Skip to 28 seconds in. Sure, there are way too many Super Mario Brothers covers, but that theme is amazing as is seeing this performance of the theme on an ancient Chinese hyper flute. The instrument looks like something out of a science fiction movie.

There was a time when I loved video games.  I subscribed to EGM and EGM2.  I trolled the nascent World Wide Web looking for video game news.  I read IGN religiously.  The most powerful systems out there were the Nintendo 64 and the Playstation.  Then I discovered girls and dropped the subscriptions.  Most of the video games of that time period were still very arcade-y in nature.  Or they were platformers like Mario or Tomb Raider that had the flimsiest excuse for a plot.  Yo, the princess got kidnapped again.  Run through a bunch of levels to get to her.  No exposition or reason for anything going on.  You just needed to complete these tasks to unlock the final boss fight.  Of course, games were starting to have cut scenes between levels to keep the narrative going.  And I remember the great FMV flame wars that caused.  Were you just working to unlock expository videos?  This was better than the Mario case, but there was still just a small correlation between what you were doing to get through the level and what was going on in the story.  The biggest exception was the movie tie-in game, but those tended to have gameplay elements that were full of suck.

This is a game I have been waiting for ever since I played New Super Mario Brothers on my borrowed Nintendo DS.  This is the purity of Mario.  Screw all this 3D stuff.  Yeah, it rocks to have a 3D space to run around in, but that’s not Mario.  Mario is a side scroller and its charm comes out best that way.  Or maybe I’m just an old codger nostalgic for what I grew up with.  It’s probably the latter given that the Mario theme in New Super Mario Brothers Wii (NSMBW henceforth), a modified version of the original with a little “ah” a capella thrown in, excites me in ways I cannot express. Apparently it also excites the goombas and turtles because they do a little dance move during the a capella parts.

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.

For years I had been saying that I would not buy an iPod product.  After all, they sell music in the iTunes music store with DRM on it.  All of my music on my Linux computer is in the OGG format and it can’t be played with iPods.  However, when it came time to buy an audio player I did a bit of research.  It had to be something I could buy at the local Best Buy because I had a coupon and gift card.  Of the players sold at Best Buy, the players which supported OGG were, ironically, not well supported on Linux.  In fact, the best supported and integrated player in Linux was the iPod.  That’s important to me since I use my Linux computer for serving my main audio needs.   All of my podcasts come in through Rhythmbox.  The second requirement I had is that it had to be of the same form factor as the 2nd Generation iPod Shuffle so that it could use it at the gym clipped onto my shirt or shorts and not weigh me down at all.  I used to work out with an iPaq in my pocket and it was not very comfortable at all.

I received Super Mario Galaxy for Christmas and I must say that I’m quite happy with the gift.  This is the most talked about Wii game for the end of 2007 and not without reason.  Everyone who’s into gaming kept mentioning that Mario Galaxy is the true successor to Super Mario 64 on the Gamecube.  Pretty much everyone, myself included, thinks that Mario Sunshine was a piece of sod that should never have been made.  Mario Galaxy, on the other hand, has a lot of the same charm that made SM64 so much fun to play.  My only complaint, and this is a very tiny one, is that the puzzles are a bit easier than Mario 64.  I remember racking my brain with my brother trying to figure out how to get the each of the stars for SM64.  With Mario Galaxy, I feel that most of the stars are a lot easier to get.  However, as I write this blog post I realize that I played Super Mario 64 approximately 10 years ago, so it’s possible that the puzzles that were so hard for me back then would not be quite as hard now.  That said, I beat the game in two days with about 20 hours of gameplay.  That is, I beat the final Bowser, but was only about half way through collecting all of the stars.

This week is National Engineering Week and we’ve been doing some pretty interesting things here at Cornell. For example, whoever could name the most digits to Pi would win a pie. We had a social contraceptive contest to see who could come up with the worst pickup line. But nothing we have done, or will do, here at Cornell, stacks up to what engineers did at this school!. They took a whole bunch of Post-It© notes and created a mural to Mario. I will post some of the pictures here in case their page goes down or is slash-dotted. By the way, if you go to their website you’ll see the reasons for the title of my post.