When I broke down and got a fancy new TV, I decided to get the Xbox 360 instead of the PS3 because of the sizeable selection of games you can download for a fee directly from the couch. This includes old arcade classics as well as new stuff. A couple of days ago, a game called “Braid” was released, which is a sort of puzzle game done up like a painting. It started blowing my mind about 5 minutes after I started playing it, and hasn’t quit. Since. Here’s what it looks like:

The music fits in perfectly with the look of the game. Here’s a little YouTube action so you can get the full aesthetic:

I usually get frustrated in puzzle games pretty quickly, when the difficulty ramp is too steep, or bored, if it’s too easy. Braid is perfect, right in the middle. I’ve solved 3/5 of the worlds, and haven’t been once tempted to reach for a walkthrough. What’s more, Braid doesn’t have any complicated rules–you learn everything by observation, and so the overall experience is very satisfying. It was $15 and has already paid for itself.

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Comments

Cameron — 2008-08-08 17:51:43

Thanks for the recommendation!

Cameron — 2008-08-27 17:17:45

One of my favorite dudes on the internet takes a shot at Braid: http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/view/zero-punctuation/203-Braid

Pretty much the best political ad ever, as if created by Jay of Jay and silent bob. (Has some naughty words, click to see full size.)

The Zombie Scenario Survivor Test. Give it a shot. My first time through I answered truthfully and ended up with 70%. The second time I went ruthless and did much better.

If any of you were like me back in 1989 sitting in front of the TV with your NES powered up, playing Dragon Warrior, then we should talk. Just in case you’re not sure, here’s a Rorschach test of sorts for you:

Does that picture make you twitch? Awaken some dark memory in the recesses of your brain? Then you’re like me, and you should definitely check out the latest iteration of this same franchise, 16 years later: Dragon Quest VIII. Square Enix is still the publisher, and there are still frickin’ slimes!

And drackies! You know you remember the drackies. Apparently Square is doing all they can to cash in on nostalgia just such as this and has actually produced a slime controller

I’m not saying you should buy this for me for christmas. But I’m also not saying you shouldn’t.

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Comments

danny — 2005-11-30 12:39:49

Everytime I think I’m almost out, the slimes pull me back in.

Looks like this is a rental now.

Cameron — 2005-12-01 06:53:32

So, how’s the game?

bryan — 2005-12-01 08:42:41

So far, nothing revolutionary. Combat is turned-based, a bit simpler than FFX, but has almost WoW-like attribute points that you allocate to get special abilities. I’m sure I could look up what all the abilities I will gain are, but I’ve been going for the “just me and the game” style of play so far. Honestly I’ve only played for a couple of hours, but it’s really been scratching my RPG itch.

Cameron — 2005-12-01 21:37:48

Heta gained two levels yesterday when I got bored. Amazing what rested XP will do for you!

I’ve seen many harddrives come and go during my life-long fascination with computers. The first one I used was 30MB, the first one I bought with my own money was an 850MB Conner (remember them?). I even had a classic of HD history, the IBM Deathstar, and mine did end up failing in the classic way.

I stopped stressing so much about storage when I built a 3x120GB array when we moved to California. The idea was to have a bit of redundancy (I used RAID 5 for parity information) and enough storage (actually only 240GB, you lose one disk worth of capacity to get the redundancy). It wasn’t cheap, but also didn’t cost that much and I was able to build an all-purpose Linux file server and router/firewall.

Well believe it or not, It’s been over two years since I built that thing and I was at about 80% capacity with more files coming all the time. Luckily, a hard drive fairy from heaven gave me 4 gently used 250GB Hitachi 7K250 drives. I paired these with a super-cheap four-port SATA card (no fancy hardware RAID or anything) and using the great software RAID setup on Linux, brought the 1 terabyte beast to life:

This pic is from the somewhat painful process of getting my data from the old array onto the new one. Since I only have 3 PCI slots on the board, and they were all occupied, I had to give up internet access by pulling out the NIC while I was doing the transfer. Even better, I had to buy multiple power splitters to get all seven drives going at once. Now the new drives are tucked away neatly and the old 120GB PATA drives are moping in the closet. Of course, I had to sacrifice one drive’s worth of storage to redundancy info, but 750GB is still nothing to sneeze at. Now I’ve got a place to stash all those dual-layered DVDs from netflix until blanks come down in price a bit.