Braid distinguishes itself right from the start. As soon as the game loads, you are controlling your character, a surprisingly rare trait for a game–no initial menus, no options. Just your silhouetted avatar up above a hand-painted cityscape saturated in deep reds and oranges, with the game’s title writ in flame.

Even had you not been aware of the building anticipation for Jonathan Blow’s Braid–at least within the game industry and in the immediate periphery, where Blow has long been a proponent of experimental gameplay–and many gamers likely were not, the game wastes no time in painting itself as something unique.

There seems to be a mini-trend of recent games that play like examinations of various physical properties: Valve’s Portal is suit of puzzles largely constructed around momentum, while Nintendo’s Super Mario Galaxy, to a less dedicated degree, is a celebration of gravitation.

Braid, then, is an exploration of time. This kind of analogy is trite on its face–after all, these games succeed for a multitude of reasons beyond this arguably link I propose.

But it’s worth making the comparison, because Braid’s participation in that prestigious puzzle/platformer pantheon is particularly unique. Our brains have an instinctive grasp of things like momentum and gravity, even while they are being depicted in fantastic ways, in part because we have largely conquered them in ways our ancestors could hardly have imagined. Time, on the other hand, despite theoretical hypotheses, remains to us so fundamentally linear, so unyieldingly constant, that Braid’s unrelenting abuse of it presents a kind of challenge which at times eclipses its constant impartation of delighted challenge with genuine intimidation. (more…)

Taken from the opening credits of Magnum Force, the second Dirty Harry film.

A quick note: Most of my posts are not this inflammatory! If you’ve found this piece by way of Penny Arcade or a link by somebody who found it by way of Penny Arcade, welcome! Glad you stopped by. Consider checking out the rest of my blog, where I make plenty of other posts that aren’t so polemical.

No, not everyone who pirates a game would have bought it. But when you can go to any torrent site at any given moment and see thousands upon thousands upon thousands of people downloading a game, even weeks after it came out, how can any reasonable person not accept that there were lost sales?

Sure, we don’t know what percentage of those pirated copies are lost sales, but just because we don’t have that figure, does anyone truly believe that means the potential sales are negligible?

We know from firsthand statements that Ritual, just as one example, saw considerably more technical support requests from pirates than from legitimate customers on Sin Episodes. Does it matter if you thought that game wasn’t good? No. Those pirates must have thought it was good enough to try to get it to work properly.

And that is clearly not an isolated example. Because every time anyone brings this up—be they a top-shelf developer, or a less prominent one—people think of a million reasons why that particular game or that particular developer just don’t deserve the support of the discerning PC gamers. It happens every time, with the excuses tuned for each game. At that point, they stop being isolated examples, and they become part of a very clear trend. (more…)