I first notice Braid being played when I was in the office a few months ago. Dan had bought it on xbox live and people were gathered around the TV yelling out instructions, so when it came to playing Braid in the session I was kind of ready, but not. First impression was pretty, very pretty but let’s do some history first.
Braid is a puzzle/platformer developed by Jonathan Blow over the course of 3 years with his own money. The art was done by David Hellman, several times in fact, till Blow was happy. Braid picked up a few awards for being innovative 2006 and then some more in 2008 when it was released properly. Here endith the history lesson, on with the review.
I was impressed with Braid, truly impressed. It’s been quite some time since I’d seen a decent 2d platformer, and as I continued to play the game the story got to me. Really got to me. Never have I come across a more pretentious piece of crap than this damn story. Thankfully the game play and art work saves it. Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for good story line, but when the writer continues to furiously masturbate about how clever he thinks he is, all I want to do is pull out his right lobe and show him where his creative thinking went wrong with a pencil.
Braid is a cool game with an awesome concept. The rewinding of time along with time inert objects, crazy monsters and classic urgency makes for a good mix. Watching Tim play it though was an exercise in self control. As he said himself he isn’t good at puzzle games and I’d like to confirm that fact. Make it a Law.
So Tim (the games hero not our hapless couch companion) lost his wife/memory/what the fuck ever. He goes around finding these jigsaw puzzle pieces, defeating bad guys, turning back time Cher style, killing more bad guys and finding that the princess is in the other castle. After you collect enough puzzle pieces you can arrange them to actually form a picture. Neat. The problem was that I didn’t see an end in sight.
I should sum up though. Braid is a pretty good game. I thoroughly enjoyed it. Apart from a couple of pet peeves it fully deserves the thumbs up.
Our third episode has finally landed! After an inexcusably long time in the stratosphere, we welcome you all to see our condensed review of the first 30 minutes with Fallout 3. Our guest on the couch this time around was Liza Shulyayeva, a veteran PC gamer but console virgin. We hope you enjoy this episode [...]
Our second episode where we sit down and give the infamous game Braid a run through the TLC gauntlet. As you can see we tried a bit of a different format for this one, and yours truly wasn’t involved since I had already completely pwn3d the game before this session. Be sure to check out [...]
Our pilot episode, needless to say it’s a little rough around the edges! At this stage we were just testing out our tech and some show ideas, but hopefully you will find the core concept of the show still intact and enjoyable. We’ll be posting new videos and redesigning the webpage to better address what [...]
April 16th, 2009 at 8:48 am
What the fuck does BaDH stand for?
Also, would be nice to have some bio’s up for the reviewers, so we know who Jeza and Dan are. Didn’t think this review was as good as the first one, but looking forward to the next (mainly because I know there’s going to be some great *facepalm* lines from you-know-who
).
April 16th, 2009 at 9:38 am
Beating a Dead Horse, our oh so clever naming scheme for the review we do after an extended play session (at least 1 hour) after the 30 minutes on the couch. Bios for the editors will be up in the next few weeks once we get past our backlog of eps.