David Hellman

Yesterday’s joint McCain-Palin interview with Catie Couric inspired this drawing. Hoping to overwrite memories of Palin’s terrifyingly inept performance before Couric last week, McCain shows up as the defensive daddy. Watch him bristle at Couric’s questioning, and obliquely refer to her as a “quote: expert.” Palin beams with relief and gratitude when McCain intervenes on her behalf, repeating one of his phrases (”pizza place”) under her breath like it just clarified for her the whole crazy situation.

More than anything else, it gave me an image of an aggrieved parent-student meeting in a principal’s office.

Steve Napierski of Dueling Analogs riffs on the implications of time travel.

The Braid Graphics Briefcase has some new additions!

• Animated GIFs! As seen above, these can be highly creepy. And very annoying as forum avatars!

• Animation Stacks! These are the original Photoshop files for all the characters, exactly as I delivered them to Jon for importing into the game! Every frame of every character.

• Level Icons! The black-and-white woodblock-looking icons that introduce every level are also available.

There have been a lot of calls for different-sized wallpapers, and I still intend to get around to that. Although if anyone wants to take the wallpapers that are already available and modify them to satisfy those requests, that would help me!

Check it all out here.

“They got this game, right, for people who smoke, or people who drink, like if you drink beer and you get drunk, or you smoke weed and you get high … anything, like if you just be getting fucked up. They got this game, right … this shit called Braid. Watch this shit! It about this little guy in a suit, and he walk around. Ain’t even got no point to the game, you just walk around jumping on shit. It look like Mario in the future.”
- Soulja Boy

Greatest game review of all time?

Thanks to Nick Suttner and Matt Chandronait for the tip!

Last time, we looked at Tim’s house, full of doors to time-warping worlds. Each of those doors leads to a place in the clouds, called the “world and story screen.” It has two main features: 1. podiums presenting books with pieces of story, and 2. doors to the various puzzles of each world.

The way the story is presented in Braid is rather unique. As Tim runs across the screen, he passes a series of podiums. As he arrives at each one, it glows and its fragment of story appears overhead. Because the podiums lie in a path the player must necessarily cross, it’s assured that all players will be aware of the prose, although it’s easily skipped simply by declining to linger before any podium.

Beyond the podiums sits a row of doors. Initially only the first one is accessible; in time, all provide entry to their respective domains. Each door leads to a small area containing a handful of puzzles embodying the unique theme and time mechanic of their world.

Here is the world and story screen for World 2, from some time in 2006. (Pardon the low-quality jpeg.) All of these graphics are placeholder. The doors and podiums and cloudy floor were all created by Jonathan Blow. The background is a photograph which he either took himself or stole from flickr (just guessing). The Tim sprite is by Edmund Mcmillen.

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When I was in Seattle for PAX, Casey Muratori (whose game, Sushi Bar Samurai, was one of the PAX10 this year) and I checked out the Seattle Underground Tour to catch a glimpse of the old city. Unfortunately, the tour guide was preoccupied being a comedian and neglected to explain much of the mystery around us. Is Seattle Underground really just some useless basement property cannily repurposed as historical attraction??

Casey wrote up the “adventure” on his blog. He draws a thought provoking parallel between Seattle Underground and hand-holdy game design like that found in recent Zelda games.

Read Casey’s account here. Photos included!

Gary Hodges of Joystick Division called me over the weekend with some questions. This week he’s publishing the results in three installments. I was very impressed and flattered by the amount of research he’d apparently done.

Part 1 is here, and concerns my upbringing.

Part 2 is here, and concerns Braid.

Part 3 is here, and is of grave concern to all.

Remember the first Zelda? Yeah! That was a cool game.

These old guys would give you clues. You’d walk into a room and he’d be there, and just spit out two lines. Never with any further explanation. It was cryptic, sure, but we liked it that way! More to think about. More mystery!

Like I said, brevity. Dropping the article, here.

Well, the Zelda series has come a long way since the mid-eighties. Last year The Phantom Hourglass was released for the Nintendo DS. It got good reviews. I’m only just getting around to it. I used to be a big Zelda fan, but the Gamecube installments forced me to confront certain grim truths. I’d grown, yes, but Zelda had changed as well. A series that started out rugged, minimal, nonlinear and downright mystical had become crowded, cloying, authoritarian and formulaic.

As Tim Russert liked to say, “Let’s watch!”

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Russian gaming magazine Strana Igr continues to publish The Art of Braid in Russian. With permission from the editors, here are the first three installments.

Part I (PDF format, in Russian)

Part II (PDF format, Russian)

Part III (Russian PDF)

Great googly-moogly, will you look at this.

Check out more incredible work by the Etch-A-Sketchist!