Jonathan Blow complains that Braid: Anniversary Edition “sold like dog shit”

There was kind of a turning point for XBLA where it went from having neat smaller games and old arcade games, like Midway or say like the stuff Reflexive made, to trying to pander and bring in games and developers like this. And quite frankly XBLA lost its charm after that and also the fact that later on these developers whined about the file sizes and got that changed too. So there was no more like ceiling to work against. You know restraints can lead to creativity, problem solving. So then we just got regular old games on the service. No real creativity. The fact that these games also ended up having no lasting power while the likes of you know Peggle did is basically the Universe correcting itself.
 
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Pissmaster said:
I don't feel bad for Blow at all. The Witness was just a collection of line puzzles in a world where you walk around in the first person and solve simple puzzles that just act as a backdrop for those line puzzles. He asked $40 for it. It looks and feels like a mobile game. Somehow it got a lot of attention when it was new. I even remember saying "that looks like shit and is crazy overpriced", only to get with a few "NUH-UH!!!" from simps, wherever I was posting at the time.

I finally got to play The Witness for myself because it came in a bundle with some other puzzle games I wanted, and sure enough, it was exactly what it looked like. Total garbage game.
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The Talos Principle is the better pretentious puzzle game in first person anyways, The Witness by comparison is so basic and bland.
 
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The Last Stand said:
John Blow sees a bridge in a fantasy game and loses his shit.

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It really encapsulates why I hate video game artists. It's never about good game design but autistic pet peeves that just take away time and effort for shit that players actually care about. Can't wait for then all to be replaced with AI.

Also the extra retarded thing is that having bad bridge design isn't necessarily unrealistic. Sometimes the builders are idiots.
 
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UnbirthOfANation said:
basically just a hallway that leads you to a cutscene of someone, presumably Blow, walking around recording things with what is probably his phone camera, which is supposed to mean something but I guess I'm not cultured enough to know what.
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The idea is that you start seeing line puzzles in real life, even when not playing the game. The game has had an effect on you!

Edit: On the bridge discussion.

What he's describing has a name that I forget. Basically, if you know about something, things not conforming to that stand out to you. It's like how Law and Order: SVU: Indimidation Game (the gamergate episode) is hillarious to anyone with a cursory knowledge of video games. Or this scene from NCIS.

A more subtle version is when, in Hollywood movies, you will have car tires screen on dirt, or historical people get mad at the kind of boots a knight is wearing. At a certain point you just have to let suspension (bridge) of disbelief take over from autism.

Blow has clearly seen a documentary on bridges and is now seeing that mistake everywhere and assumes he's the first person to notice it. The rule of cool goes out the window.
 
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He could simply just release an HD version of Braid fo 10 bucks. if he really want to do a commentary of the game, he could just make a video and post it on youtube. infinitely better, and less expensive than the fuck he did

heck, a some of video game companies do it. Volition played their Saint Row games and comment a lot on what happened during the production of the game. heck they even played Yakuza 0 and commented on it, which I think became their inspiration for those annoying melee takedowns for Saints Row 2022
 
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