BRAID IS HERE!!!

By: Sick Panda

On: August 6th, 2008

Hello, gentlemannz. Is me, Sick Panda, reporting live from doctor’s offices on laptop MacintoshBook Pro, donate by Chinese governments. Doctors tells me ever-thing gonna be okay, but I must stop barffing on them.

Anyway, I tell you right now Braid is here. On XBOX live arcade and mebbe soon on the PC computers too.

Eurogamer give ten out of ten review, say:

I almost never give out full marks, generally reserving that honour for retro games that have proven their worth many times over, but Braid has me in its spell. Judged purely as a game, it’s cunning, ingenious and endlessly surprising. …But there’s so much more here, a desire to create a game experience that is more than mere technical craft.

Also, XBOX World give ten out of ten review, too, and also say:

In a world without Mario and Valve and the Bethesda hit factory Braid is indeed the best game ever made; in this world, it’s among the best games of the generation, and is unquestionably and immediately the best game ever to have been released on Xbox Live Arcade.

Also, Derek play preview of game and say is good game also, he say:

Yes, of course Braid is awesome! Now go back to sleep!

Is must be a pretty good game, then! Go play if you can. Sick Panda can no play. Okay, gentlemanns, thank you for your time and this is the very Sick Panda signing off until next time!!! (Thank you Mr. Yu for making link and quote.)

TIGdb: Entry for Braid

Posted in Highly Recommended, Platformers, Xbox 360 | Tags: JonathanBlow

chutup

Also, that Xbox World review is kind of hilarious when they claim Fallout 3 is one of the best games ever and it’s not even out.
DefAcid

Sick panda is sick.
http://www.daintyrhino.com Dave

This game is fantastic. I was a little irresponsible today and skipped out on some fairly important things to play it. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a game with such well-balanced, self-reinforcing elements. The story, the art direction, the music, and the gameplay all tie together.

All that and it’s fun. I’m going to go sit in the corner and pretend like my current game designs aren’t about blowing things up and burning things down.
w

Cave Story ripoff
HyBrIdEnS

I hope it comes to PC VEEEEEERRRY sooon…
Please?
Trotim

The game is fun but getting all pieces is tedious. =/
AmnEn

It’s funny. How they rage about 4 hours of gameplay for something that costs 15$ but are all orgasmic about something that has 3 hours of gameplay and costs 50$ (aka call of duty 4).
Quetz

Ohh, I just can’t wait for a PC release!
Mazapán

I can’t understand how some can be so indifferent to this game, give me one other game with puzzles of the same quality. I’m with Raigan (and the rest of the world) here, solving some of those puzzles gave me a la petite mort. Braid has set new standards for all of us.
Paul Eres

“Staggered releases are OK by me. Lazy porting/horrible optimisation that makes the game irrationally hard to run is not. If my computer canâ€™t run Braid Iâ€™m going to be really pissed off.”

I really doubt that will happen, I’m not sure why you’re even expecting that it will. I’ve known people who have played a preview version of the game on regular generic 2-year-old computers just fine. Most PC games have options to turn special effects down in order to get it to run on older computers, so I’d expect it to work on most anything.
Towerofprostitutes

Well, I have an X-Box 360, but I don’t have an X-Box Live account, nor do I care to have one. Anyway, I’m incredibly suspicious of Braid. Whenever a game is hyped this much, and gets such positive reviews, followed by people saying “Yeah, this game’s awesome!” I just start to get really suspicious. *coughgtaivhalo2ssbbcough*
markzman

Actually it’s not that good. It’s not bad, but it’s not a game to get hyped up about. I find the Super Mario series is still more fun. I definitely liked the artistic style of Braid but after playing the Trial and becoming very bored I couldn’t justify dishing out $15 bucks for it. Sorry but I’ll save my points for BC:R or Castle Crashers. The reviewers must be delusional or something.
Optrirominiluikus

I bought Braid immediately so I have no idea what the trial is like, but the stuff I’ve seen so far… sheesh. It’s great. Best game so far this year.
Victo

Halo 2 was a fun online game actually …
The soundtrack was epic too, excluding the Breaking Benjamin song …
Splinter

You don’t need an xbox live account to download Braid!

Everyone should play at least the first 20 seconds of it. That was my favorite part of the trial though I was pleasantly surprised thrice more before it was over.
Yellow Monkey

“â€œInvariably this game is going to receive comparisons to Portalâ€

What? Why?”

They’re both short, unique, level-by-level puzzle games.
Towerofprostitutes

@Victo: Yeah, except the Plasma Sword was hilariously over-powered. Plus, the singleplayer mode sucked.

@Splinter: Well, I still don’t care to play it, or even try the demo.
Moose

It’s a fantastic game, but at heart it’s an old-school puzzler, which means it inherits all the problems that old-school puzzlers had. Which are mainly to do with play patterns: once you’ve traversed every world, you can no longer turn on the Xbox and “have a game of Braid” because all you can do is go back to the same puzzles and cross your fingers that you think of an answer this time. Some of them yield to experimentation, but some don’t.

Also, I think it’s quite a shame that after World 2 shows how much fun it can be when you don’t have to backtrack, that he then proceeded to throw backtracking into the later worlds.

And the Xbox issue.. I agree that it could be a concern if console manufacturers continue cherry-picking indie games onto consoles (thus risking slumming the PC market and throttling the number that can exist) but in this case there’s apparantly going to be a PC version and MS are doing XNA, so I’m not too worried here. The PC version had better be moddable, though.
john

why do people always assume the people who don’t like a game is the “vocal minority”.
i hear this everytime, but has anyone got proof that there are more people who liked the that didn’t post than people who didn’t like the and also didn’t post.
(hope that made sense)
Kongming

So what are you suggesting, john? That for any game with a visibly enthusiastic response there is a silent and dissatisfied majority? I mean, looking at the comments and reviews isn’t the best way to gauge actual popularity, but at least it’s evidence instead of baseless supposition.
Hmmm…

It’s great to see the indie community showing love for another Indie game, but lets be honest here guys, Braid isn’t THAT GOOD. I truly believe people want it to be good but feel that a negative review by the indie community means negativity towards indie games, period. Which isn’t the case. I just think we should be honest. Sure, Braid has a unique and very flavorful artistic style, but the game itself is bland. Some people have stated that it’s too little bang for the buck and I’d sorta have to agree, but I also understand why people wanted it to be the next big game, hell so did I. Unfortunately it’s just not that memorable. I’m sure there will be people that enjoy it but I’m also certain that many people will find that aside from it’s graphical “cuteness” there’s really not much too it.
Anarkex

I love this game, but as people have said, it’s way too short, and while the puzzles are ingenious they don’t exactly stay fresh on repeated plays. Everyone should play through it at least once because it really is phenomenal, but I agree that the price they’re asking is just a tad too high.
Noyb

Do you people have any soul? =/
http://www.mawsoft.com/blog Impossible

John: I like to think its a vocal minority. If its the majority then everyone hates gaming and we should stop making games.
m

“And despite the temptation Iâ€™m not going to buy a 360 just to play Braid.”

I did this. Back in May. Hellllll yea the wait was worth it.
m

Wait, what? I just read the comments.

People are actually complaining about the price and the shortness? Damn I thought that Penny Arcade strip this morning was the jokes. What the crap people I paid like $500 to play Braid (granted I am counting extra controllers and 6 blockbuster games used to fill time in there) … and that was instead of food. And just cos I liked ALILBTDII.
raigan

It’s funny, I _can_ perfectly understand the people who say this is too short or boring or whatever, because one of our friends came over to try it and JUST RAN THROUGH THE ENTIRE GAME WITHOUT GETTING THE PUZZLE PIECES.

Yes, if you play it this way, Braid is in no ways remarkable and is pretty boring, albeit with good style.

I can’t believe that anyone who dislikes this game has beaten the “x=t” world or the alternate-timelines/shadow world. Those puzzles were AMAZING!
juice

I hadn’t paid much attention to Braid until an article popped up on Gamasutra with a discussion on the artwork. That was enough to trigger my downloading the demo, and that was enough to make me buy the game.

This is going to be a love/hate game for one simple reason: it’s art. Like Ico (and/or Shadow of a Colossus) or Darwinia, there’s something in the game which is more than the sum of its parts – at least for those attuned to such things. Everyone else will just call it pretentious crap with retro-styled gameplay and a badly written emo-fluenced story (I have to admit, I winced at the princess “whipping her braid at him”).

It’s not perfect, but it is clearly a labour of love. I’ve completed the first world and I suspect a chunk of the weekend will go on the rest…
ugh

this game is brilliant. This is nothing more to say about it. Anything said before or after is either wrong or needless.
I Like Cake

Other things that cost $15:

1. A pitcher of beer.

2. A cheap bottle of wine.

3. A pocketbook.

4. A quarter of a tank of gas (in Canada).

5. An entrÃ©e at a decent restaurant.

I’ll admit I haven’t played Braid, but if it’s at least as enjoyable as any of the above, I would say it’s worth $15. Please try to have some perspective.
Phasma Felis

Am I the only one pissed off that this game looks like butt in SD?

Well, I mean, it’s still very pretty, but huge amounts of detail are lost; the hint signs in the first level are illegible, you have to squint to spot the green glow of a time-fixed object, the puzzles don’t look like anything except when you’re actually working on them, and a whole lot of other minor visual cues are just really hard to make out. I wouldn’t know that Tim was wearing a tie if I hadn’t seen the development pictures.

And apparently the damn thing is widescreen only, which means if I want to be able to see the sides of the display I have to shrink everything and make it even harder to see.

Am I wrong to be upset about this? For expecting *someone* to have paid attention after the problems with King Kong and Dead Rising? Or are there really so few SD console gamers that designers think they don’t need to care?
Ilia Chentsov

butt in SD? A super-deformed butt?