"Braid is like having a really smart guy throw a brain teaser at you, and this really smart guy isn't going to just let you say 'I give up' and then tell you the answer." Chick's point is good: if you don't like platformers, Braid is going to hurt. At the same time: it's so primitive a platformer, I think it's hard to dislike because of the mechanics, and the time-manipulation smooths out some of the kinks with platforming (much like in Sands of Time)

"Just as the words consumer and user are condesending to people, the word experience is condesending to the activity of people, or life. And it’s condescending to the people who work hard to create the products and services. Everyone seems to be an experience manager these days, but we should be proud of what we do." When Heathcote blogs, he blogs big. Great post.

Might come in useful for that Braid article I need to write.

Too true.

"I had an example, I had some data, and I had a little experience with making things in Processing." Kars explains the thinking behind his time-travel maps, built in Processing. Really nice work.

2008 Bulwer-Lytton fiction contest results. Excellent, as usual.

What it says on the tin.

Constant Setting, by Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino et al. Constant Setting shows you a crowdsourced photograph of a sunset from wherever the sun is setting right now. Beautiful.

"Put your spatial perception into perspective with this 3d puzzle game. Assemble as many images from an abstract cloud as you can before time runs out." Re-orient the world until the perspective makes the image in the top right appear. Astounding.

"I’m excited to pass along the news that a team of dedicated Wing Commander fans and Origin Museum curator Joe Garrity, recently completed their 7-day archiving grind of almost 1 Terabyte of data at Mythic Studios." A remarkable slice of gaming history, and great to know that Mythic want to preserve all this stuff. More like this, please.

A Z-Code interpreter for the iPhone. Fantastic. If you have an iPhone: get this, and get Spider And Web. My work here is done.

Kevin Cornell has been working on a graphic novel adapatation of "The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button".

Hell yes.

"I am a fan of Ruby, and when I saw Red the framework that allows you to write Ruby and get JavaScript out the other end I was excited." By contrast, when I saw this, I wanted to punch somebody. Seriously guys, don't cross the streams.

"Michael Abrash's classic Graphics Programming Black Book is a compilation of Michael's writings on assembly language and graphics programming (including from his "Graphics Programming" column in Dr. Dobb's Journal)."

"Every inch of Braid is a painting; every game dynamic makes music. Unlike most platformers, Braid is forgiving; when you miss a jump, you simply back up time, and the visuals and audio cues associated with this mechanic are pleasing of themselves, aesthetically, while also supporting the underlying fiction." Harvey Smith on Braid.

Some really nice code to make decent sliders in jQuery without compromising the underlying HTML.

"That’s almost an entire day spent fighting one boss. And they still didn’t beat him. I feel physically ill just thinking about it. How did anyone ever think that’s good game design?" Scary.

"You read a lot (in incandescent threads devoted to the topic) about how ten dollars is the "sweet spot" for Live Arcade titles, and that may be the case, but we should entertain the idea that its creator wasn't trying to make an "Xbox Live Arcade Game." Perhaps he was trying to make a good game, the best game he could, and Microsoft's Broadening Initiative For Digital Content was the last thing on his mind." Tycho is pretty much right; the whole Braid-pricing issue isn't just a non-issue, it's maddeningly stupid, and people – including Microsoft – need to get over it.

"Narrative, like play, is one of the most basic tools we posses as human beings for coping with experience. And just as play can be fundamentally empowering, there is something distinctly empowering about using the tools of narrative to throw a net of meaning over our lives."

"The idea of there being these two separate things has to be forced away from our thinking. They are one team, which produce one product. Stick their desks together and see what happens." Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.

"The Tombs of Asciiroth is a free, open source game you can play right now in your browser. It has arcade, puzzle and exploration-style game play in an extensive world of font-based abstraction. If it looks a little old school, it's only because I've been trying to make this game since 1980. But other things kept getting in the way. Hope you have some fun with it."

Leigh Alexander publishes some conversations about Braid, and opens up the floor. Some good discussion here.

"an alternative way to represent time schedule tracking by stacking different lengths of Lego blocks as a way to convey different sequential time periods. stacking hourly rows on top of each other builds up the whole day, while color represents the different projects at hand. a whole week of time tracking is created by setting up a series of rainbow-colored days." Awesome.

"MadWorld will "spoil the family fun image" of the console, according to Mediawatch-UK, a British organisation hat campaigns for decency in television, games and films… "It seems a shame that the game's manufacturer have decided to exclusively release this game on the Wii," said Beyer. "I believe it will spoil the family fun image of the Wii."" And this has *what*, precisely, to do with banning the game? The fact it differs from other titles on the machine? Once again, pressure-groups jump the shark.

Looks nice.

"the comic books that are mature and have adult themes and are about emotional issues and are really powerful, those are underground? Those are the ones that should be the most mainstream because they apply to all people… I feel comics is a medium that hasn't found its whole potential because it got locked into a limited corner of popular culture. Games could be teetering on the edge of that." This is exactly the kind of thing I'm scared of right now.

"Finally Taking Over The World is interactive fiction programmed in brainfuck. It is completely written by hand without the use of any compiler or the like." IF written in brainfuck. Blimey.

"Kars does a lot of prototyping, which he explains in some detail. He also said some pretty interesting, and uncoventional, things about the relationship between design and understanding of, and involvement in, the technologies of implementation."

"Despite all this growth, however, Deering warns that current development costs, currently in excess of $10 million for major titles, are unsustainable, given that less than 3 out of 10 games actually recover their costs." I knew it was bad, but I'd never thought of it like that.

"Chatroom is a short game designed to simulate an IRC chatroom… The story is set in the year 2097, where your character is holed in an underground military bunker with only a working computer to use as means of contact with the outside world."

"[Titanic] was one of the worst experiences of my former life. Since I stepped into the shadows of the Hell House, things had been pretty easy. Then I found Chrono Trigger." Not the SNES RPG; no, a Chinese-knock-off NES version. Full of horrific brokenness, Derrick plays through it for us. It feels like pulling teeth.

"Titanic 1912, the RPG, made me cry blood, pluck my arm hairs, contemplate suicide and mumble incoherently in my cubicle as I held the fast-forward key." Chinese NES RPG based on Titanic. Great writeup; awful game.

"We’ve forgotten that our ability to engage with something is a gift inherent to human perception, and instead we’ve attempted to replace that form of engagement with a derivative technological form of interaction."

"This [plugin] is called Craken. In a nutshell it manages and installs rake-centric cron jobs. Coupled with Capistrano goodness it is the answer to your recurring task needs in Rails."

Wizwow makes a light-meter out of a length of string, which helps to learn how to estimate the power output of your small flash.

Race For The Galaxy gets reviewed on Play This Thing. This is probably next on my list of boardgames to get.

"Diaroogle helps you find quality public toilets from your mobile phone. It's for the discerning, on-the-go defecator who is brave enough to use a public bathroom, but still demands a hygienic and private bathroom experience. It is also a community authored database of New York toilets."

Matthew Kumar writing up Damián Isla's session from Develop, on the evolution of Halo's AI. It was excellent: technical and experiential enough all at once.

"Nintendo's staked its empire on the joys of mere motion a few times already, and won. Now, it's funny to remember how we doubted that this was a winning proposition." Pliskin on games-out-of-worlds versus worlds-out-of-play.

"if the player identifies with the protagonist and is motivated by the desire for the protagonist to "win" or "succeed", how can satisfying interactive tragedy exist? Won't the player always be trying to avoid actions that propel the story to an unhappy conclusion? What can an interactive tragedy offer to the player in place of traditional metrics of success?" Emily Short on making tragedy playable.

"Rmagick. It sucks, I know. We all hate it. But you have apps that depend on it and haven't changed that yet. So you need it installed for development. And you hate installing it." But, of course, there's a shortcut. It is linked here.

Pliskin on WarioWare as a pinnacle of "pure gaming" – stripping away gameplay and interaction to the rawer level of "what are the rules"?

Lovely little linkpost from Music Thing about the drum machine with the big boom.

How had I never seen this before? Beautiful little puzzle game: find the star in the level. Each level has a different mechanic. Each makes me smile.

Lovely little machinima about what happens when RED and BLU go out of business, and their somewhat psychotic employees have to go and get real jobs. "I am serious actor!"

"Fuelly is a site that lets you track, share, and compare your gas mileage. Simply sign up, add a car, and begin tracking your mileage." Looks interesting.

"Trance has brainwashed people into thinking it has the best DJs in the world". Entertaining Jack Chick parody. Stop DJ worship now!