Have You Been Playing…?

It’s easy to get disillusioned by gaming’s retail releases – sandbox worlds with far more expanse than the content requires, redundant shooters and barely altered rehashes. Luckily, no matter how dire GAME’s shelves may seem, the online services are constantly offering fresh experiences, innovation and cheap thrills.

Here are two recent downloadable titles you might have missed in the excitement of Monkey Island remakes and bitesize Battlefields.

Trash Panic

Playstation Network – £3.99 – Demo Available

Playstation Network’s Trash Panic very clearly illuminates something that both the Playstation 3 and the Xbox 360 lack in their downloadable services; the Japanese. There’s just that indefinable allure of the east’s quirky sensibilities, a raw, un-emulatable philosophy that’s lain dormant for far too long this generation.

Trash Panic takes Katamari’s eco-friendly message, clutter-centric world and kooky characters and throws them in the bin. Literally. You’re tasked with cramming too-much junk into a tiny trash can, only achievable by smashing and breaking items until they fit. It’s like playing Tetris with destructible bricks or making a jigsaw puzzle with scissors.

The attraction comes from the real world properties each item has; there are little icons on the HUD telling you that the match is a “fire object” and a tyre is a “poisonous object”, but it’s a redundant task by the developer – it’s obvious. Once you throw a match in your bin, it’s obvious that toilet paper, a wooden hanger, an acoustic guitar and a sturdy chair will burn, while rubber boots and a metal wok won’t. It’s also obvious that the water spraying from a shattered toilet will douse the flames and, while perhaps less obvious, it stands to reason that burning tyres splinters the delicate atmosphere and creates downpours of acid rain.

Trash Panic is short, but bafflingly tough – another sign of the Japanese touch. Plus, with the physics based interactions (including an intuitive shake of the controller to settle trash) and excellent strategy of holding objects and saving monuments from the trash, multiple playthroughs rarely tire. There’s also a VS mode, missions, unlockable difficulties and leaderboards – a lot of game for your £4. There’s also a demo on the store.

Trine

PC (Steam, Other DD Services, Retail) – £19.99 – Demo Available

All the games that Trine can be compared to, from Castlevania to Braid and from LittleBigPlanet to The Lost Vikings, share an amazing pedigree; a wealthy lineage of puzzlers and platformers that Trine effortlessly joins.

From Finnish developers FrozenByte, Trine is a platformer with physics based puzzles, asking you to switch between three characters on the fly, to accomplish the tasks. Your wizard can move objects, Gravity Gun style, and spawn new blocks for traversal. The thief zips on a grappling hook and fires arrows. The rotund warrior reduces the skeleton army to dust with his sword.

While almost everything in the game, from the wizard’s newly generated blocks to the thief’s gravity-obeying arrows, rely heavily on physics, it rarely feels like a beefed up tech demo. Instead, the open playground presented means that any puzzle can be solved multiple ways, and using some cheeky physics to game the system offers more satisfaction than guilt.

Trine also has amazing production values and unfaltering design, it just might be hard to stomach the £15 price point (rough estimate based on $20 American Price) when it hits PSN soon. The PC version (£19.99) is, of course, also an excellent choice.