Yearly Archives: 2013

Writing Resolutions

Posted by natechen on

Hey, it’s that time of year again! That’s right, it’s a brand new year and that means people are girding themselves up and resolving to do new and exciting things like loose weight, eat responsibly and in general make it easier to make it to the next new year. But me, I’m a writer and healthy living is an area of contractual genre blindness for us. So I figured I’d come up with some writing related resolutions instead. What kind of resolutions? I thought you’d never ask…

  1. I will maintain this blog, doing my best to continue to post on schedule, no matter how many toothpicks I break keeping my eyelids open.
  2. I will not poke myself in the eye with a toothpick. It impedes the writing process.
  3. I will try to read less garbage in my continuing attempts to understand what kinds of stories currently drive the writing market.
  4. I will read more garbage with the intent to discover what makes bad writing bad and how to correct those flaws.
  5. I will remember that finding ways to resolve apparent contradictions helps a person become more creative and flexible, it’s exercise for the imagination and every writer needs more of that.
  6. I will continue to offer shameless critique of people who have succeeded in an industry I have not yet broken in to, as well as people who work in industries I know little about. If they want to sell me stuff, they better make it a worthwhile product.
  7. I will do my level best to get an e-book assembled and available for purchase from Amazon.com, so that my work can be held up for ridicule in the largest forum available.
  8. I will add as much suspense to my stories as is humanly possible, because day to day life does not contain nearly enough uncertainty.
  9. I will add more romance to my writing, because write what you know is more a loose guideline than a mandatory requirement.
  10. I will hire a person to stand behind me with a rolled up newspaper and periodically whack me over the head yelling, “Make with the funny!” This should keep my writing from being overly gloomy.*

So there you have it. My authorial goals for the year. If you have any advice for how I might live up to these goals, I’d love to hear from you in the comments. Please feel free to add your own suggestions in the comments, as well.

*These resolutions void where prohibited. No exchanges, substitutions or refunds. Use only as advised. Keep hands and feet clear. Please resolve responsibly.

Cool Things: Braid

Posted by natechen on

It’s been a while since I mentioned a video game in this spot. In fact, other than my first Cool Thing, Dungeons of Dredmor, I haven’t mentioned one at all. You can gather a few things from that. For one, I don’t play many video games. That’s mainly because I’m a writer busy with this blog, a job and occasional theatrical appearances. For another, there aren’t many games out there that really strike me as cool. I have standards. After all, I’ve played Contra and Ikaruga. It takes real work to measure up to stuff like that.

But Braid… Braid is special.

Braid is a 2D platformer, a la the original Super Mario Brothers. However, unlike the plumber chronicles, Braid is a puzzle game. The controls are incredibly simple. There’s a button for each of the game’s six primary functions, move left or right, climb up or down, jump and reverse time.

Yeah. Reverse time. I told you this game is special.

Everything about Braid is about manipulating time. The player can’t even really die. If you get injured or fall down a pit the level doesn’t reset, the game just waits for you to press rewind and back up to a point before you messed up. But backing up time is about more than just undoing mistakes. It’s also your primary problem solving tool.

You see, Tim, Braid’s hero, has discovered how  to reverse time and used it to smooth the problems from his life. Unfortunately, Tim now finds that he must wield his new-found powers to rescue a princess and crosses paths with a number of obstacles, monsters and weird time phenomena along the way.

What’s most impressive about Braid is not it’s visuals, which are beautiful 2D sprites, nor is it the game’s catchy soundtrack, which sounds good both backwards and forwards. It’s not even the story, which is both original and moving. No, what’s really impressive is the creativity and originality the game both shows to the player and demands of them.

Over the course of Braid’s six levels players will be confronted with places where time moves forward if they move to the right and backwards if they move to the left. They will find things that won’t be rewound no matter how hard Tim tries. And they will even find places where the actions they’ve taken leave echoes in causality, forcing the player to partner with shadows of himself in order to advance. No other video game in recent past has demanded so much of it’s players in terms of thought, planning and out-of-the-box creativity.

However, for those exact same reasons Braid is not a game for everyone. It’s not action packed, there’s not scoring system (although there is a time trial mode unlocked once you clear the game initially) and there’s no compelling sense of struggle between Tim and his situation. It’s amazing, but at the same time it can’t appeal to everyone.

Still, if you love innovative gameplay, clever mechanics or straight up challenge, Braid is a game worth your time and money.