Super Time-Travelling Mario Brothers?

Jeff Gerstmann, former big-time reviewer and editorial director over at GameSpot, has a write up of Braid over at his new site, Giant Bomb. Braid seems pretty lame if you just read the plot and look at the screens. It's a classic "go save the princess" game being released for XBox Live Arcade and for the PC. It looks just like Super Mario Brothers, except for the lack of Italian plumbers with enormous mustaches. But the resurgence of classic game plots and looks isn't what makes Braid interesting. Not by a long shot.

If you really want to strip it all down to its barest surface, Braid is an homage to Super Mario Bros. You jump on top of creatures to kill them, big plants pop in and out of pipes, there’s a castle with a flagpole at the end of the world, and so on. Of course, if that were all the game did, it wouldn’t be anything special. In fact, it’d probably be actionable. Braid’s big difference is that you have control over time itself. That lets you rewind your mistakes to prevent death, its first useful feature. But it only took a few minutes for me to realize that Braid isn’t primarily a platformer. It’s a puzzle game. You’re eased into the time controls, but each world makes changes to how things work. For one example, you’ll eventually encounter certain enemies, keys, doors, or other pieces of the world that are covered in sparkles. This denotes that they don’t move backwards when you rewind time. So you’ll need to account for that. From there, things get much trickier and very entertaining.
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Sounds pretty cool, huh? I really think that these are the types of games that you're going to see many developers really pushing for. How many times can you really play the same shooter over and over? It's nice that many FPS developers are finally coming around to the blindfire mechanic. One has to wonder if that would have happened without Cliffy B using Kill.Switch as an inspiration for Gears of War. Perhaps games such as Braid and Portal will be the inspiration needed for game developers to try and really think outside of the box to come up with new ways to play. New styles to use, and new challenges to keep players interested.