braid

Seems to be drawing the xkcd crowd: "What is Braid? One may as well ask what life is. It is art, it is love, it is pain, it is a journey. It is itself. I don't mean to sound pretentious."

Wanna get a copy of the soundtrack.

I can't be the only one that skipped all the shit about blazer-wearing dude's gf, right? Do not want to hear about it irl either.

Link here, czn: http://www.rllmukforum.com/index.php?showtopic=190136

it might be asshattery, but I think there's something to it.

obviously major spoilers.

No, I think that guy's pretty on point and most of that is actually kind of obvious. The notes on the flags was illuminating, tho'.
It's still awfully emo; complex themes and higher plot points aside.

thanks will, I'll read that when I've had a chance to finish braid

I've beaten the game, so anything below might be spoilers? Just a warning to other readers. I'll italicize it.

It was kinda emo, yeah, but if anything, if vilifies that main character instead of going "oh poor him." Then again maybe that's my own bias, but by then I found myself completely not empathizing with him as much as I felt like a bad guy for getting him that far, and empathizing w/ the princess. If it were all "oh poor tim he didn't get the lady he stalked" then yeah, bad emo, but "hey chasing a princess is kinda creepy yo" is good emo, imo.

The story was kind of ridiculous and "emo", but I liked that you didn't even have to bother with it unless you wanted to. Stop on the books, or don't.

I may be conflating "emo" with twee, precious and affected.

when are the new maps out?

I had braid dreams last night. And then when my alarm went off and I pressed snooze, my still-dreaming brain thought I'd just rewound time. This happened 4 or 5 times, with me constantly believeing it was still only 7am. Ended up getting up 50 minutes late. It was FANTASTIC!

WTF @ "secret stars": http://www.gamefaqs.com/boards/genmessage.php?board=943284&topic=44749717
Anybody confirm this is real?

It certainly explains some of the cloud placement...

yeah, pretty sure it's real.

So I was getting frustrated, & decided to check out the official walkthrough. And the 2nd page of the walkthrough (which is quoted in the first post on this thread) inspired me to go back. And I got through more! Tho there's still 1 piece in Room 2 (just above the door) that I can't figure out. (Don't tell me.)

(Not that you'd be able to tell, given how inadvertently vague I was.)

Ha. I know exactly which piece you're talking about.

Tho there's still 1 piece in Room 2 (just above the door) that I can't figure out. (Don't tell me.)

I will give you the vague hint that if you look at the setup, there really is only one possible way it could happen.

reading through those explanations of how to get the "secret stars" make them seem immeasurably difficult and my suspicion is its a ruse concocted to make you - in trying over and over to nail the precise jumps and configurations necessary - i.hate yourself, ii.hate braid and iii.hate life

OK - so turns out they're real

ngh

I will give you the vague hint that if you look at the setup, there really is only one possible way it could happen.

Yeah, if I swapped in Luigi!

Polyphonic's hint is a hint for the whole game rather than that one particular piece, really.

http://www.cubeecraft.com/character076.html
http://www.cubeecraft.com/character077.html

One of the best things about braid is that reading about it has finally opened up the world of "intelligent game bloggers", people who write about game theory and execution; why we play and what it is that makes the games fun. Finally finding people who can write above the eukaryote level is ace. Here's folks I'm now reading daily:

http://versusclucluland.blogspot.com/
http://www.artfulgamer.com/
http://www.brainygamer.com/
http://sexyvideogameland.blogspot.com/
http://insultswordfighting.blogspot.com/

woah, that's weird

I have been doing the exact same thing since braid came out - including reading those top three blogs and contributing to the brainy gamer's "vintage game club"

uncanny

Hey, dudes like Mitch Krpata been writing since long before Braid! I think. Anyway I love insult swordfighting-- if you haven't read his new taxonomy of gamers article it is vital.

Also, actionbutton.net reviewed the game and I agree with a LOT of what they say.

yeah, the text in Braid is often quite embarrassing. doesn't come close to ruining the game, though. ridiculously pompous, overwritten tripe is no more or less annoying than your typical "cool-guy" youthspeak or poorly translated non sequiturs.

also, that review (and its comments) overstate the misogyny, don't you think?

okay, actually it's far more annoying than poorly translated non sequiturs (one of the reasons to love games in the first place), but you don't see those too often anymore.

Heh, I see there are others here who are always reading those GameSetWatch roundups in the past year... not a bad thing at all, mind you. Those blogs are quite good though, I wish I'd discovered them even earlier. The writing on them is quite good, but since most of them are journalists, they're all constantly on top of all the new releases and such, and it's kind of hard to keep up with sometimes. Kind of off-topic... out!

I dunno, the game's "misogynist" insofar that it's not not misogynist, but that is still a valid point, i think.

OK, done; let's start reading the batshit analyses of the game then

so frustrated: apparently I can't get one of the secret stars because you need the jigsaw pieces for world 3 to be un-sorted... is there no way to detach the jigsaw pieces from one and other when they've been put in place?

how long did it take for that guy in will m.'s link to piece all that stuff together? the mind boggles

OK, so I figured it's not going to spoil the story any and the secret stars are apparently unfathomably difficult to track down so I watched a video of how to do them and all I can say is

WOW

fk tht sht

cosined: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3bJYEk-IXa8&feature=related

So, I finally finished it. There were only a couple pieces I thought were actually unfair. (I ran into another piece where I had solved it, but because I didn't have the finesse to time a jump correctly, I thought there must've been another solution. Looking at a cheat confirmed that I had solved it correctly, and so I just spent half an hour trying to time the jump.)

The stars thing is pretty cool, tho I'm never going to do it. (I would have been willing to try the princess star - but since it isn't unlocked unless you do the first 7, I'm not going to bother. Especially since there's that one star that apparently takes 2 hours of real time to complete!)

Yeah - this is really good but I don't understand why there are so many pieces that require pixel perfect timing / half an hour's work after you figure out what to do? There's one with a cloud in particular that is just ugh.

i was playing this when i was drunk and thought i was destroying at it, in the cold light of day i realise that i got like 2 puzzle pieces out of about 5 levels..

<3 it though

I finished by cheating. :\

wish this was out for DS pt. 300

i like that it is still lots of fun, if you have to cheat, because you are not smart (hi dere)

Yeah, even if you take the easy way out, there's still the matter of executing. But after I found out the trick to getting some of the pieces that stumped me, I felt REALLY stupid (esp. the one in World 2 w/ the piece just above the exit door).

Did you use Luigi?

I got the raccoon suit.

Finished this last night. I had to look up solutions for my final three pieces. Two of them I don't regret cheating on, because they kinda skankily relied on gamplay dynamics I'd been completely unaware of, just because they hadn't been introduced very well (I'll explain which in a separate spoilery post below). But the third was my final piece, and I think I was just being impatient with that one - another 10 minutes of fiddling and I could have figured it out myself.

World 1 was great though. It's definitely a 9.5 out of 10 game, overall.

So yeah, SPOILERS:

The first was the point where you needed to let a goomba dude fall on your head and kill you, so that the goomba would then bounce into the air and your rewound self could use it as a springboard to the just-out-of-reach platform. I'd managed to avoid having any goombas fall on my head all the way through the game. So there was no way I could've known that doing so would make the goomba bounce up into the air. So yeah, the tools to solve that one just weren't in my possession.

And similarly, the one where I had to use the ring to get three time-ignoring goombas past three dragon-plants...the answer was to start rewinding time then right-bumper forward, which stops time altogether. But again, there hadn't been a point in the game that'd shown me that was possible, and I hadn't noticed it myself. Without experimenting with every potential combination of controls (or else just luckily happening across it), there's no way I'd have realised that was something I could do.

They'd be minor niggles in any other game, but they did feel like unusually big flaws given that the rest of Braid was so carefully and cleverly designed.

I mean, did any of you figure those two out without help?

I did! :D

this is the only puzzle game I ever completed; so frustrating in parts, but AMAZING when you finally figured out the puzzles

I started playing through again so I could pick up the 8 secret stars and see the official ending; I'm cheating on the secret stars and the puzzles I can't remember how to do tho

this is the first game i played through with no help (from the web, friends or elsewhere) in a long long time; trial and error paid off. Fuck some secret stars tho'.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c53fGdK84rc
and xpost to portal and russian doll too i suppose