·:[ Smiling Politely ]:·
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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.