Radio Silence

Sorry about the silence here for the past two months. General craziness aside, I just haven't had much interesting to say, nor time to say much. Here's a brief overview of what I've been up to:

• In my continued quest to find interesting ways to present my pictures, I've decided to upload some selected (and often slightly edited) photos to Flickr. I'm not a huge fan of the lossy jpeg compression they use, but the photostream concept is well suited for posting a few photos a day that aren't necessarily related to eachother.
• Played through all of the excellent DS visual novel 9 hours, 9 persons, 9 doors. Lots I could say about this, but my brother beat me to the punch. In short: Best game I've played on the DS, and probably the only game I've played in the last few years that's kept me up to all hours of the night trying to figure out what's going to happen. Comparing this to a typical Hollywood thriller is like comparing Inception to the Disney cartoon of your choice. If you like suspenseful novels (note: even if you don't like games) and own a DS, play this now, if for no other reason than to ensure we Americans get more games like this.

And yeah, that's about all I got. Lots of other stuff going on, but nothing really interesting.

Braid

My brother, Chris, gave me a copy of Braid for my birthday this year. When it was first released, Braid was hailed as an amazingly innovative blend of a platform game and a puzzle game. Personally, I think it's one of the most strikingly cunning games I've ever seen. In most puzzle-games, you finish the game thinking you're an idiot for having not seen the solution immediately; in Braid, by contrast, you feel like a genius as soon as you uncover the solution to each puzzle.

The mechanics of Braid are simple. You can only do, basically, three different things: Run, jump, and make time go backwards. Almost every puzzle in the game is driven by the last mechanic. Each 'world', of which there are five, introduces another time-related mechanic. The first world has you adjusting to solving puzzles by moving backwards in time, and the third introduces objects (e.g. enemies, platforms) that are unaffected by the moving time backwards. Later worlds introduce more complicated mechanics, but all in the same vein.

Tying the whole game together is a simple story reminiscent of the first Super Mario Brothers game, a hero seeking a lost princess, who he can never manage to find in any castle he encounters. Although the 'hero seeking a princess' story is a classic probably better suited to the 8-bit era of video games, Braid makes it work and even ties it to the time game mechanic. The true depth of the story isn't revealed until the final level, and it blew my mind when I saw it unfold.

Braid is a fantastic game with only one major flaw: It's short. I played through the game in about four hours. At $20, that's a pretty high cost per hour of entertainment, although it compares favorably with many movies. Anyone interested in fiendishly clever puzzles and game mechanics should definitely check it out. Braid is available for Windows (via Steam), OS X (via Greenhouse) and on a wide variety of console systems.

Long time, no blog

Wow, it's been nearly a month since I touched this thing. I'm not entirely sure where that month went, but here's a few things that I've been up to recently...

• My brother gave me a fancy new game for my birthday (back in early October...) called The Spirit Engine II. It's absolutely fantastic. The gameplay is a bit simplistic, but the story is phenomenal and reminds me why I tend to prefer indie games to most of the big names. I'm in only the fourth chapter, but I already can't wait to figure out what the heck is going on.


• The news with the economy sucks primarily because that's all I hear on the radio when I'm going to NC. Thankfully, I'm equipped with my mostly-obsolete iPod.


• The only thing that's keeping me sane with all the election news is the political satire at Sinfest, one of my favorite webcomics that is nowhere near as racy as the title implies. The sunday comics are particularly well done, such as this and this. There are plenty of other good comics in the archive, too.


• I appear to be on a fantasy novel kick. Forthcoming reviews will include The Lies of Locke Lamora and Red Seas under Red Skies, both by Scott Lynch, and Mistborn: The Well of Ascension by Brandon Sanderson. I also read The Sunrise Lands by S.M. Stirling, but it may not have been exciting enough to warrent a blog post.

I'll try to be more on top of this whole 'blog' thing in the future. Look for more posts forthcoming.