Controlling two characters with one gamepad

Control each brothers with a different analog stick. I love the smell of video games when they look like handmade polished piece of work.

Bastion

game genre: voice-over game.

Braid

keywords: Irish folk music, fading-painting-style graphics, time control, XBox360/PC/Mac

Braid won the design innovation award at IGF 2006 (Independent Game Festival), so no need to spend too much time here acclaiming this magum opus... yet - and it's pretty sad - now that the PC/Mac version is out, I realize how Braid still didn't fully reached the widespread notoriety it diserves.

Part of that may come from the (erroneous) perception that this is "just" a glorified plateform game dressed with some fancy hand-drawn rendering. Well no, this is really not "just another plateform game".

Sure Braid uses common gameplay mechanics one saw in hundreds of mario-like games: a princess to be saved, ladders to be climbed, enemies to be scared of, and doors to be opened (through keys to be found). Sure.

But this is just the canvas underlying the true nature of Braid.

Braid is really in essence a time-based game.

Throughout the journey one is given 4 different time-bending capabilities.

When one of these manipulation techniques is picked-up for the first time you quickly figure out the way it works... but then, confronted with some tricky situation, and after a few puzzling situation, we find ourselves looking at this very same technique from a very different viewpoint. Merely starting to understand how bad one's brain is when it's time to think out of the box and almost feel it awaking as if it were an atrophied muscle.

Braid will make one us realize how time is a very simple yet powerful game-mechanic greatly underused in the video game [writting this in 2009, so who knows about the future].

Portals, Trigger-Zones, Shadow Projections, 3D Prespectives, Time ...etc. We're just starting to unveil how concepts we once thought basic in their usage are latently powerful in their nature; if only we'd dare look at them from a different (yet humble) viewpoint.

Enjoy Braid (and kudos for its creator).

Windosill

Currently playing Windosill, a flash-based game bundled inside a small executable.

Trying to give a taste of it...

Ok, it's a point & click (& drag) game where there's nothing to do but try to discover what kind of interaction hides behind each game scene.

No UI, no documentation, no rules; even the title screen is smartly embeded inside the game progression. Every object stands here for a good reason... or maybe not -- after all you are the only human in this place who can figure it out. All around there's only strange resting entities awaiting for you to make them "live" and interact (always in the most unexpected manner).

There's physics everywhere; rigid AND soft bodies so you can very naturally feel contacts, collisions and friction.

But the most impressive part comes from the refreshing aesthetic game design and artistic viewpoint the author injected in the whole process. By no way Windosill looks like anything you've already played before. It's perfectly tilted and shifted in just the right proportion to be defined without any doubt as a brilliant put-a-smile-on-your-face game.

Finally, the only regret comes from it not having been programmed in a faster language than flash, which can definitely not compete with low level compiled languages when it comes to skinned meshes and heavy physics (for now).

Result is a quite slow frame rate [15fps] on a 3 years old laptop... it hurts.

But still there's zero reason not to enjoy this masterpiece now (and buy the full version for only 3$ !).