Obama/Biden!!!!!!

Thank God.

Julian's new record

Is the most beautiful thing I've ever heard. I think you all will enjoy it too.

Thoughs on Braid

So, I've been playing Braid. It's a wonderful game and I fully recommend it. On the surface the impressionistic "painterly" art style of the game is beautiful, and far more attractive and interesting to me than games that fall into the uncanny valley of attempting to look realistic.


Although the game's basic mechanics are extremely simple and familiar, with it's Mario style side-scrolling platforming and it's key and lock puzzles, the unique time mechanics of each level made me think in ways that I never have before. The only comparison I can think of is Portal. Portal made me think in a new spacial logic that doesn't really exist in reality, and Braid does the same with it's unique temporal logic.

Although this game is relatively short, it is challenging. Most of the game's 60 puzzle pieces took some thinking for me, but no longer than 15 minutes to solve. There were however three pieces in particular that took me quite a bit longer to figure out. In frustration at one point I looked at developer Jonathan Blow's official walkthrough, only to discover that he had pulled a fast one on me and encouraged me to figure them out myself. So I went back and spent some serious time with these three remaining pieces, and as he suggested in the walkthrough, they may have taken me an hour or two to figure out. But figure them out I did, and it felt extremely satisfying. After experiencing Braid's clever ending and epilogue I thought I had finished the game.

Apparently the game was not finished with me though, as there were still a a few nagging things in the back of my mind. I had read artist David Hellman's excellent article on gamasutra about the exhaustive process he and Blow went through to make sure the art in the game was perfect. In the article he displays numerous mock-ups of a single screen in the first level the player encounters in the game, including this one:


Hellman notes:

When I sent these to Jonathan, he jumped on the rectangular "cut out" on the bottom of the center platform. It was a conspicuous geometric variation in a puzzle game where the player will assume everything has been placed for a reason.

It would be bad for the player to get stuck trying to figure out the puzzle-solving purpose of something with purely aesthetic value. As we went along, I got more disciplined about eliminating stuff that might distract or confuse the player.

I knew that Jonathan Blow's design philosophy was to exclude extraneous noise, and everything in the game had been carefully placed for a reason. Without giving anything away, I had noticed several things in the game that seemed out of place, strange details that Jonathan Blow had placed carefully to linger mysteriously in the minds of players like me. As he notes in his walkthrough: "Braid does not have a linear story the way most games do, so Getting To The End is not necessarily what you would expect. The idea of 'beating the game' does not apply so much, here."

With these little unresolved pieces of the puzzle nagging at the back of my mind, but with no clue in which direction to proceed, I did exactly what Jonathan Blow's walkthrough advised against. I read a forum. What I found was pretty astounding. Aside from people trying to analyze the game's abstract fragmented "story" which presents snippets of optional text that seem to be related on the level of theme alone (personally I'm torn on how I feel about this aspect of the game, but I'll spare you that tangent for now) there is a series of nearly impossible (both to find and execute) hidden challenges in the game that unlock an alternate ending.

If anyone reading this is playing the game, to give you a hint about these challenges without spoiling them for you as a few have already been spoiled for me, they involve finding the stars in the constellation visible in the city overworld, dispersed throughout the game. One of the stars requires starting a new game, or at least finding the star near the beginning of your first play through. Another requires waiting for about two hours in one of the levels! I can't help think that despite Jonathan Blow's statement to avoid reading forums to solve the game's challenges, that these stars were built-in specifically for the forums, where people who found all the puzzles pieces but still wanted more could cooperate to uncover these challenges and be rewarded for doing so, much like Bungie did with the skulls hidden in Halo 3. Indeed, Braid is a game that can be played and appreciated on multiple levels, and it is this kind of depth that makes it so interesting and great.

Donkey Kong Jenga

Check out this awesome Donkey Kong themed Jenga set.


In addition to the classic game of Jenga, it has some sort of Donkey Kong themed alternate rule set that involves using the spinner to moving the little included Marios up the girders to save Pauline from Donkey Kong. I wish this image was a little more high res so I could see what's on that spinner. It's currently sold out on Amazon.

Weight Watchers is an RPG?

Clive Thompson posted an interesting article on wired today about how Weight Watchers functions exactly like an RPG. I really like the idea of turning dull, boring activities that people have trouble motivating themselves to do into games. The brilliant thing about Weight Watchers though, if it does actually function like an RPG, is that it isn't marketed as a game and most people who use it probably have no clue that they are playing one.

Ocarina Of Time

I'm enjoying The Legend Of Zelda: Ocarina Of Time, which I paid $10 to download from the Wii Virtual Console. I borrowed this (along with an N64 system) from my friend Shannon Wheeler not too long after it came out ten years ago, but had to return it before I had completed the game.

At the time I resisted the move from 2D to 3D, and I still see problems with it, especially when comparing this game (the first 3D Zelda title) to the very polished SNES predecessor A Link To The Past ($8 on the VC), which remains beautiful, taking perhaps the gameplay of the original Zelda to its logical, refined conclusion: The play control is more-or-less perfect, the items and their uses and encounters with the quirky non-player characters so much fun, and the graphics and colors beautiful.

One main problem in 3D gaming has to do with the motions of the camera: What images and viewing angles you the player are seeing on the TV screen as you pilot your character around this world. Although Ocarina is said to handle this problem gracefully (and I can attest that compared to Mario 64 this is a big improvement), there are times when it still feels awkward. When being attacked by something just off-screen, for example, as a player I would appreciate it if the camera automatically zoomed back a bit and adjusted itself to a position where I could see both Link and his opponent clearly. But aside for that, and aside from some play-control issues -- having to leap to narrow/moving platforms, for example, is so much more difficult in three dimensions -- this game is pretty beautiful visually, still managing to be evocative even with its comparatively blocky graphics, and the graphics and music combine to create what feels very much like a three-dimensional world that you are slowly exploring, uncovering hidden sections on a map you carry as you do so.

The extensive, relatively in-depth interactions with non-player characters (townspeople, etc) is a big change, and one that I enjoy. Each little village is a puzzle box waiting to be carefully unraveled by the player as you perform this or that task to help people solve problems and receive rewards for your efforts, which in turn sometimes allow you to solve a previously unsolvable problem/puzzle.

What I know now that I didn't know ten years ago: If something seems too hard, do something else instead. It is a lot easier to go through side-quests once you have accumulated some items from the main quest. If you see something unusual, like for example a hole in a patch of dirt, it almost certainly serves some purpose in the game, even if it is not something you can currently do or access -- it pays to remember its existence and location and come back later, once you have more items to try to use there.

I'm going to see if I can go through the whole Zelda series without looking anything up on the internet. We'll see if I make it.

The next installment, Majora's Mask, which was also an N64 title but which has not yet been released for the VC, contains non-player character interactions to an unusually intense and at times bafflingly complex degree. But I plan to keep a notebook by my side, recording clues as I go through. In fact, that might serve me well during this one: sketching a map of the lost woods, for example, and noting locations of pieces of heart and other items that I can not yet obtain.