I clocked some quality gaming time over the weekend, only I wasn’t spending it playing blockbuster retail games. Instead, I grew obsessed with two recent downloadable Xbox arcade games: Castle Crashers and Braid.
Plenty has been written in the past couple weeks about these two games, since Castle Crashers was one of the most anticipated arcade games to be released this year while Braid ended up being the best-reviewed arcade game of all time (Metacritic has it at 93, just a point below Halo 3 and a point above Guitar Hero 2).
A friend asked me to pick which of those games he should download. I told him that’s a Sophie’s Choice and I wouldn’t make it. He needed to knuckle down and buy both of them as they are both immensely rewarding in vastly different ways.
Castle Crashers is a button-masher in the tradition of great side-scrolling arcade brawlers like Golden Axe. But it is infused with a Sunday comic-strip aesthetic, a basic but rewarding leveling-up and skills system, deep co-op play, and fantastic tongue-in-cheek humor. It’s so far provided hours of thumb-blistering fun for me and Harlan.
My only complaint would be that some boss battles are pretty tough, and losing them means going back to the start of the level. Also, there are quite a few cool items for sale at the various stores sprinkled throughout the world, but I find I’m always blowing by hard-won gold coin on health potions, and thus am never able to earn enough capital to invest in any of the high-end goodies.
It’s hard to imagine a more different game than Braid. That’s not much of a statement as nothing is really at all like Braid.
At first blush, it’s easy to mistake Braid for a simple side-scroller, like some broody Mario who wandered into a Degas painting. Like a Mario game, the controls are dead simple: left control stick to move and the A button to jump. Only here there are no double-jumps, no wall-climbing, no special moves. Oh, there is one twist, and that is that you use the X button to rewind time. Rewind one second or the entire level, it doesn’t matter.
It’s really easy to imagine this game mechanic incorporated into something like a Mario game. Super Mario Time Traveler or something. Wiggle the Wii remote and send Mario back in time! Braid avoids this cutesy setting in favor of a moody, wistful story about a boy named Tim who wishes he could undo a mistake that cost him the love of a princess. It’s a story that is completely at one with the distinguishing game mechanic of rewinding time.
Instead of just having the player make Tim traverse each level, avoiding obstacles and dispatching enemies, each level in Braid has one or more puzzles that require manipulating time in increasingly subtle and complex ways. There are no tricks or cheats or shortcuts. Just Tim, you, and that X button.
Braid has won widespread praise and is being held up as the latest evidence that, hey, games are too an art form! The unity of Braid’s story and gameplay nicely support the idea that the art of video games lies in the aspect of “agency“, or decision-making and being in control.
Still, I can’t help but think that Braid wouldn’t be getting nearly the accolades it has if it didn’t boast one of the most evocative visual and audio aesthetics of any recent game. If you’ve played Braid, imagine the game re-skinned with a “typical” garish arcade-game palette and accompanied by electronica or thumping techno. Throw away the tragic-romantic story and replace it with a generic one about a space commando using his time-warp cannon to navigate alien landscapes and find all the pieces to the Morgatron 3000 ray that will save his planet.
It might still be a fun and cool game but I bet it would score at least 10 points lower and quickly get lost in the shuffle. Instead, every element of the game stands out — the gameplay, the graphics, the story and the music, and it’s Braid’s polished whole that adds up to an amazing experience.
