Braid Review

     Braid is real close to getting a perfect score from me. It excels to the top of its class in every category. There is really only one reason I'm going to give it a less than perfect score. It's a puzzle platformer that is very similar, in set-up, at least, to Closure, the only game I've give a perfect score. And Closure is better than it. Braid's gameplay is at least equal to, and possibly even a bit better than, Closure's gameplay. But theme-wise (and I'm including music, visuals, and story in this category), Closure is the clear winner, despite Braid being extremely, extremely strong in this category as well. Closure's story and theming is perfect. Braid's is real close, but I prefer Closure's. And since they are very comparable games, both being 2d puzzle platformer games with ingenious mechanics and a similar feel to the movement and level structure, I have to compare them in my mind. And Closure is the clear winner for me. Not that their can't be 2 games in the same genre that both get perfect scores. It's just that these two games are very similar. That's why Braid is a Great Game, tier 2. 
     Once you beat Braid (which only takes a few hours), there a few things to do. A speed run mode unlocks that challenges you with completing certain levels within really strict time limits. I thought that was a bad idea, but when I tried it, I had a blast finding ideal routes and tricky time-manipulation tricks to shave time off my playthroughs. There is also a challenge to beat the whole game in 45 minutes, which I failed miserably at. It would take several hours of practice that I don't want to put in to get that time. There are also some very, very hidden secrets to find in the game that are worth the trouble, both for the experience and the little bit of light they shed on the story...
     Braid's graphics are also top notch. It basically looks like a moving, breathing painting the whole time. It's really gorgeous, one of the best looking 2d games I've ever seen. The music is also top-notch. It ranges from happy violins to disturbing ambiance, to lullabies and creepy vibes and back again. The music really follows the game's themes; the potential of youth, relationships, family, disappointment, restriction, horror, etc. That list goes on and on.

     Re-winding time is actually just the very tip of the iceberg. Each new set of levels introduce other time-bending powers that are just as fully realized and executed as re-winding time. One of these abilities stands out in particular as something I've never seen before. This concept is also so well implemented that it just works intuitively, just like the rest of the game. It's really great stuff. And I'm not saying what it is, because that would spoil the fun of discovery.

     Because you can re-wind time, puzzles often include elements that wouldn't work in other games, such as deadly surprises or the necessity for extremely precise movements. These aren't a problem, since you can instantly re-try a puzzle after dying or missing an opportunity, and you'll have the knowledge of exactly how enemies are going to move and what is going to happen since you have already experienced it. And then the mind-bending really starts. Braid's level design is sublime. The puzzles are ingenious and work perfectly. There are so many stand-out moments of brilliant creativity and excellent implementation. I'll give you a few simple examples. Some levels might require you to get to an area very quickly after completing a task. This can be done by going to where you need to end up first, then completing the task and re-winding at max speed until you end up back where you need to be. Other levels might give you mutually exclusive goals, but since you can re-wind, you can find a way to do both tasks. These are the most simple and general examples I can give without spoiling what you need to play to properly experience. It gets much more complex than that. Many levels end up being a mini mind trip on the level of a two-hour movie with a perfectly orchestrated mind-blowing twist. 

     Pressing and holding square re-winds time. You can do this as many times as you want and can rewind all the way back to the beginning of any individual level. It's really cool how there is almost no limitation to this very powerful ability. Death means nothing to you; if you fall in a bed of spikes or get bitten by an enemy and die, no problem, you just re-wind back to before you died. Tapping L1 increases the re-wind speed, and R1 decreases the speed. The only other controls are X to jump, circle to use switches, and the left analog stick or d-pad to move.

     Braid is very much in the vein of Mario, and makes no bones about throwing in many very direct references to that series (as well as nods to Donkey Kong and Banjo Kazooie, and probably others). You run around in small levels that are usually only a few screens long at the most. Your goal is to collect puzzle pieces, which are guarded by obstacles and enemies. In order to get to these puzzles, you'll often have to exploit Braid's main gameplay hook; re-winding time.

     It's a 2d puzzle platformer. In it, you play as Tim, a guy who is off in search of the princess whom he has had a falling out with. At least, that's what the game is about at the outset. Braid has a winding, ambiguous story told mainly through text excerpts that you read at the beginning of each set of levels. The story goes through themes more than it does a direct narrative. It's very well written and gets across all kinds of emotions and meaning. It's pretty remarkable, actually. And amazingly, the gameplay really gels perfectly with the themes and ideas put forth.

     I recently picked up Braid during a PSN flash sale for $.99. I can't think of a more clever intro than that, sorry. But don't worry, I thought of a great gimmick for the review.

Child of Eden Review

            Awhile ago I was considering buying Playstation Move just so I'd have an excuse to play Stranger's Wrath again since it got patched to add Move support. I couldn't quite justify it for just that game though. Luckily, my cousin got me Child of Eden for my birthday, so with two games waiting for me to try Move out on, I went ahead and pulled the trigger. After resisting some too good to be true offers on Craigslist, I was able to get an Eye, motion controller, and nav controller for $25 bucks on e-bay.

            Child of Eden is a sort-of sequel to Rez, the PS2 on-rails shooter that featured trippy visuals and synesthetic music. Child of Eden is also an on rails shooter. It progresses you through themed levels, and you don't control your motion at all. You can control where you look with a greater degree of freedom than I expected although, except for a few segments, in general you need to keep your focus straight ahead.

            These levels are not your traditional videogame locales. They are more like meta-physical representations of their theme. I don't want to give too much away about what the levels are like, but, for example, one is called “Beauty” and takes place partially in a giant garden and features lots of flowers and butterflies all floating out on a giant ocean. There are five of these levels, and in general they last about 10 minutes. It's an intense 10 minutes though. Although the levels do a good job of representing their theme, there are also lots of enemies that look like microscopic organisms or creatures of some kind.

            It's hard to describe the game's look and feel; there are so many trippy environments, backgrounds, textures, lighting effects, and great use of live action. Live action used to be kind of looked down on in videogames (at least by me), but in the age of HD video, the actress in this game fits right in with the graphics.

            The actress plays Lumi, a girl who died a long time ago who you are trying to sort-of recreate using data stored about her in cyberspace. My interpretation of the game is that each level has you searching through an archive to find out about and free certain aspects of her. It's really breathtaking when she suddenly shows up in a level after many minutes of trippy visuals and wildly fluctuating shapes and colors and sounds. You really feel like you've found her and need to free her.

            I played the game primarily with Move controls. There is a brief and super-effective calibration you must perform, and then the motion controls work brilliantly. Navigating the game's menu with the Move controller is really fun; you never have to use a button, just hover the reticle over what you want for a second and you will jump to where you want to go. The placement of the icons is designed very well, so it's really entertaining and makes you feel like you're in Minority Report or something.

            During gameplay, you control a reticle with the move controller. If you pass over an enemy, you will automatically lock on. You can lock on to up to 8 enemies at once, or you can lock on eight shots at an enemy if it can take more than one hit. Once locked on, you can fire your homing lasers by flicking your wrist. It worked best for me to jerk the controller toward my body and then toward the screen. If you do this in time to the music when you have eight targets locked in, you will get a multiplier bonus. To me, this is really hard to do on purpose. From what I've read, it's essential to scoring high, as you loose your multiplier if you don't continuously hit on the beat. There's usually not a visual representation of the beat on screen, and it also just feels weird to me to not shoot as soon as you are locked on since you need to kill enemies fast so they don't return fire. Still, in certain segments, you can get in a groove and build your multiplier up. For me, these moments were fleeting; I never really got the hang of shooting to the beat. You can also hold the trigger down to fire a rapid-fire laser which you aim with the reticle, which is useful and also necessary against certain enemies. There is also an expendable Euphoria attack you activate by pressing the move button, which shoots out like-a-hundred lasers. This acts like a bomb from a more traditional shooter; it usually kills all on-screen normal enemies, damages bosses, and clears out any bullets that were headed your way. You start levels with 1 Euphoria attack, but can find more ammo as you go.

            If there are bullets coming at you, a wide ring appears around your reticle with grooves in it that show you what direction the bullets are coming from. Bullets are a lot rarer than you might think, but it is essential to shoot them down with the rapid-fire laser as you only have five HP. The ring is really effective at pointing the bullets out to you, and makes for tense battles where you shoot away until you see that ring and then have to quickly swing around to knock down the bullets.

            Once you get past the first few levels, the game starts to really play with the dichotomy between the lock-on laser and the rapid-fire laser. You start to run into more enemies and bosses that require you to use one or the other, or a combination of both. For example, one brilliant boss fight makes you shoot down colored lights. One color is only damaged by homing lasers, the other by rapid-fire lasers. It makes you try to frantically lock-on to all the one color while avoiding useless lock-ons with the other color. There are a few other great uses of this concept, but I'll leave them for you to discover.

            I only tried using a traditional controller once, and instantly thought that it wasn't worth messing with since I had already played the game for several hours with move and was really used to it. Basically, you hold X to make the lock-on laser acquire targets as you move the reticle around with the left-analog stick. You release it to fire. R2 fires the rapid-fire laser, and circle uses your Euphoria attack. I'm sure the controller works fine, I was just already really used to using Move, so I didn't bother with it much.

            I want to call out level 4 as an especially stand-out moment in the game. I don't want to ruin it, so I won't even mention it's theme, but the level really nails that theme. So much cool stuff happens in that level, and it wordlessly conveys a lot of ideas about the concept like few works in any medium manage to do. It's also one of the most fun levels, and it ends in a great boss fight.

            Unfortunately, the game's music is not as great as it could be. Don't get me wrong, it has its moments of brilliance, but I feel that a game that puts as much emphasis on music as this game does needs to have a nearly flawless soundtrack (like Bit.Trip Runner 2 and Retro/Grade), and to me, there's quite a few missteps on the musical front. I know it's a matter of taste, and I've heard others say this is one of the best soundtracks in gaming, but to me only about 60%-70% of the music is really good. Some if it is really similar to music and sounds from the brilliant Lumines (which was made by the same designer), but unfortunately those sounds haven't aged too well to my ears. This game tries to be synesthetic by matching visuals to music, but doesn't succeed quite as much as it should.

            The game is fun, but doesn't have much appeal for me to re-play. To me, it was very experiential; something you experience and enjoy rather than game through over and over like an addictive platformer or shooter. It's more like the WalkingDead games ; you experience it and then there's not much point in continuing on unless you just want to see it again. There are tons of really hard to get score-chasing trophies in this game as well as a hard mode and a super-challenging bonus level, but none of these hold much appeal to me. I'm happy to have seen the game's play ideas and thematic imagery and sound, but I'm not feeling re-playing each level 12 times, which is what you would need to do at the very least to get all the trophies.

             Child of Eden is a beautiful game with some cool gameplay ideas. It's fun to run through it and see each level's theme play out and the gameplay changes and differentiations that go along with it. But once you're done, the multitude of post-game content is not that appealing, as it all involves re-playing the same 5 levels endlessly until you are perfect at it, and would require that you master the wonky art of firing homing lasers to the beat. I have to mark the game down for its music too. If it had a really killer soundtrack, it would be a much better experience. Fortunately the soundtrack isn't bad, and there are a handful of awe-inspiring combinations of sight and sound. But you can tell that the whole game was supposed to echo those moments, and unfortunately the soundtrack fully can't keep up with that idea. Child of Eden is a Mediocre Game, Tier 3.

  

         

Burger Time World Tour Review

            I don't really know about the original Burger Time. From what I understand from my sister-in-law who has played it recently at an arcade, it is pretty similar to World Tour. I do know that when I recently did my PS3 Bucket list, I watched a video review of it and I thought it looked pretty cool, so I added it to the list. Then I heard on twitter from Nick Sutner, who works at Playstation, that Burger Time World Tour would be leaving PSN for good. I immediately purchased it so that I wouldn't miss out on it. I wasn't planning on playing it for awhile, but since I had to put it on my hard-drive and I don't like games to sit un-played on my hard drive for too long, I went ahead and gave it a whirl. I don't know if this review is really useful to anyone as the game isn't available anymore, at least not on PSN. Maybe it's on other platforms or will re-appear sometime in the future.

            In Burger Time World Tour, you run through 2d levels. Actually, the levels are round; they behave just like any 2d game, but they are rendered in 3d and they connect to themselves so that you can run around in a circle forever in most of them as if you are on the outside edge of a merry go round. This interesting idea also gives you a great sense of vision of the level as you can see the other side of the level behind where you currently are. It's an effect I've never seen before, and it's awesome. You can really plan out where you need to go because you can see the whole level. If the level was in regular 2d, it would be too big to see all on one screen. The levels also have a great sense of scale; some of them reach high into the sky, and the graphics and focus really make you feel like you are climbing up to the heavens.

            The goal of each level is the same; make a certain number of burgers. The burgers are huge; each layer is probably 8ft. across and burgers can be up to 12 ft tall or mayber more. Each layer of the burger (such as the meat, the veggies, and the bun) are typically seperated in vertical columns. You must traverse a series of ladders, platforms, obstacles, and enemies and run over each layer of the burger, which drops that layer down to the next lower level. You quickly learn that you need to start at the top because if you leave the bun up at the top you'll have to go back and get it and push it down through all the layers to get it down to the rest of the burger. Normally a piece only drops one level when you run over it, but if you drop it while an enemy is stopped on it, it will drop two levels, and if there are two enemies on it, it will drop 4 levels. You usually accomplish this by hitting enemies with pepper to stun them while they are on the ingredient. The enemies are all anthropomorphized foods (such as sausage, eggs, and habaneros), and using them to drop the burger pieces will also cook them into the burger, which causes it to become a specialty burger that gives you more points based on what you put in it.

            You run with the left analog stick or the d-pad. X is jump, square is attack with your pepper, and circle uses a power-up if you have ran over one. Triangle is used to pick-up and throw enemies when they are stunned. Throwing an enemy at another enemy will stun it, and if you run over a burger piece while holding an enemy, you will drop it with the piece and get all the usual bonuses.

            There are 40 levels. They start simple and get quite large and complex. Each of the country-themed levels add lots of variety in the form of new enemies with unique attacks (like hot peppers that explode when stunned or carrots that can drill down through levels without using ladders), new obstacles (like platforms that break when you use them, elevators, and fires that go on and off), and power-ups (like an energy drink that makes you invincible and super-fast or the rocket that lets you fly for a few seconds). There is a ton of variety and the game stays fun the entire time. In one level you might be going through maze-like corridors and up and down ladders to get each burger piece. In another there might only be one path, but it's really dangerous. One level might be swarming with enemies, and another might be filled with deadly traps and obstacles. No two levels feel the same. Each world ends in a boss fight against a giant foe or unique enemies. You still build burgers in these levels, but they have a few unique twists to them due to the boss characters attacking you from the background.

            The way the game gives you a star-rating at the end of each level seems a little off. When I did my run-through to get the trophy for beating every level without dying (as you usually have a few lives and start over from checkpoints if you die), I beat each level decently-under the par time and without dying, yet I received star-ratings as low as 2 and as high as 5 even though I couldn't perceive any significant difference in my performance. That's why I don't really feel an interest in trying to get the star-ranking trophies; I don't have a clear sense of what I could improve on, and trying over and over again to micro-manage my clear time and points doesn't seem fun. Beating all the levels without dying is really challenging and fun, however. Some levels will require many tries to accomplish this, but it stays fun even when you do the same level over and over, perfecting your route and your response to enemy patterns. The only bummer is the long load time whenever you re-start a level.

            The music is pretty cool. It's bouncy, upbeat stuff that has a few nods to old-school 8-bit sounding game music. This is true of the sound effects as well; some are pretty modern sounding, others sound like they were ripped right out of 1982, which is a really cool touch.

            Burger Time World Tour doesn't stick out in my mind as some super-awesome game, but I had a lot of fun with its frantic gameplay and interesting take on the presentation of a 2d game. It's a Great Game, Tier 3. Now, where is the nearest 5 Guys????