I wonder if they have a line item for how much they “make” off the currency exchange?
Or maybe they’re bleeding money because they set price points back before the US dollar was trashed and public perception doesn’t allow them to readjust gracefully.
Anecdotal, I know, but I had no idea what Braid was until last night when I saw the title screen in a screenshot on GAF. I liked what it looked like so I decided to get it, and suddenly it was (no kidding) a quarter to three.
I didn’t know about any of this hype/acclaim and controversy surrounding Blow until I read this thread, and I think Braid may have replaced MGS4 as my current front runner for Game of the Year. I love the look, the tone, the music, the twist to the now-pedestrian time reversal mechanic, and the whole package. Yes, there’s a little touch of “GAMEZ R ART” pretentiousness to it, mainly in the story text, but I can forgive that in the context of a side-scrolling platformer that surprises and delights me in every new stage.
I don’t think anyone answered this, but yes, world 2 is the first world. The overworld is world 1. Perhaps!
Off topic, but it seems like there is a small but apparent trend to declare a diminutive or indie game as your front runner for Game of the Year. I remember Portal and Fate got a lot of that. Charm and polish seem to go a very long way.
To be fair, there are about half a dozen upcoming games that are entirely likely to dethrone Braid. However, it’s worth noting that one of the biggies is LittleBigPlanet, which, as you note, traffics heavily in charm and polish.
In an era of large-budget productions, putting a little love into the game seems to make a difference, maybe?
Maybe just a little soul, because STALKER has to be the most uncharming and unpolished game in many years. :)
I agree that charm and polish go a long way (I’d add innovation in there too) but I also think there is some allure to picking an unexpected or slightly off beat game as one’s Game of the Year. While any such discussion is premature of course, I do think that sometimes people in the gaming press choose lesser known titles for that honor in order to stand out themselves or perhaps, seen another way, espouse the merits of a game that has gotten lost in the noise. I don’t doubt that these individuals truly love the games, but I also suspect they like standing apart from those that pick games like Halo 3 or Gears of War.
I agree on the prose bit - something seems a bit off. I get the point though, and the way the text is laid out means you’re not forced to sit through and read it if you don’t want to.
Fantastic game. In the first world (2?) I was confused by what exactly made the time-travel mechanic different from being a flashy quicksave/load system. Then I got to the glowy green objects in world two (3?) and it suddenly clicked for me.
I had the misfortune to reread Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintainence recently, which has unfortunately undermined my ability to talk meaningfully about this, but what STALKER and Portal and Braid have (I didn’t play Fate), I think, and what most mainstream commercial games don’t have, is Quality – in the ZatAoMM sense. Basically that whole book is devoted to explaining that one word, but I guess I’ll gloss it for games as the product of a dedication to doing it right and doing a good job, while not just churning out another game where you run around and kill people. I guess I could put the last bit as “doing it with a purpose”. (I’m not sure I’ve quite expressed well enough what I meant, e.g. to indicate that the HL2 episodes don’t exhibit this quality to me.)
I suspect in games it’s just too hard for a larger team to achieve the same level of quality, and small teams tend to produce smaller games, which explains the trend. (Of course 95% of small games are still crap!)
STALKER is unpolished, I imagine, because it’s too large a game for the team on it to achieve that level of quality, but I get the sense that’s what the team was trying for, at least.
(full disclosure: i worked on Braid at the very end, but the Quality was there when I got there. fuller disclosure: i’m also friends with Jon.)
I was also implying more of what Steve was saying, that there seems to be a rush to jump out with exclamations of devotion, yet sometimes the GOTYs don’t really stand the test of time after the initial enthusiasm. Of course, that is true for some mainstream titles, and I am reading way too much into a simple side comment, especially since 2008 hasn’t been that great this year anyway (yet).
Don’t mean to step on any toes either since I do the same thing, I was just wondering if anyone else noticed that tendency.
Oh sure, I could believe there’s a tendency for people to pop out the ‘GOTY’ phrase as shorthand for ‘really awesome (Quality) but not actually the kind of thing I might pick as GOTY’. But I haven’t done a careful study of which sorts of people make the remark and what they go on to actually pick as GOTY, so maybe it’s not hyperbolic at all.
Another way to look at it is which games we’ll still be talking about in 10 or 20 years. If you pick your GOTY by voting in groups, you’ll often water down away from the critical darlings, but I think the critical darlings are more likely to stand the test of time. (You can see some of this by looking at Academy Award best pictures from bygone years.)
I just solved World 2. I think by the time you accomplish that, it will start to become clear why it is called World 2.
I’m extremely impressed with this so far. I know I’ve only seen the beginning, but the brain-bending quality of this is fantastic in the early going.
But really, what’s the difference? It’s not the same as if reviewers were taking the game and attributing all kinds of meta-stuff to it that weren’t the intention; that gets old and tiresome quickly. But this is a case of the developer saying “I meant to do this” and then presenting a game that tries to do that, along with his own commentary. The game and the hype around it are all part of the same package.
Like checker said, it’s basically marketing, and that doesn’t need to sound as cynical as it does. Word-of-mouth isn’t as powerful as we like to believe, so whatever gets a work some more exposure is fine as far as I’m concerned. Whether it’s putting “Sid Meier” or even “American McGee” on it, or making it a sequel to an existing franchise, or talking about games as art in lectures and on blogs: it all gets the game noticed by people who wouldn’t have otherwise.
If the game sucked, it would get dismissed, no matter how many people went on about how artistic it was. But it sounds like it doesn’t suck (I can’t comment on that, since I’ve never played it). I see “expresses itself through game mechanics and symbolism” as the same as “massive terrain deformation” on a game box or “interactive DVD menus” on a DVD slip case. They’re bullet points which’ll get me to try the game out. I can only speak to whether the game really is all that after I’ve played it, so anything that gets me to play it is fair game.
I don’t think that argument has legs. Again, I haven’t played the game so I can’t say for myself. But pointing at Edge (and Eurogamer) isn’t going to convince anyone that an “indie darling” “artistic” game is actually any good. They eat that shit up.
I never did read the book, oddly enough, but I understand what you’re getting at, I think. There are games that have tremendous production values, where every little detail seems completely perfect and polished. Then there are those games were you can just tell the amount of passion and creative energy that went into them, how much love the creator had for them. To me Loco Roco would be a recent example of a game like that. World of Goo looks to me like it will be in that category. Before all is said and done, I might put Braid in that category is well.
The polish and the size are closely related. There’s a lot to be said for an extremely brief experience that’s perfect all the way through. Big, ambitious projects are unavoidably going to have detracting flaws.
There’s also the factor that as an employed adult, my gaming time is limited and my money essentially isn’t, so I measure the cost of a game in hours rather than dollars nowadays. If a game can deliver to me an experience and message in just a few hours, I’m going to like it much more than a game that takes twenty to deliver the same.
This is my bias showing, though. I prefer the kind of games you play, pay attention to, and are done with after one playthrough, like a book or movie. It’s interesting that you list Portal and Fate together, because Portal is the kind of contained experience I’m talking about, while Fate’s goal is to provide background noise for your mind, like knitting or folding laundry. I really don’t mean this derisively; you zone out while doing it, relax, think about other things, and feel the satisfaction of getting something done. When I’m stressed out from work or whatnot, I appreciate that kind of experience, I just don’t consider it edifying.
Off topic again.
I’ve heard this many times and completely empathize because I’m the same way, but I think I just realized why I’ve gotten so angry at certain extremely popular games in my backlog and personally rate them so low: it’s because I feel like they needlessly waste my time.
I played Mafia recently and wanted to break one of the developers because it didn’t include a quicksave, and the jouncy physics in Trackmania occasionally made me want to throw my controller at the screen, something I haven’t felt since the dark days of bad NES games. The twist is that I probably only played each game for 20 hours and wasted far more time on the decidedly average NWN main campaign, for example. I’d rate both as “decent,” but in the former case they are superb games docked for frustrating me, whereas the NWN OC was never going to be more than average, even with less time spent.
I know I’m going way down this tangent in a thread about a seemingly nice game, but you helped me realize that in forming the equation of how much satisfaction I get from a game, the hours spent factor into it more than merely the absolute value. Thanks. :)
Blizzard may disagree with that. :)
The epiphany involved in solving World 2 was worth $15 alone. I went on to solve World 3 without much trouble. World 4 makes me cry, and I can barely get out with one puzzle piece.
Whoa, now I’m afraid things will go backward in my browser when I move the mouse to the left.
Absolutely. During testing I came across that as much by accident as experimentation, and that was one of the best ‘aha!’ moments I’ve ever had in a game.