·:[ Smiling Politely ]:·
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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.

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.

So my favourite game in quite some time that I never shut up about is, of course, DROD.  The City Beneath is the latest installment, and even though I bought it online when it came out last year, I don’t think it had been “officially” released until recently.  (I’m a bit confused on this matter, I only remember that before I had to hunt around on the forums to find a link to purchase, and as of right now there still isn’t a non-downloadable version available yet.)

In any case, as part of this “official” release, or maybe not, I see now that there is a trailer to watch on YouTube.  It’s kind of, well, it keeps a straight face at most points and so I’m not sure what they are trying to sell the game as, but personally I would have emphasized more of the puzzles and especially more of the quirky humour.  But in any case, you can at least hear the music and get a small glimpse of what the game looks like in motion.

The trailer is available here.

The game has been making the rounds, and while it’s not super fantastic awesome or anything, it’s basically something you can play by visiting the web page every couple of hours or so.  Therefore I recommend that everyone sign up for Ikariam, set sail on the Epsilon world, and we shall make a grand alliance so that I don’t have to pay through the nose for wine or anything.

A short description for those who haven’t heard or don’t care to research:  The game is a very simplified 4X/Civ clone, only web-based, massively multiplayer, and glacially paced.  As an example, I am about to build my first colony, which required about a day’s worth of resource gathering.  I sent the ships off to colonize an island, giving the orders this morning when I woke up, and they are due to arrive some time around lunch.  The first thing I will do is probably start building a port there to ship goods back and forth, and that will probably take an hour or so.  In the meantime, I’m researching the “Professional Army” technology, which still has about 7 or 8 hours to go before completing.

I think I remember Joey playing this game in the lab, or at least something very much like it only without all the Civ4-knockoff graphics and what looked like much more complexity, but I can’t remember what that was called and Mike is also playing this one, so this one I shall commit to!

Activision suddenly realizes that some people might need Guitar Hero more than Guitar Hero needs them.

It’s funny, I never get around to writing these until months after I play the game I want to talk about.

Dungeon Runners is a free-to-play mumorpegah (MMORPG).  Well, maybe it’s not a MMORPG.  I don’t really know.  Dorkier people than I argue with each other all the time (on the internet no less!) over whether or not games like this or Guild Wars or whatever actually “count” as being MMOs as if the genre has some purity that must not be tainted.  Whatever.

The game looks a lot like World Of Warcraft.  It plays a lot like Diablo.  You hang around some hub location like a town, shop, get quests, and then go run dungeons.  The dungeons are randomly generated every time you go in.  You kill monsters and get loot.

It has two things going for it.  One is the price.  The game is a free way to scratch that MMO itch should it happen to crop up.  The company makes its money through advertisements and optional subscriptions.  The advertisements show up in two ways: banner ads at the top of the screen while playing, and splash screens occasionally popping up for a few seconds when the game loads new zones.  The banner ads sound obnoxious, but I actually found that they disappeared from my perception within seconds.

The optional subscription (5 bucks a month, I think?) gets rid of the ads, gives you some basic inventory perks, and (most importantly, heh) allows you to use the best items should they happen to drop for you.  I must admit, it is pretty tempting to sign up for a subscription once you start to get a bigger and bigger collection of gear that is much sweeter than the junk you are wearing but is marked as “Requires Membership.”

The second thing this game has going for it is the overall tone.  While I will defend the EQ/WoW style of gameplay when it comes to the actual combat mechanics, I kind of have to side with Jon Blow when it comes to the overall structure of your typical MMO as far as value to humanity.   Setting aside extreme social criticism, however, I think that most everyone would agree that the quest design/writing structure in these games is on the whole pretty ridiculous.  Dungeon Runners at least sort of takes that ridiculousness and, well, runs with it.

The first vendor you meet talks with Krusty’s voice and tells you to leave him the hell alone.  The first town you reach is the town of Townston, where they send you to audit the dungeon of Algernon to make sure all of the monsters have their licensing papers up to date.  (You verify this by killing the monsters and taking their papers, of course.)  Generic rare items are typically given names like “Sweet Cardboard Sword of the Freakish Platypus”, and the unique items get even better ones like “Sissirat’s Brother’s Cousin’s Roomate’s Staff of Something Really Awesome” or “Mr. Fracture-Upper” or my favourite: the Random Axe of Kindness.

I drifted away from the game around the time I got to “Algor’s Terror Dome” where I had to go and kill the hippy environmentalist orc protesters and take their placards.

That sort of brings me to the downside of the game… it’s kind of dull and repetitive.  The randomly generated dungeons spruce things up a bit, and maybe I’m just not an inventive enough player, but as a mostly mage-build I basically slotted in 2 or 3 spells, and held down a button or two until things died.  Over and over.  Not much variety in tactics at any point.  Very mindless.  The challenge is supposed to scale up if you group with people, though, but I’m kind of antisocial so that never happened.

The end result was that while I was playing before I came home for Christmas, when I got back I never touched it again.  Maybe some other time.

Another new Grow for anyone interested.  It’s a pretty simple one.