Braid Coming to Windows Today

By: Derek Yu

On: April 10th, 2009

The long-awaited PC version of Braid is now available on Greenhouse (including a demo), and will be unlocked on Steam around noon PST. The game will also be available through Impulse and through Gamersgate today. The price is $14.95 USD.

TIGdb: Entry for Braid

Posted in Highly Recommended, Platformers, Videos, Windows | Tags: JonathanBlow

Vincent

Oh yeah!
Sninnyer

Fuck yeah! D/loading the demo now!
robert

It’s great fun, I’ll probably get it on Steam (don’t know much about Greenhouse’s DRM, but as far as I know you have to activate each time you install the game, so I could just get it on Steam then).

What bugs me is that Blow seems to have forgotten to support gamepads – hope that’ll be dealt with in a patch.
http://gnomeslair.com/ gnome

Yes, yes, yes, and thrice yes! Time to get naked and dance around the streets I believe.

Braaaaaaaaaaiiiiiiid
Trotim

Time to do another 100% run!
Dan

Robert: Jon Blow said this in a comment over on the indiegames blog

“The thing is, the gamepad support in Braid relies on knowing exactly what the controller is (in terms of how the visual prompting is set up, for example). It’s just really hard to do that with an arbitrary gamepad.

Besides, the game was designed by playing on the keyboard anyway. You can always use joy2key to map your gamepad to keys.”

So it sounds like not giving generic gamepad support was a conscious decision /:
J

Finally! Good times, good times. Full version via Greenhouse is 119 MB, btw.

robert: Still downloading for me so I can’t check, but you should be able to use Joy2Key to enable joypad use. It’s available at the first result from a Google search (at electracode.com).
J

As a follow-up, the game recognizes an Xbox 360 controller automatically, even changing the instructional icons above your head to match it.
Bleagle

I downloaded the demo version, but it seems to have a problem with my graphics card. I can hear the sounds but my screen is black. Does Braid need Shader 2.0 support?
http://gnomeslair.com/ gnome

I wouldn’t think so Bleagle, as it runs on my pretty ancient PC. Then again I did get a new (cheap) graphics card 3 years ago…
Jonathan Blow

Yes, Braid needs shader model 2 support. But any graphics card that doesn’t support shader 2 would be too slow to draw all the pixels Braid draws (it’s a *lot*).

Sorry about the high system requirements, but that’s just the game that we ended up making.
Jonathan Blow

Oh, I am going to recommend that the various download locations post the system requirements today.
Bremze

Looks like the lifetime of my GF5500 FX comes to an end, I am missing out on too many games due to the SM 2.0 requirement.
Bleagle

@Bremze: Yeah, my Geforce MX 440 has the same problem. I couldnt play Portal because of that, too. But now I really need to get a new pc. I cant ignore Braid. I just hope it’ll be worth it…
BELIEVE IN THE LORD

I don’t gtive a shit anymore. One year is too long a wait, I’m not going to be blow’s bitch.
JB

what if you already played prince of persia?
http://chaoseed.com/garden John Evans

And remember, if you’re feeling frustrated with the puzzles, go read the official walkthrough.
http://0xdeadc0de.org/ Eclipse

Bremze that’s quite strange because even my freaking old geforce 5200 fx had shader model 2.0
SouljaBoy

WHOOOOOOOOP!
mcc

How do I tell if I have Shader Model 2?
vsync

Tried the demo — it ran excruciatingly slow and with no vsync, destroying the pretty graphics with tearing. There’s no option to enable vsync in the game, but when I forced on vsync in my driver settings, the game ran much faster overall, but with noticably variable speed. Apparently game speed is tied to the video framerate? This feels buggy.
Solved

Odd, I’m in europe, steam says that it has been released but there is no button to purchase it.
Moose

Solved, Steam typically has sync problems like that when a game is just being released.

BELIEVE, the year delay was very probably imposed by MS.

And people here – the big question on this – is there an editor?
Hubert von Trollington

$14.95?

This is an old game with less than 10 hours of gameplay, and I am amazed that they would ask so much for it. Especially in today’s economy.
mrfredman

Yea, steam is being weird. I was really hoping to DL it within the next hour so I could play it on my cross-country flight this afternoon.

I guess I’ll just have to play through cockpit compo entries instead.
A Guy

If hours of gameplay = quality, then Portal is a piece of shit not worth even the $10 it fetches on ebay.
A Guy

Ack, ignore my last comment, I can’t believe I bit. :(
Soulliard

I’ve been waiting for this for ages, and now, when it finally comes out, I have a huge paper to write.

*sigh*
Flamebait

The demo says “TODO: has encountered a problem and needs to close. We are sorry for the inconvenience.”

If what *vsync* says is true, I wouldn’t buy it even if it worked for me. A PC game without vsync capability is immediate and total fail.
Jonathan Blow

Mr. vsync: There was a vsync bug in the initial version that was affecting a lot of people; I am rolling out a fix currently.

As for the game speed slowing down / varying in-game, the most likely cause is just that your video card can’t draw this many pixels. But if you do have a high-end video card, it is possible it’s a bug (and if so I will fix it!)
http://0xdeadc0de.org/ Eclipse

Solved me too, and i want it on my steam list damnit!!! i have it on xbox but i just need it on my pc, as i already did for aquaria, buying it two times (one from bit blot site and a year after again from steam :P)
Anonymous

Is anyone else getting big-time slowdown? I am, but only when I enter the 3rd World for some reason. Task manager said it was taking up 298,948 K of cpu.
MisterX

Frankly, I wasn’t convinced of Braid. I thought it only got the status as that “big indie hit” because it is fun, pretty flawless and looks great, which made it a good candidate for that current hype for few indie games. I’ve now played the demo for a while and I’m convinced that Braid is great, special and totally deserves the recognition it got. That’s not to say it’s one of the only games, many more indie games should be hyped like this. Still, Braid seems to be well deserving it anyway.
I’ll buy it as soon as it is on Steam.

By the way, about vsync: Jonathan Blows Braid blog seems to be down at the moment, but he posted that he is aware of the problem and it is going to be fixed very soon. There is even a way to manually enable VSync already using a commandline parameter, unfortunately I don’t remember it. But, really, as he said in that blog entry, it’s just a bug. If your computer can handle it, VSync should automatically be activated anyway. I didn’t have a problem with it myself.
robert

Braid is amazing. Now please add gamepad support so I can play it on the HDTV more easily. Joy2Key is not a good option, too much hassle. :D
josh g.

Why is it showing up as unlocking tomorrow on Steam instead of today? (Canadian thing only?)
http://waxy.org/ Andy Baio

The Steam page now says it’s coming out tomorrow at 5pm PST. Nuts.
http://number-none.com/braid_demo_1010_impulse.exe MisterX

Same in Germany. They apparently simply postponed the Steam release yet another day. I wonder if that might be intentional, or if it’s just due to some accident. Either way, I suppose more people will buy it from one of the other sites, which I think is a good thing :)

By the way, Blow released an updated demo which should fix the vsync-issue and potentially also solves the problem with crashes. As the blog is still hard to reach I’ve included the link to the updated demo in my nickname, just click it.
Fuzz

Got the demo on Greenhouse (which is proving to be really nice) and I’ll definitely be buying it soon. Really a beautiful game, in all aspects.
Lambchops

It’s good stuff, well worth the wait.

I love platform based puzzle games. Especially ones with cool mechanics such as this. The most instantly addicted I’ve been to a game since World of Goo.
MisterX

And here it goes..
The confusion in the Steam Store is settled, Braid is now officially available from all four distributors :)
William Broom

Stayed up till 3 in the morning to play this and it didn’t disappoint. I do feel like it takes a bit too much from Mario, but oh well.
smallfry

No joystick support = what the F?!?!?
Bennett

This is lovely, Jon. I bought it on Greenhouse, and I must say that I was really charmed by it. Beautiful and also mentally challenging in a rare way.

I sort of wish you had added transitional animations for the ladders though… there’s something jarring about the ladder climbing which takes me out of the game world a bit. I think part of the problem is that he glides too smoothly up and down the ladders… he should pulse up them like a real person.
td45

This game ain’t work on my computer.

I ain’t buyin this shit.
Chris Whitman

The game took me about five hours to complete. It was excellent!

Most of the puzzle pieces were pretty easy to get, although there were a good three or four which had me confused for a bit.

I think it could have used another stage or two and some harder puzzles, but all in all I really enjoyed it. The last bit was awesome.
MisterX

Can someone from the eurozone who bought Braid via Greenhouse please tell me if the VAT is added to the final price, or if you just pay the correct dollar price (i.e. in this case ~11,35â‚¬)? Thanks :)
sinoth

I lurve this game :) Bought on Steam, played with my logitech controller via JoyToKey.
Hypersapien

Just got it on Steam. Pretty damn cool game. Now I understand what everyone is talking about.
ssid

Remember, that’s $14.95 US fiat dollars.
ZeppMan217

Already playing. Damn, it’s harder that I thought.