Braid just released for PC
moultano
Creator of ns_shiva. Join Date: 2002-12-14 Member: 10806Members, NS1 Playtester, Contributor, Constellation, NS2 Playtester, Squad Five Blue, Reinforced - Shadow, WC 2013 - Gold, NS2 Community Developer, Pistachionauts
Creator of ns_shiva. Join Date: 2002-12-14 Member: 10806Members, NS1 Playtester, Contributor, Constellation, NS2 Playtester, Squad Five Blue, Reinforced - Shadow, WC 2013 - Gold, NS2 Community Developer, Pistachionauts
in Off-Topic
<div class="IPBDescription">get it on steam.</div>Wooo <img src="style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/smile-fix.gif" style="vertical-align:middle" emoid=":)" border="0" alt="smile-fix.gif" />
here's the trailer if you haven't heard of it: <a href="http://vimeo.com/4083982" target="_blank">http://vimeo.com/4083982</a>
here's the trailer if you haven't heard of it: <a href="http://vimeo.com/4083982" target="_blank">http://vimeo.com/4083982</a>
Comments
The game itself could be seen as something of a companion piece to Portal. The two are largely unrelated, outside of their unique puzzle mechanics, but they compliment each other well.
Portal focuses entirely on three dimensional space and movement. By freeing the player of certain restrictions it is able to build puzzles to challenge the players to think about spaces and movements in new ways, to look at areas in a new light and consider new ways to move through them. It then expands on this with challenge levels, forcing players to again rethink their assumptions about these spaces.
Braid acts, mechanically, as a counterpoint to Portal. By removing the third dimension Braid restricts the player to what is ultimately a linear space. Instead of having players experiment with their movement through space it has them experiment with movements through time. Then, not content to simply remove a restriction the game begins to experiment too. In each world it brings forth a new concept for the player, never allowing the player to become complacent in the freedom of temporal movement the game affords them.
Both games are brilliant puzzle games, both challenge the way the player thinks, both are short but both have memorable endings.
If you enjoy the demo I can assure you that it only gets better from there.
£10 is indeed a total bargain. For me it is about a gazillion times better than Portal because it's actually a puzzle game and not a luke-warm 'idiots guide to puzzle games'.
Don't get me wrong, Portal is also a very good game, but for me it was mostly good for its charm and character and its sense of progression towards the end of the game. I got more out of GladOS and the behind-the-scenes twist than the challenge. I found Portal mostly unchallenging except for maybe two or three levels. As long as we don't stress the puzzle side of Portal it's a really good game.
My friend and I have been arguing over whether Braid is worthy of all the hype it gets. For me it is, but his argument is that it's a bit of an art game that a segment of people really appreciate because of its intellectualism. It has artsy graphics, artsy music and artsy story, and it even deconstructs the platformer genre and pokes fun at it.
You could say it's a bit of a critic's game, but I'd still argue that it is massively aaccessible and easy to pick up. You only need to know maybe 5 things to understand the game and whenever you die you just rewind time to try again. The game doesn't punish you for failing so much as it rewards you for thinking.
Braid is great because it has two levels of difficulty but these aren't separate, so it can be appreciated by the more casual and by hardcore puzzle enthusiasts at the same time. Basically you have a basic progression from left to right that involves some Portal-level puzzling, then you have puzzle pieces that involve much harder, sometimes excruciating puzzles that require a lot of lateral thinking. Most of the time the puzzles aren't technically difficult, it's just a question of looking at something from a fresh angle. But the sense of achievement when you beat these puzzles is still just as immense. To go back to the Portal comparison, in Portal everything was building up to a great sense of achievement at the end of the game, in Braid I'm getting a similar if shorter sense of achievement practically every time I solve a puzzle.
Add to this a great art style and a superb soundtrack that sounds something like Irish folk music, and you have a game I love and wouldn't hesitate to recommend to everyone who calls themself a gamer, and even to some of my friends who don't.
update: WOW awesome puzzles after the game is over, really rewarding, much more difficult.
I bought it and played through it today and I was thinking almost the opposite. Figuring out what needed to be done was relatively easy in braid and actually executing it was the hard part. And it had that one puzzle to get those last two pieces in world 2 that uses a mechanic that is not intuitive and is never indicated to be possible (also it is only ever used once). Also the indications of what will be affected by what are sometimes inconsistent.
I also really didn't like the cosoleportitis that it had. You can't alter the resolution or any worthwhile graphics settings, meaning that I had to play at a painful 10fps. It was only really terrible for world 2, but still, its 2d for christ sake and as artful as it is I can't think of any reason it should run worse than the source engine. Also, you can't remap the controls, which means no joypad w/o third part utility. I didn't even bother reading the plot or attempting the ridiculous stars.
That said, it is a pretty good game. I don't think it quite deserved the hype it got, but I enjoyed it. The artistic style is pleasant (though it does remind me a bit too much of Yoshi's island), the music is awesome (though its a shame you almost never hear it because of the time distortion), and the puzzles, when they don't require too much in the way of holy-s***-perfect-f***ing-timing, are good. The whole last world (1) is great.
Overall, B+.
Also, update to Braid today that, while not allowing you to change the resolution yourself via the menu, does lower the resolution for you if it thinks your computer or monitor isn't manly enough for it. Playing at the recommended* resolution now makes the game less painful. I might even replay it.
*Forced by Automated System Manliness Detector
That's mitigated by the reversing time. You can just keep reversing time and delay your reaction a little bit the next time. I don't think I encountered any where you needed to do that and doing that screwed up the result.
Taking 5-15 tries on a single rewind, retry, rewind, retry, rewind, retry, etc etc is not a good thing <img src="style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/smile-fix.gif" style="vertical-align:middle" emoid=":)" border="0" alt="smile-fix.gif" />
Those were the ones where I checked a walk through. I had a solution that seemed perfectly viable but I just could NOT get to work. About half the time my solution WAS viable, I was just off by a fraction, other times it wasn't viable at all.
Also, stars == lol no.
I didn't even KNOW there were stars until I saw them mentioned here. I checked a guide and read what yuo have to do for the first 2 and laughed it all off.
<span style='color:#000000;background:#000000'>World 4-5, there are enemies that need you to move time back and forth so they can get past the plants, one of the plants can only be moved quickly enough if you fast-rewind. Mis-time the fast rewind and you have to start the puzzle over again. To get the star for this level I think you have to do this puzzle multiple times and time it so that your fast rewind gets you in perfect position to jump off an enemy and get to a higher ledge. Mis-time this and you have to redo that section of the puzzle, assuming you didn't rewind too far and so have to do the last section over too.</span>
Sure, its still quicker than starting the level over again (not by much), but frustrating after you mis-time it for the 5th time in a row. And don't get me started on the ones <span style='color:#000000;background:#000000'>like that one level in world 7, where you have to out race your time-immunity wearing off</span>. I imagine they're a little easier on the Xbox 360 because the rewind button is tied to an analog control.
<!--quoteo--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE</div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec-->I didn't even KNOW there were stars until I saw them mentioned here. I checked a guide and read what yuo have to do for the first 2 and laughed it all off.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
To be fair, from what I can tell of the other 5 they aren't nearly as stupid. But since your reward is just more story (from what I've read), and I didn't even bother reading the story that was given to me for free, I'm in no hurry to get them.
<span style='color:#000000;background:#000000'>World 4-5, there are enemies that need you to move time back and forth so they can get past the plants, one of the plants can only be moved quickly enough if you fast-rewind. Mis-time the fast rewind and you have to start the puzzle over again. To get the star for this level I think you have to do this puzzle multiple times and time it so that your fast rewind gets you in perfect position to jump off an enemy and get to a higher ledge. Mis-time this and you have to redo that section of the puzzle, assuming you didn't rewind too far and so have to do the last section over too.</span><!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->That's one way of doing it, I guess. It sounds harder than the way I did it, which was:
<span style='color:#000000;background:#000000'>Use the time bubble to slow down the plants so they were all in sync. With all of them going up and down at the same time, and provided the enemies are synched to not hit the plants when they spawn, the enemies will walk past the plants effortlessly in a constant flow.</span>
<span style='color:#000000;background:#000000'>Use the time bubble to slow down the plants so they were all in sync. With all of them going up and down at the same time, and provided the enemies are synched to not hit the plants when they spawn, the enemies will walk past the plants effortlessly in a constant flow.</span><!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
<span style='color:#000000;background:#000000'>
Use the ring to get all the plants down. Freeze time. Wait for 5 or so mobs to walk by.
Rereading (and checking gamefaqs) shows that you are totally off <img src="style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/tounge.gif" style="vertical-align:middle" emoid=":p" border="0" alt="tounge.gif" /> He is talking about the previous level where your left/right movement acts as a time control.
However, that is an example of where I might have checked gamefaqs. I first tried it your way (when talking about the ring levels), where they would all be in sync, but just could not get it (due to getting one plant right, then going to the next but messing up the first b/c the ring would reach far enough to slow it down just a little bit)
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There is apparently going to be (or already is) a Level Editor for Braid.
Info:
<a href="http://braid-game.com/news/" target="_blank">http://braid-game.com/news/</a>
A few thoughs:
- In the demo most timings were somewhat easy even for a terrible platformer like me. I could've lived without them too though, since they aren't particularly interesting in any way.
- Some puzzles were fun, but once again nothing really that would've made me feel idiot or genius and nothing that made laugh when I got the idea. The full version probably has a lot more challenge.
- I missed a few critical green glows on the first look. Of course you'll see them once you know to look for them on almost any item, but before that it caused some unnecessary frustration.
- Most puzzles <b>seemed</b> to have only one actual solution. Once again the full version might do better and I may just be lacking the creativity.
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All in all it left a nice feeling and I had a few smiles when I realized the solution, but that's pretty much it. Somehow Gish for example managed to get me a lot more interested.
Can somebody explain me the stars? Are they some kind of extra replay value for true time twisters?
Use the ring to get all the plants down. Freeze time. Wait for 5 or so mobs to walk by.
Rereading (and checking gamefaqs) shows that you are totally off <img src="style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/tounge.gif" style="vertical-align:middle" emoid=":p" border="0" alt="tounge.gif" /> He is talking about the previous level where your left/right movement acts as a time control.
However, that is an example of where I might have checked gamefaqs. I first tried it your way (when talking about the ring levels), where they would all be in sync, but just could not get it (due to getting one plant right, then going to the next but messing up the first b/c the ring would reach far enough to slow it down just a little bit)
</span><!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->Okay I know which one he's on about now, but the rewind thing isn't that harsh.
<span style='color:#000000;background:#000000'>Getting the plants in line isn't that tough either, just do the second one from underneath then move to the between the first and second to slow them both down equally and get them in sync. Then go quite far to the left of the 3rd one so it's barely affecting the first 2 and sync that one up.</span>