I got my Xbox 360 back from repair last Thursday and have put it to use. ^_^
Braid is the new big thing on Xbox Live Arcade, so I downloaded the trial and tried it out. Here are my thoughts.
Braid is a 2D platform / puzzle game with nifty gameplay elements, nice backgrounds, and nice music. I don't want to play any more of it past the trial game.
Back in the days of the Great Giana Sisters, Nintendo would've sued the pants off of the makers of this game for making a profit out of blatant copyright infringement. There are a ton of allusions to Super Mario Bros all over the place. You go through levels jumping on the heads of your enemies, on a quest for your princess, meeting a dinosaur (presumably to be like Yoshi but it looks more like Barney The Dinosaur) at the castle in each level. I guess these days you call it "a tribute" rather than "theft" though.
The effect of using these Super Mario Bros elements is mainly that I pine for the simple cheerfulness and happiness of the Mushroom Kingdom, as I read through the annoyingly self-serving story laid out in various diaries you get to read before starting each world. It seems to detail a romantic relationship that went horribly wrong. Worse than just that, from the way it's written I can picture a guy using this game to try to get back together with a girl who's dumped him. And, well, as it's all of a personal nature, the end result is that it just makes me think "the author of this game must be a real jerk. If this story applies to his real life, it's wrong to use a game as the platform for your lamentation, and I can tell he still can't quite see how unattractive he is (and was). Even when he thinks he's been a loser, you can tell he still feels something else - it's disgenuine on a level that even the writer doesn't see. He deserves to be dumped by the princess. Well and truly. She's better off with Bowser. Even if he's all spiky and breathes fire.".
The game's story is its main downfall, for me. If the game has all the text in some language I don't understand, it would have been a great game. I'd be raving about it. I would probably have bought it.
The main character looks like a chibi Jonathan Ross, there is a nice rewind button which is really quite cool. No need for extra lives, and it forms part of the gameplay as well. The music is quite nice. The backgrounds are quite nice. 2D platform / puzzle games are good.
But I really hate the main character from those bits of text, so I don't want to help him, I would actually rather keep him away from the "princess" (that's by far the happiest ending I can picture for the story), and I don't want to put my money in the hands of the person who made the game to make him think like he did the right thing. I really really really dislike him.
I can take all sorts of bad storylines in games, or no real storyline at all, but... not this. This is just horrible and I feel bad playing it because of that. He should not be allowed to rewind himself back into that girl's life. He made his mistakes, that's it. Final. Done. No going back. That's how it should be. He should learn from it and move forwards, a better person. I don't want to be the person this game wants me to role-play as.
I also think Jade Empire for the same price on Xbox Live Arcade is better value. There's no way this game is worth three Space Giraffes.
Since playing the demo, I've found that the game gets all sorts of critical acclaim, first an award from innvations in game design, then good reviews for the game. The maker, however, does seem to be as much of a jerk as his script would imply. It's not just that he's using his game (which would otherwise be great) as a soapbox for his old relationship problems, but also... I get the impression that he's really proud of what he's done, thinks he's great, and that his work is higher art than, say, Super Mario Bros because of his tackling of adult relationship issues, but in reality, it's worse than reading a 14 year old's whining on social networking site.
