The new forums will be named Coin Return (based on the most recent vote)! You can check on the status and timeline of the transition to the new forums here.
The Guiding Principles and New Rules document is now in effect.
Jonathan Blow's Braid
Recoil42
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
http://kotaku.com/gaming/jonathanblow/jonathan-blows-braid-242119.php
http://www.northcountrynotes.org/jason-rohrer/arthouseGames/seedBlogs.php?action=display_post&post_id=jcr13_1170707395_0&show_author=1&show_date=1
This game sounds absolutely fantastic. It's like Blinx and Prince of Persia on steroids, mixed with a little Super Mario Bros for taste.
The art style is a little "iffy", imo, but other than that... Just awesome, and I'm definitely looking forward to it.
Jonathan Blow's game Braid has been much talked about but little played, since he has been keeping the game under very tight wraps. Braid won the award for Innovation in Game Design at the 2006 IGF, but no demo was posted. Braid was discussed at the 2006 Experimental Gameplay Workshop, but no demo was posted. Braid was entered into the 2007 IGF and Slamdance festivals, and still no demo was posted.
Braid was selected as a Slamdance finalist, and I was heading to Slamdance too, so it seemed like I was finally going to get to play this elusive game. Alas, controversy erupted (when SCMRPG was pulled from the finalist list), and Jon pulled his game from the festival in protest. I wasn't going to play-test Braid at Slamdance after all.
However, somewhere along the way, Jon was nice enough to send me a snapshot build for review purposes. That build, version 0.847, is the subject of this preview. The build is a little rough around the edges, with place-holder graphics still lurking in the later levels and some performance issues in the early levels that were nearly complete (on a 1.9 GHz machine with a GeForce4 graphics card, this 2D platform game saw major slow-down when played at it's ideal resolution). Even with this rough build, I was able to draw one simple conclusion without doubts or reservations: Braid is the most innovative and interesting game I have ever played.
Braid has the potential to change the way you think about reality. It will certainly change the way you think about video games. In this preview, I will explain why it has this power, using detailed examples from the game. However, part of the game's interest lies in it's surprise factor: there is great joy to be had in discovering just how clever this game is for yourself. In fact, I am glad that I never read a preview of this game before I was lucky enough to play it myself. All I knew, and all you should know if you want the full experience, is that Braid is a 2D platform game in which the player manipulates the flow of time. If you're willing to wait for an official release, you should stop reading here.
http://www.northcountrynotes.org/jason-rohrer/arthouseGames/seedBlogs.php?action=display_post&post_id=jcr13_1170707395_0&show_author=1&show_date=1
This game sounds absolutely fantastic. It's like Blinx and Prince of Persia on steroids, mixed with a little Super Mario Bros for taste.
The art style is a little "iffy", imo, but other than that... Just awesome, and I'm definitely looking forward to it.
Recoil42 on
0
Posts
Gets a shrug from me. I don't want commentary about how games waste my time, I want a challenging game. If I miss a jump and fall in the spikes, I guess I don't really have a problem with death as a consequence.
What a load of shit.
If I could retry immediately every jump I failed without penalty, I'd breeze through games like Megaman ZX in a day, and get bored with it. I could artificially cripple the game to make it challenging, but then we're back where we started - which is an okay place to me.
You should really learn to read the fucking preview before you act like a giant douchebag and make an ass of yourself, you know that?
In World 3, time works the same as it does in World 2, with the addition of "purple sparkle objects." These objects, like the key and the gate pictured below, are immune to the rewind button.
http://farm1.static.flickr.com/145/356037069_023e72118b_m.jpg
For example, if your character falls down into an inescapable pit, the rewind button can be used to rescue your character by allowing him to un-fall back out of the pit. If he grabs a purple-sparkle key while down there, however, the key will remain in his hand while he un-falls, and he will carry the key up out of the pit. For a non-purple-sparkle key, your character would un-pick-up the key as you held down the rewind button. As another example, once open, a purple-sparkle gate remains open, no matter how much you rewind (a normal gate will un-open as you rewind).
In World 3, Braid sometimes falls into the trap it was seeking to avoid. Once a purple-sparkle object is moved or manipulated, there is no way to undo what you have done. Sometimes you find yourself stuck, unable to solve a puzzle after manipulating purple-sparkle objects in the wrong order or messing up timing for purple-sparkle objects that are moving. The only way to reset the positions of purple-sparkle objects is to restart from the beginning of the level. I found myself starting certain levels over and over to retry un-rewindable puzzles that I messed up---I felt like I was stuck back in a pre-Braid game again, and I found myself was wishing for a "meta-rewind" button (that would rewind time for purple-sparkle objects).
World 4 introduces a totally different time model: the world's position in time is directly linked to your character's position in space. As your character walks to the right, time goes forward. As he walks left, time goes backward. While he stands still, time stops. Hitting the rewind button causes your character's actions to rewind, which can cause the surrounding world's time to go both forward and backward (depending on which way he moves during the rewind). Puzzles in World 4, like the example pictured below, involve interleaving your character's position with the position of moving world objects.
http://farm1.static.flickr.com/147/356037074_2515d42f38_m.jpg
In World 5, time's behavior becomes even more interesting. Pressing the rewind button to undo an action spawns a "alternate universe" in which an alternate version of your character still carries out the action that you just rewound. The activity in the alternate universe is visible in a red overlay, as can be seen below:
http://farm1.static.flickr.com/159/356038248_35d9d0a438_m.jpg
Another addition in World 5 are yellow-sparkle objects. These are linked between the alternate and main universe. If a yellow-sparkle object moves or is manipulated in one universe, it does the same thing in the other universe. For example, if your alternate-universe character switches a yellow-sparkle switch, a main-universe door hooked to that switch will still open (whereas if he switched a non-yellow-sparkle switch, only the version of the door in his alternate universe would open). This is heady stuff, for sure---the puzzles in World 5 are some of the hardest in the game.
World 6 cools things down a bit with a somewhat simpler time model: your character is equipped with a ring that he can drop and pick up at will. The spot where the ring is dropped becomes a locus of time slow-down. For your character, and the rest of the objects in the world, time progresses at a rate proportional to the distance between these object and the ring. Objects that are far away move at nearly-normal speed, while objects that are close to the ring grind to a crawl."
http://farm1.static.flickr.com/143/356038252_ec97deba01_m.jpg
I'M A TWITTER SHITTER
By the way, just because someone isn't impressed by something doesn't mean they just didn't read some piece of internet literature. Or did you think that everyone who read it would magically agree that this was a marvel of modern gaming?
Also, those screens don't help. Maybe if there were videos of the game in action, it might help. I looked at braid-game.com, too, and there's none there, either.
I don't usually fix posts but this, I feel, had to be done.
OK maybe not THAT bad, but it's gospel like praise is pretty sickening in a few places.
BRAID WILL TEAR OPEN A HOLE IN TIME AND SPACE, REVEALING TO YOU ALL THE GLORIES OF THE UNIVERSE WHILE BRINGING YOU TO NEW HEIGHTS OF PLEASURE AND WISDOM. TRULY BLOW IS THE SON OF GOD.
Get that shit fixed, Jonathan Blow.