Much has been made of the fact that games are not the same as movies.  Despite any apparent similarities, they have different goals; they work different ways. They cannot be evaluated using the same criteria.

(Thus the indignation over Roger Ebert’s game-related comments. Electronic gaming’s would-be defenders somehow combine smug disdain with a curious undercurrent of desperation in their rejection of Ebert’s scorn. Yeah, sure, Ebert doesn’t “know” games. Nor need he: the guy’s job is to know movies, and he’s spectacular at it, a necessary consequence of which is that he’ll never see gaming except in terms of how it fails to live up to the standards of cinema. Stop wasting his time and ours with litanies of refutations and counter-examples.)

Read the rest of this entry »

Warning: There will be no discussion of stars in this review.

On a base level, an obvious comparison between videogames is available: Braid is to time as Portal is to space. It is capable of—no, it actively changes the player’s perspective and fosters new ways of thinking about the world. For this experience alone, Braid is well worth playing, but it further reveals itself to be intricately more (or, you may feel, less) than the sum of its parts. I reacted, as I find myself doing with most any work that so requires interpretation, on an intellectual more than an emotional level, and yet Braid is a very emotional work. It may take time to see it, as it did for me, but I believe this to be an earnest and sincere expression.

Upon first experiencing the final action-puzzle event, I was inspired with the presumably intended awe and horror but also rage. If it weren’t for that meddlesome, distracting text framing the gameplay, this lovely, clever, unassuming platformer could have accomplished a simple and elegant feat of storytelling. Instead, I felt, it is wrapped in convoluted, analytical prose that stinks of pretense (and I am not one to use that word lightly). Let me describe the changes necessary to create my ideal version of Braid: No cloud rooms. That’s it. No cloud rooms with text (or alt-text) about Tim leaving his woman to see a movie and then invent nuclear weapons. Just get rid of it.

What’s left?

Read the rest of this entry »