Tetris is the first video game I was unable to shut off on command.  Players of Sid Meier’s Civilization are familiar with the problem of “one more turn”, similar to the bookworm’s “one more page”.  Tetris was my first “one more turn” game.  I first played Tetris when I was five or six and received my Gameboy for my birthday or Christmas.

Don’t worry, this blog isn’t about to become some weird fan tribute blog to Braid.  It’s more of a case of trying to make sense of the game I’ve just played.  There’s really no reason to make sense of The Beatles Rockband.  You are one of The Beatles playing music.  There’s nothing to “get”.  But finishing Braid has left me with more questions than answers.  Braid has the potential to leave you frustrated in the same way you may end up frustrated at a particularly dense painting where you see that there is a table of objects, but can’t figure out the significance of the objects.  It just looks like a cluttered table until the docent explains that the book with a skull on it represents that man will never understand his world until he dies.

warning:  The following contains many spoilers about Braid.  I, personally, feel that your enjoyment of the game will be greatly reduced by reading this ahead of time.  You have been warned!

I finished Braid last night.  I did cheat a little.  Of the 60 possible puzzle pieces, I used a walkthrough to get about 10 of them.  Each of the ones that I used the walkthrough for (and I did not do this until I had spent a good chunk of time trying everything I had learned up to that point and even afterwards (since you could revisit worlds) were puzzles I would have NEVER solved.  For example, the puzzle piece that is accessed by moving around the giant replica of the puzzle in the level would never, ever have occurred to me.  Someone of a certain type of mind would surely have realized that the puzzles would not exist in the world if they did not have a purpose, but I could not figure this one out.  And the fact that most of the puzzles are one-offs means that you never do this again.

That a game like Braid can exist is a statement on where video games are as an art form with a well-established history and canon.  To make a parallel in the paint world:  without a long canon of traditional paintings of tables with fruit and bread, people wouldn’t have really understood the “parody” or “remix” of a Cubist rendition of such a painting.  In the same way, Braid is most enjoyable to those of us who have been playing video games for the past 20 years, growing up with Super Mario Bros. as our first video game experience.  In fact, Braid does indeed make a few callbacks to this classic game which has almost become a scripture to us.  Any game that allows users to design levels (eg Little Big Planet) cannot exist for more than a femptosecond before at least four people have recreated Super Mario Bros. World 1-1.  Braid does nothing so brash and that’s where the game design genius begins to show.  The game designer does not ape Mario, but hints at it here and there.  One can almost see the developer giving you a knowing look and a nudge in the ribs.  “Look here, I’ve made this or that subtle reference.”  I don’t want to ruin it by speaking of it even though this game has been out for ~ a year already.  It would ruin the delight of experiencing it.

I finally finished Final Fantasy IX.  Took me a little over 30 hours.  I didn’t do all the side quests, but that’s more of Dan’s thing.  The characters I played with the most ended up at about level 52 - if that tells you anything.  Except for a little bit when I was trying to learn some skills, I didn’t do any grinding.  That’s the big difference from when I played Final Fantasy VI as a kid.  I don’t have quite as much time.  Whenever I got to a complicated dungeon, I consulted an FAQ.  So what are my final thoughts?  Here’s a rambling, stream-of-conciousness review of the game after finishing it up.

After playing Final Fantasy 9 for a few days, here are my first impressions.

• the graphics are a little distracting - it’s kinda like an uncanny valley thing.  It’s not quite as nice as the new stuff, but better than the SNES graphics.  But there are a lot of closeups because it was state of the art when it first came out.
• There appears to be a lot of slapstick with Steiner.  But then again, there’s always some slapstick in Final Fantasy games.
• Like pretty much any Final Fantasy game, after the first disc, I’m still not sure what the plot is.  Just like anime/manga, the plot is usually not evident in the first few hours.  After playing for just about eight hours I still didn’t know what was going on.
• At first I thought I had acquired an airship VERY early for a Final Fantasy game, but then quickly lost it.

I have a lot of love for Squaresoft (well, now they’re SquareEnix), despite the fact that I’ve played relatively few of their games.  I think Chrono Trigger and Final Fantasy 6 (originally released as Final Fantasy 3 in the US) are the pinnacle of their jRPG work.  I’ve also played Final Fantasy VII, Final Fantasy VIII, and Chrono Cross.  I didn’t really enjoy Final Fantasy 7 nearly as much as everyone else.  I think it’s partly out of spite.  All these new jRPG fans think that Final Fantasy 7 is the greatest Final Fantasy game ever.  But they’re never played the SNES Final Fantasies.  Nothing is better than Final Fantasy 6 story-wise.  And Chrono Trigger is unmatched for the amount of differences your actions could make to the game.  When I finally got a Playstation in college, I was lucky enough that all the Final Fantasies released up to that time had become “greatest hits” and were available for $20.  I bought them all.  I finally got to play Final Fantasy 7.  I had tried before on our computer, but it just wasn’t up to snuff.  Even owning it on Playstation, it took me two attempts to get through it thanks to real life getting in the way.  When I finally finished it, I just didn’t see why everyone thought it was so awesome.  It might partially have to do with the fact that I had a 2 month gap in the middle of my playing the game, but I just didn’t get what made it so amazing.

A few days ago, I saw the heavy boots story on digg and shared it with Dan.  To quickly sum up, in case the web page dissapears into the great bit bucket in the sky, a physics major was told by his philosophy TA that the astronauts on the moon didn’t float away because they had heavy boots on.  That prompted Dan to share this post with me again.  After leaving a Dr Horrible reference, I started thinking about this.  And I came to see Final Fantasy as one of the largest exercises in suspension of disbelief.  The most egregious aspect is with the weapons.  Because of what is often a very tedious menu screen, I usually do not sell back all of the old, useless weapons back to the shop when I buy new ones.  So, technically, my characters are running around a HUGE world map trying to save the world, while at the same time lugging around hundreds of pounds of useless weapons.  Quite ridiculous, no?  On top of this they may have as many as 99 tents, 99 sleeping bags, and pretty much 99 of any item.  Think back to the smallest you could ever fold a sleeping bag.  Now, imagine going hiking through the woods with 99 of them split up over, at most, four of you.  So, it’s 25 each for three of you and 24 for some lucky bastard - probably the girl in the short skirt with the large breasts who’s always complaining of back problems.  This is where gameplay mechanics start to mess with your mind too much if you dn’t suspend your disbelief.  Because sleeping bags are not prophelactics, you can use them over and over.  But the game makes you discard one each time you use it.  Of course, within the game thsi makes sense because you’d otherwise be able to heal up to full every time you were in the map screen.  I never questioned it as a kid.  I was just glad to have a tent or sleeping bag to heal my characters.  But when you think about it, it doesn’t make very much sense.  This, of course, naturally leads to the other problem with SquareEnix jRPGs - passage of time.  For obvious reasons (mostly related to grinding), time doesn’t pass in these games unless you’re at a milestone moment.  So while there’s a meteorite coming towards earth or some jerk has decided to use earth magic or magical-people magic to destroy the world tomorrow, you can sleep in an inn over and over.  And while the game never explicitly states you stayed in the inn overnight (except when it’s part of advancing the story - clever, clever they were in those old SNES RPGs) it does often imply it, with transition effects that seem to suggest you were there overnight.

As 2008 has proven - draconian digital restrictions management (DRM) does not stop people from illicitly using computer games.  Spore, whose DRM was so bad they got ratings bombed on Amazon.com, was the most pirated game of 2008.  The DRM caused hassles for legitimate users and did nothing to stop illicit use.  This is always the case.  Ever since the beginning of DRM on video games there have been people getting around it.  These DRM schemes are not cheap.  They are licensed from companies who tell the video game companies that this is the only way to protect their games.

First I updated Wine to 1.0.0 (It didn’t work properly on 0.94) on Ubuntu.  In there I have D as the CDROM drive. So I typed wine d:\install.exe  This installed just fine

Here’s what happened with 0.94 when I first started this post:

But the first time I clicked to play it, it did not work. The screen just went blank. When I restarted X, edited the registry keys as it says to do on the Wine site and started it up, this time it started up When I tried to play the first campaign it froze up Gnome so I restarted X again Wine FAQ says the movies folder should be renamed for stability reasons