Obviously great, of course.

Xbox? :/

Ah, nevermind, just read something about the PC version.
Little anoying me. Looking forward to it.

Thank you 1up for finally allowing me to use the term "pretentious masturbation" in regards to game design and theory. :)

God, I love Raf Vermeulen.

What a painfully lame platformer!! Admist all this Braid hype, no one mentions the fact that it looks like a lame, american mario bros. clone! i mean it's not even an interesting looking clone!! the playfield is wayy too big, the enemies look like crap, the suit guy is lame looking, it looks no better than a game maker platformer with painted backgrounds! and most importanly, painted backgrounds do NOT make a game! David Hellman's art is medicore and stupid!
this is the most hyped game in indy history, and i'm dying to see it go down and flames!!!!
f*ck johnathan blow!! he is an overhyped hack!!
stop acting like you are reinventing the wheel.

(70.112.xxx.xxx)

Well, I think on a blog like this, which tries to cover news on all the indie games out there, you see a lot of stuff about Braid. (Part of this is just that Braid has been in development for a long time so a lot of stuff has happened!) But in the global scheme of things, I don't think Braid is very "hyped". Almost nobody in the world knows about the game.

Also I will just say that the gameplay is a lot more interesting than you have surmised from watching the videos. (The IGF and Slamdance juries disagree with you that it is a lame Mario Bros clone.) And, I disagree with you about the quality of the art.

With that, I am going to try and teach myself to stop responding to ranting people on forums, and go back to working on the game.

Thanks!

Hehe, hi neighbors!

Jonathan Blow can make you cry like a baby in an arm wrestling match. You don't wanna mess with him, seriously.

Does anyone else notice that all the childish rants against Braid are by people posting anonymously? I don't have a dog in this fight over whether or not the game is good, but at least Mr. Blow puts his name on his opinions. By remaining anonymous, and avoiding responsibility for the comments they leave, his critics are acknowledging that they aren't very proud of what they're saying. Nor should they be -- their name-calling smacks of envy more than anything else.

Hand-painted backgrounds might not make a game, but they show that the developer is willing to step off the well-worn path of shiny-bumpy 3D graphics and try something more personal.

It looks like this will finally give me a reason to turn on my Xbox again. :)

Well said, Walter Starbunkle (a man who puts his name to his words, and what a name it is)!

Is it trendy to either bash or overly praise Jon Blow and Braid or something?

I listened to lots of interviews and lectures featuring Jon Blow and with some of his views I agree and with some I don't but it's not as if he's talking utter nonsense.

I'm also a bit worried that Braid might turn out to be a bit too artsy and pretentious BUT I'm nevertheless very much interested in the project and ready to be surprised. Whatever the case I'll be buying Braid for sure - or receiving it for free from my office if the editors in chief finally realize that we have to report more often about indie games. ;-)

jon blow is somekind of supergenius. he's a designer's deaigner. a thinking man's man.

and braid will make you cry.

"Thank you 1up for finally allowing me to use the term "pretentious masturbation" in regards to game design and theory. :)"

i do believe you mean, "thank you 1up for finally alerting me to the fact that the term 'game design' doesn't simply mean 'make a game'."

i can see how to someone with such an ignorant view of what it really means to *design game play, systems, structures, etc.* (just like 99.99% of the rest of folks who aren't game *designers*) may find the commentary pretentious sounding. try watching it again and maybe you'll learn something.

It's sad to see such attacks.

I do disagree with Jon Blow that the game isn't hyped, though. I don't think hype is a bad thing, but this game is very hyped, I'd say 90% of anyone who plays independent games has heard of it. It's probably in the top 10 of most famous indie games, and it isn't even released yet.

Hype has good and bad points; on the good side everyone will be itching to play it and buy it on the first day (as happened with Aquaria), but on the other hand it tends to annoy people and cause people who would otherwise have enjoyed the game to have a grudge against it due to being tired of hearing about it, and those people will intentionally be harsher in their reviews of the game than they would have been if the game just came out of nowhere.

In any case, good interview, I enjoyed seeing Braid in motion.

Regarding pretentiousness, one thing I noticed is that anyone who talks or writes about their games gets that label. Which is a pity because I like hearing what people have to say about their own games. But it's probably something that only other game developers care about or appreciate, the average player doesn't really care (and rightfully so) about the intricacies of game design or what the author wanted the game to mean.

I for my part don't find that the things that Jon Blow says are pretentious - e.g. I very much like his theory of artificial rewards vs natural rewards in games.

What I'm worried about is that the game itself might turn out to be a case of "form over gameplay". Since I haven't played it can't tell for sure - I know that even some people who were skeptical at first changed their minds once they got hold of Braid so maybe my concerns are unfounded.

Lim-Dul, what do you mean by form over gameplay?

Well - I mean this moody atmosphere, the hand-painted graphics, the music, the in-game text (from what I've seen in the previews/interviews)...

I just wonder if the gameplay will be able to keep up with them or if there's a pretty standard platformer underneath it all...

Might be just me, but I don't really see how a game with such time-altering mechanics could end up being a "pretty standard" puzzle platformer... the same way I don't see how one could've considered Portal a pretty standard puzzle game, either. It's entirely possible that the puzzles will suck, but I would think that they'd be of the "less standard" variety regardless.

Anyhow, I kind of wish Braid would get released already, so all the bitching could get directed at the game, rather than its creators. There'd be a bit more of a point to that.

Lim-Dul, I see what you're saying. I think pkt-zer0 is right, but I'd say Braid is a platformer the way Portal is a FPS. The genre just kind of lays the groundwork for this other thing, which is more unique.

I think frequently previews don't convey what the gameplay is really like because ... it's hard to convey. Think of Portal again. If someone says "you have these two doors that lead to each other and you can put them anywhere," you might think that could be cool, but you have to play the game and think through the implications of the system before you "get it." The trick or gimmick in Braid is time behavior, but because that's been done a number of times, maybe it doesn't sound as novel as it otherwise would. But hopefully the implementation makes a lot more of the concept than previous efforts ... I think it does ... I hope you'll enjoy it.

That's why I can't wait to get my hands on Braid - do you hand out preview versions to video game journalists even if they most likely won't be able to sneak an article into their respective magazines because their editors in chief are more focussed on the mainstream market? =)

As to the time manipulation - that's another thing I want to see in action since I've seen many of the previewed mechanisms (e.g. time clones) in other games including some experimental Flash projects. I'm dying to see how it has been implemented in Braid. =)