·:[ Smiling Politely ]:·
• • • • •

I can personally vouch for this one.

While Braid is a fine puzzle game, I still gotta give the edge to DROD as far as pure puzzle satisfaction goes. Not that it’s really appropriate to compare them.

With Braid, my experience was (for the most part) that of studying the network of platforms leading to some puzzle piece, determining how that world’s special power helps you get there, then executing. Each puzzle is very unique: rarely do you use the same trick twice. This is pretty explicitly by design, by all accounts I’ve read. Most every interesting consequence of each world’s unique “rules” is used, more or less, exactly once in a puzzle.

Solving a DROD room (well, I guess I should say, “solving a DROD”) is a much more iterative, interactive experience. A lot more experimenting is involved, as you dig your way halfway through a room only to discover that you’ve painted yourself into a corner, revert back to a checkpoint, and repeat. It’s remarkably fast paced for something that is “turn-based”, and it feels a lot more like “playing” a game than Braid did, as much of my time in Braid was spent staring and contemplating. If I’m merely staring and contemplating in DROD, it usually means I’m well and truly stumped.

At the same time, I’m glad that Braid is pretty serious about actually providing a challenging puzzle experience. As a kind of faint echo of the critical reaction I had been expecting, a lot of the negative reactions are dwelling on the game basically being too hard. Of course, this complaint mostly danced around so as not to sound too petulant. The puzzles are unfair because I have to read the designer’s mind! The platforming requires pixel perfect timing! It’s enough to make me want to bust out one of those facepalm.gif things that the kids all seem to like these days.

There’s also just a lot more variety to DROD, as well as a lot more quantity. Of course, it’s had years and years to build this up, and it is also much more focused on brain twisters than Braid is for the most part. (Though I will defend DROD’s “story” not only for its humour, but whatever seriousness there is to it as well.) All the same, Braid falls short of the “Best Puzzle Game of all time” award. It’s pretty high up there, though, duking it out with the Lost Vikings and the Incredible Machine. Maybe some others, I can’t recall at the moment.

Braid came out, and despite my earlier cynicism, it is indeed garnering tons of critical praise and appears to be selling pretty OK, at least for an XBLA game.  Shows what I know, I guess.

My Braid experience was similar to my Portal experience: almost immediately after release, all in one sitting, cover-to-cover so to speak.  They both took about the same length of time.  Portal is probably the more “entertaining” game, what with the humour and toyetic nature of the portal gun.  Braid, on the other hand, I found significantly more rewarding to play, both in the nuts-and-bolts puzzling of the game, as well as in the overall story/theme/whatever.

It’s not simply a matter of Braid’s puzzles being more difficult than Portal’s, though that helps.  Not that “harder” equates with “better” in a puzzle game, but as I’ve said before I found Portal to be rather trivial as far as brainpower required to play.  In Portal, I always knew what to do, it was just a matter of execution of the proper jumps, or, at worst, exploration to find the proper surfaces to portal or buttons to push.  In comparison, I solved most puzzles in Braid are solved through reflection and logic.  So, if you are actually looking for an actual puzzle game, Braid is much more worth your time whereas Portal ironically makes the better “platformer”.

Braid is also a bit more interesting in the story department, if you can tolerate a game that takes itself pretty seriously.  My charitable view is that the game is ambitious.  Others may prefer to describe the game as pretentious.  I think the second viewpoint, which crops up even in many of the positive reviews, is pretty misguided.  It’s pretty much the most modest story I’ve seen in a game, a story ruminating on how we spend our time, a story on the scope of a Lost In Translation, whereas most any other “story” game in existence doesn’t dare venture anywhere outside of the comfort zone of sci-fi and fantasy.

The two biggest things I could say against this aspect of the game would be that the prose itself can be a little twee (but it doesn’t bother me so much when taken as part of the bigger picture) and that it’s pretty obtuse for the sake of obtuseness.  If you don’t care for the kind of writing that, on the face of it, “doesn’t make sense” and requires you to do some extra parsing on your own, then this game will probably annoy you.

The danger in this sort of thing is that people can slip into the whole “genius through obscurity” mindset, where we misattribute grand things to someone who is just vague enough to hide an empty work from prying eyes.  (As an aside, I think it’s funny, how much we often worry about overrating works of art.  Like it is a great tragedy if society treats something as being greater than some hidden objective goodness value handed down by the gods or something.)  I don’t think that Braid is guilty of that, but I could be wrong.  In the end, though, it’s been several days now and I’m still turning Braid around in my mind and thinking about what it is saying.

Apparently the comments have been messed up (mostly my own fault) for quite a few days now.  Things should be fixed now, so you can continue to comment or not comment as you will.

Moving to Ottawa just justified itself as I got to go see Wolf Parade last night.  The ticket was a bit pricey, but basically Wolf Parade will have been the favouritest band of mine that I’ve seen live now, if that makes any sense.  Mrs. M. had to go to work early this morning, so I was the loser there all by myself, but whatever.

Another Montreal band called The Witchies opened.  They were pretty good!  They don’t have a CD or anything out, I guess, which is too bad because I would have got one from the merch table but I’ll just keep my eye out in the meantime.

The Witchies played a pretty short set, but Wolf Parade played the new album in its entirety and almost all of Apologies To The Queen Mary.  Everything sounded a bit more punched up live, and I think that the songs from In Mount Zoomer especially benefitted from the more energetic performances.  The songs sounded a bit less flat than the album versions, but what do I know?

As a bonus, on the way down I noticed some posters advertising Handsome Furs later on this month, and according to this flyer they handed me on the way out, Mount Eerie is coming in Octoboer, among other miscellanous interesting acts.

When I first acquired my 360, I quickly hopped onto the Xbox Live Arcade train and snapped up a handful of titles, all of which have treated me well more or less. I probably would have traded Puzzle Quest for something different as it wore out its welcome after some time, but the killer duo of Pac-man CE and Space Giraffe has had serious staying power, and Castlevania: SOTN is a classic I wouldn’t be playing if it weren’t for XBLA.

In recent months, however, I’d mostly been kind of curtailing the XBLA spending despite a few notable temptations like Rez HD and Ikaruga. This summer though, I think I’m going to have a hard time because there appears to be a ton of good stuff on the way.

Of course, the one game I absolutely must get as soon as it is released is Braid. I’ve mentioned my excitement for this game before, and it has been kind of a long time coming. I suspect this game, being a puzzle game on a non-portable system, is going to tank. This prediction would have been a no-brainer a year ago, but the surprising success of Portal makes it a bit less of a forgone conclusion these.

My charitable, polite explanation as to why I think Braid will fail where Portal succeeded is: “I dunno, just a gut feeling.” My less charitable, contrarian explanation relates to my beliefs that Portal is an overrated game. I think Portal succeeded despite being a puzzle game because: a) people were all buying Orange Box anyway, b) it was an easy puzzle game, c) it was funny, and d) it had a ton of good press because it fit into a very pleasant media narrative that was repeated on every gaming site in existance and probably took up 25% of every single review text out there. (The narrative being: college kids make cool school project, get bought by Valve, steal the Orange Box show.)

Now I’m not quite sure yet if Braid is going to be easy or not, but it doesn’t look to be particularly funny, seems to be trying to appeal to the games-as-art crowd rather than the “hurr hurr the cake is a lie!” internet meme crowd, and the developer basically alienates every game designer and journalist out there every time he gives a talk. If the game does turn out to be challenging at all, it’s gonna get a bunch of middling reviews with the executive summary “innovative, but too challenging for all but the most hardcore players, 7/10.”

Oh well, it’s coming out and I’ll be buying it so what do I care how well it does? It does have a pile of competition this summer though. Castle Crashers looks pretty fun, Geometry Wars 2 is tempting (less so since learning the co-op mode is local only), the Bionic Commando remake I didn’t initially care about has been gathering good buzz. Oh, and Galaga Legions I would normally not be overly excited about, only it’s by the Pac-man: CE team apparently, and as I mentioned above that game is definitely one of the best ones I’ve seen on the service. Oh oh, and Mega Man 9, of course.

And on top of all of that, soon the fruits of the XNA community are going to start appearing! Man, I should get in on that. Who wants to help me develop my sidescrolling Metroidvania roguelike?

Nintendo fixes their broken controllers.  Allegedly.

It’s E3 time, and nobody really cares any more but there is at least one bombshell that has gone off: Final Fantasy 13 coming out for the 360 (in the States at least.)  Kaboom.

Oh, and there is a ton of awesome Rock Band news, but I’ll get to that later.

One advantage to living in central Canada:  Amazon ships from Mississauga.  The “free super shipper saving”, which I’ve used twice so far, which used to take 1-2 weeks to get to Fredericton if I was lucky, has basically been overnight here.  I think if I dared pay for the express the goods would be in my hand within the hour!

Google has been ordered to turn over the full records of every video seen on YouTube, including the user names and IP addresses of all viewers.  Privacy concerns were set aside because, hey, “in most cases” only knowing an IP address isn’t enough to identify someone so like, it’s probably not that big of a deal.

That’s what everyone’s talking about.  The actual ruling mentions that Viacom had asked for, basically, Google’s search engine source code.  Luckily for Google, they didn’t end up having to do that, because, hey, that would probably hurt Google’s business.

Not that I think that Google should have had to hand over its code.  And there is the question of how relevant the code would be vs. the logs, and I’m not one to judge that question either.  I just think it’s a bit funny as it comes across as basically, Google’s bottom line is worth more than our privacy.

I say Google should just apologize to Viacom and make sure this never happens again by removing Viacom material from YouTube and, hey while they are at it, delisting every Viacom related business from their search engine.  I wonder how they would like that?

Then again, Viacom probably owns half of the media out there so they couldn’t be shunted aside that easily.

I hate the media industry.