David Hellman

Just a heads up to collectors that the GameStop near the downtown Berkeley BART station has an edition of Jaws Unleashed that is very rare indeed:

These pictures were taken last Friday, but there’s a slim chance it’s still there.

The soundtrack to Braid was assembled from existing compositions by several talented musicians. Jon collected the songs from various albums, but now you can download all the songs that were in Braid as a single album. This collection also includes two newly created remixes by Jon Schatz.

Check out the Braid soundtrack at Magnatune.

And here’s some more information about the artists, like which albums these tracks are originally from.

On the eve of Braid’s Windows PC release, here’s a new trailer. For the innocent, it will spark wonder. For others, it will deepen the lines of bittersweet remembrance.

You can buy Braid for PC at Greenhouse, Steam, Impulse or Gamers Gate. All these stores will make Braid available some time on April 10.

The PC version has the same content as the xbox version, except that you can play with a keyboard or an Xbox 360 controller. (Finally those blocks in the bathroom mean something.) Also, it has the level editing tools used by Jon and me. So you can make your own Braid levels and stuff. Jon wrote a little about that here.

More info may be available at www.braid-game.com and Jonathan Blow’s blog.

As recently as yesterday, I enjoyed a scoff over the inanity of twitter, the service that enables peoploids across the internet to broadcast the minutia of their lives. It’s a step beyond myspace, beyond youtube, elevating indiscriminate self-aggrandizement to a whole other level of compulsion. This was my crotchety opinion less than 24 hours ago. But as I type this, the monster truck wheels of technological and cultural progression are bearing down on me. For the first time, I am about to tweet.

This is happening because I met the Area 5 guys for ice cream yesterday. I observed how they used twitter not just to keep up socially, but also to follow the work of friends and colleagues. When Ryan O’Donnell declared that he never checks blogs anymore — he just uses twitter to find reading material — I visualized myself in Montana, calcifying in the strata of an exposed cliff.

So: http://twitter.com/davidhellman

My plan is to use it to announce blog stuff, or other things I’m doing. Professional stuff. That’s the plan! We’ll see how long it takes for laundry updates to start. And I’m looking forward to finding out how it changes my reading habits, changes my awareness of what friends are up to, etc. Hey, we are living in the future, and new systems are needed to keep track of all the crazy futuristic things going on.

Just a few days after my first appearance on At 1UP, I got to return alongside two intellectual giants of the indie games scene. Jason Rohrer is a pioneer of the so-called “art games” category — games which deliberately carry personal or philosophical statements in their logic and behavior — and Eskil Steenberg is a man creating a Massively Multiplayer Online game entirely by himself, using his own tools.

I had just seen both of their talks in the Indie Games Summit (where I snapped these photos), and leapt at the chance to share a table with them for an hour. In particular, I was very keen to pick Eskil’s brain, but it turns out it’s very good at picking itself, as one should deduce from his work.

Directly download the mp3 here.

Or subscribe to At 1UP on iTunes.

EDIT: I just listened to it … You might wonder, especially towards the end, if a producer sped up the tape to fit into a time constraint. But no, everyone was really talking that fast.