200 megabytes is the size of the entire game. And yet, probably one of the most surprisingly good games in some time.

Braid tells the story of Tim and his journey to find the princess. It’s a basic platform game, with the controls just like old Mario, except one thing: you can control time. By pressing a button (and further in game, by some other situations) you can turn back time. Even after you died. If the controls are similar to the famous plumber, the game dymaics is completely different. It is a puzzle game.

Braid is an action-puzzle game about manipulating the flow of time. To rescue a princess, the player journeys through a series of worlds; in each world, time behaves differently. The game provides a mind-expanding experience that is filler-free, treating the player’s time as precious.

The puzzles are very well designed and the difficult progression is a state-of-the-art. Considering that it is an one-man work (Jonathan Blow. did it alone, except for the music, which he licensed, and graphics, which he hired a guy for the job), it’s amazingly good.

Jesus just resurrected.

The bunny brings us chocolates. Chocolate eggs in fact.

It’s birthday of: the writer Tom Clancy, my cousin André Massa and my uncle Alexandre, F1 team manager Flavio Briatore and – god was right on this one – the wonderful actress Jennifer Morrison.

Also, it is the day of twin saint brothers Cosmas and Damian.

Happy Easter for everyone

From the series Things I Used To Hate Now I Am Using, now I finally testing Twitter.

I created my account as brmassa and I started to post micro stuff: my favorite football team stupid results, political jokes and things that are REALLY useless for most of people.

After about 2 months, I still don’t see much use on this, except on spying on peoples lives (HEY, they are aware of it… they are publishing the tweets).  With instant messaging, blog witting and spam reading, they are the Time Wasting Toolkit.

It is now just another fragmented piece of information about people. The only advantage I see is for companies like Google now have another source of free external data about potential customers. They can cross with their own data and offer ads more and more targeted to them. Social networks + search history + email history + tweets + photos = complete profile about you!

And I foresee that soon the site will add a higher level of permissions, so you will choose which people can follow you or can do some operations regarding your profile. In other words: it will gradually transform in a Social Network site.

PS: I just added the Twitter messages list at the bottom of this blog. It’s updated hourly.

I simply don’t get the point when the game producers advertise the engine behind a game. Engine, for those are not familiar with, is the piece of software that deals the core functions in a game: 3D rendering, sound, network, etc. They usually say that their own home-made engine is capable of more graphics in the scene, with more details or more effects (mostly about the graphics power). But more than what?

Unless the company license their engines as core business, like Epic’s Unreal Technology, Valve’sSource or id’s id Tech, there is absolutely no point on advertising it or even giving it a name but creating it some pseudo-credibility to the project.

WOW!! Mafia 2 are going to use Illusion Engine! What the heck is Illusion Engine?

These pieces of software are complex to create. However, there was a lot of people that were capable to create one from scratch. Today, there are several of them, with different purposes (some are for hookies, some are for 3D pros or only for FPS games) and different quality (some are slow, some have incomplete documentation or lacking of tools). But there are enough that it might be considered almost as commodity.

Unreal Engine is, by far, the most popular among the big companies. Many bestsellers were created using its tools and libraries. But don’t even think about using it: it costs a fortune! So various companies had the same idea about position their owngame engines free. Some are worthy to mention: Garage Games’ Torque, Blender/Crystal Space and Radon Labs’ Nebula Device.

Some good games came from they: Torque is quite inexpensive, and it was used on the Penny Arcade Adventures; Nebula Device is completely free with the most permissive, the MIT license, and its behind Drakensang, which I’m going to play really soon.