After having actually managed to download Braid, I’m really enjoying it. But when I got really stuck on one of the puzzles in world 2 and looked up an online walkthrough, I found that the official Braid guide says

Some of the puzzles will be hard. But when you manage to solve those hard puzzles, you will feel very good about it. The game will feel very rewarding. Don’t rob yourself of that feeling by reading a walkthrough!

So I felt bad about having cheated on the final part of “The Cloud Bridge”, but I’m determined to figure the rest out myself, even though I’m currently totally stuck on two different puzzle pieces.

What I’m wishing I could find for these are not walkthroughs but hints. Something to edge me in the right direction without giving anything away. Even then, I’d only look at the hints for the ones I’m truly stuck on. But I couldn’t find any non-spoiler hints anywhere. So I’ve decided to create a non-spoiler hint guide for Braid. In the places where I’m giving hints that might border on spoiling something, I’ll print it in hard-to-read text that you’ve got to highlight to see well. Today, I’ll be going through world 2.

I urge you to only read the hints on levels where you’re completely stuck. As the official guide says, once you read a spoiler, you can never un-read it.

World 2: Time and Forgiveness

Three Easy Pieces
This level has three puzzle pieces. The first two are so simple as to require no hints. For the third, keep in mind that as it says in the instructions, the only way to get higher is by jumping on a monster. Take a look: there are more than one monster here.

The Cloud Bridge
This is where the difficulty begins to ramp up a bit. The first two pieces on this level are very easy, but I found the second two to be surprisingly hard. This is because the solution requires some totally out-of-the-box thinking. The best non-spoiler hint I can give here is that you’ll need to interact with the puzzle to get those last two pieces. Try jumping at the puzzle.

Hunt!
The one puzzle piece on this level is relatively straightforward to get. If you’re reading this guide and think you’re honestly stuck on this one, I urge you to go back and try more before reading further. But if you honestly can’t figure this one out, keep in mind that the monsters are like trampolines. If you jump from higher up, you’ll bounce further.

Leap of Faith
The final level on world 2 has four puzzle pieces, all easy. I’ll give a number of bulleted hints here, and I urge you to only look at one at a time.

• As it says in the game’s instructions, the way to get higher is by jumping on monsters.
• Looking at the fuses on the cannons helps you determine when they’ll fire.
• Those cannons launch the monsters. They actually catch some air coming out.
• The title “Leap of Faith” should be a hint in itself.

That’s all for world 2. I’ll write up a hint guide for world 3 soon.

Braid for PC ostensibly releases today. I say ostensibly because earlier today, I logged onto the game’s Steam page, and it said “This game will unlock in approximately 2 hours”. Fine. Good. I logged on a bit later and saw that it said one hour. When it was supposed to release, the message disappeared, but there was no option to purchase. WTF?

I checked back just a minute ago, and it now says “This game will unlock in approximately 2 hours”. Sheesh. Maybe I’ll just buy it from Greenhouse.

UPDATE: Friday, 16:30 MST – The steam page now says “This game will unlock in approximately 1 day and 1 hour”.

UPDATE: Saturday, 00:39 MST- The game is now available. Purchased and downloading.

This week, for Free Game Friday, I’m not bringing to you just any old game. I didn’t have huge expectations for Tag: The Power of Paint, but it absolutely blew me away. The game feels a lot like Portal, in that you’re using an odd gun, in this case a paint gun, to navigate an environment Parkour-style.

You start off with green paint, and learn how to paint and how to erase your paint. Then you learn that green paint makes you jump when you step on it, and work your way through a number of puzzles that involve you having to make high jumps, bounce off walls, and all sorts of combinations. The game designers got really creative and crazy with this stuff.

Soon, you add red paint to your gun. The red paint makes you run fast, dodging traps and jumping further. When you combine the red and green paint, you get some crazy long jumps.

Lastly, you get the blue paint, which makes you stick to any surface, be it a skinny flagpole, a wall, or even a ceiling. This gets pretty mindbending as you pull some Prey-style wall walks. When you combine all three varieties of paint, you can speed jump onto a sticky wall. It gets crazygonuts.

Tag is a free game, and you’re a freaking lunatic if you don’t download it and give it a shot, because the game is absolutely brilliant.

After you’ve played, leave a comment here and let me know what you think.

Download Tag: The Power of Paint

Keepers is a weekly segment in which I discuss games I’ve played that I’ve seen fit to keep after playing. I generally sell a game that I’ve finished, so the only reason I keep one is because I plan to replay the game some day. Classifying a game as a “keeper” is generally a badge of merit.

It’s been three and a half years since I first played Shadow of the Colossus, and despite my complaints about the camera angle and the horse, it stands out for being one of the most simple and one of the most beautifully cinematic games I’ve ever played. In honor of this week’s announcement that a Shadow of the Colossus movie is in development, I’ve chosen the game for this week’s feature.

For those of you who haven’t had the pleasure, Shadow of the Colossus came late in the Playstation 2’s life cycle, and the basic plotline was that of a boy, who shows up at the outset of the story bearing a young girl’s body. He visits a shrine wherein dwells a spirit/diety/demon who has the power to restore her to life. In return, it asks that he destroy the sixteen statues lining the main hall of the shrine. In order to destroy each, he must defeat a colossus. And so armed with only a sword, bow, and his horse Argo, he sets out to locate and destroy the colossi.

The battles against the colossi are epic boss battles, and each has at least as much puzzle in it as it does combat. The sense of scale is amazing, and you truly feel like a mouse battling an elephant.

I’m glad I’ve kept this game. Although I did go back to replay it once, I only got as far as the sixth colossus before getting stuck. When you play the game on hard, it is truly more difficult than the normal difficulty level.

It’s a sad truth that I’ve been let down by a great number of games recently. Perhaps my expectations were too high, but I’m having more fun with Final Fantasy XII and Thief: Deadly Shadows now than I have with most of the newer games I’ve tried.

I haven’t gotten very far into Far Cry 2, and I plan to give the game more of a chance once my current Final Fantasy XII spree ends, but my initial impressions of the game are not good. The whole malaria thing doesn’t add to the game at all – frankly, it’s annoying. And the open world reminds me of S.T.A.L.K.E.R., which I did not like at all.

Some of the things I’d liked most in Crysis and the original Far Cry seem not to be present here. There’s no detection meter which shows when enemies see you, and you can’t lie prone. I’ll grant you that I’m less than two hours into the game, but initially, I’m disappointed.

Mad World was even more of a disappointment. I’d expected the frantic action of SmashTV, the cheezy old-school plot of Running Man, the humor of No More Heroes, and maybe the beat-em-up goodness of Double Dragon. What I got was repetitive running around, stabbing signposts into the necks of foes who might as well all be carbon copies, all for points. The violence existed only for violence’s sake, and the difficulty quickly goes from far too easy to way too hard, with very little time in any kind of sweet spot. The story is closer to Escape From New York than Running Man, and there’s little of either movie’s charm to be seen. The segments on the bike are terrible, and I quit the game just after beating a big Sumo Wrestler wannabe who kept throwing helicopters at me.

I guess the happy ending to this article is Galactrix. Initially, I was terribly terribly disappointed. The loading times on the DS are frequent and long, and the touch controls are the absolute worst I’ve seen in any DS game. It frequently takes me 5 or 6 tries to select an item from a list menu. I’ll touch “Get Missions” with the stylus, for example, and instead of highlighting and selecting that item, it will cause me to fly a bit away from the planet, which is especially annoying since it then takes me 2-3 seconds to bring up the menu again and try to select an option again.

The game has a definite learning curve,and once I’d gotten past it and begun to unlock more of the game’s different minigames, it got fun. And it began to grow as addictive as Puzzle Quest. Because of my first two complaints, I don’t find it to be as good a game as Puzzle Quest, but I’m enjoying it.

A lovingly-crafted parody of Oregon Trail, themed to Fallout Boy. There are some nice attempts at Guitar Hero like play, and some really poor attempts at shooter mechanics, but the game sure is funny. I died on the side of the road after my van was capsized by surf zombies. My chicken nuggets sank and my oxen drowned, leaving my van stranded.

Play Fallout Boy Trail

Keepers is a weekly segment in which I discuss games I’ve played that I’ve seen fit to keep after playing. I generally sell a game that I’ve finished, so the only reason I’d keep one is because I plan to replay the game some day. Classifying a game as a “keeper” is generally a badge of merit.

This week, I’ll be discussing Thief: Deadly Shadows. As you can see from my shelf in the photo above, it’s the game on the far left of the shelf, beneath the girl scout cookies. It’s also a game that I’m currently replaying, so now seemed as good a time as any to talk about it.

I got Thief Deadly Shadows to run in Windows Vista, which was a bit of a pain, and then I managed to set it up so that I could use my mouse 4 + 5 buttons and my mouse’s tilt wheel. Since then, I’ve been enjoying the game quite a bit, playing it slowly, and savoring it.

Thief: Deadly Shadows is in my top 5 favorite stealth games, and stealth games are one of my favorite game genres. But for some reason, I couldn’t get into the first two titles in the Thief series. They’re hard to see, but they’re on my shelf in the above photo beneath “Ghost Master” and above “Crysis”. I got a special 2-disc set for cheap.

Maybe it was because of the difficulty, maybe because of the poor graphics, and maybe because the first level in Thief: The Dark Project had a layout that was more labyrinthine than nearly any other game I’ve played. I don’t know. But I just couldn’t get very far into the game’s second level before I gave up.

But I’ll heartily recommend Deadly Shadows to anyone willing to give a go to a five-year-old windows stealth game that you can probably pick up on the cheap. With some tweaking it runs in Vista, and it’s hella fun to walk up behind a guard, club him in the head, and dump his body in the harbor.

The DSi launches on Sunday and I am giddy with excitement. When the DSi was first announced, I was pretty ho-hum about it.  At the same time, I knew I would buy one as the need to purchase new Nintendo hardware is coded into my very genetic code.  I was ho-hum about the original DS, the DS Phat if you will, until I Ninentdogs came out.  Then I had to have one.

When the DS Lite came out, I was all over that like stink on a monkey due to the various improvements made to the device.   The DSi brings improvements, no doubt, however none of them, on the surface, appear to be as profound as the changes from DS Phat to DS Lite.  Think of this as the DS version of upgrading from DVD to Blu-Ray where the upgrade from Phat to Lite was like going from a VCR to DVD.

Now, I resolved myself to buying a DSi months ago once they were available for preorder as I would like bigger screens, the ability to change the brightness without having to go to the main menu and the ability to go to the main menu without rebooting the thing, but what I’m really excited for is the SD card support and even that feature didn’t get me all hot and bothered until two weeks ago.

What happened two weeks ago?  It’s pretty simple. I started playing Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars.

GTA: Chinatown Wars is set in Liberty City, same as GTA IV and GTA IV: Lost and the Damned.  Chinatown Wars only has two islands (no Alderney here) however all of the popular Liberty City landmarks and boroughs are present.  If you’ve played GTA IV, you’ll recognize what you’re seeing in Chinatown Wars.  At several points you even tussle with The Lost, a biker gang that is an obvious nod to the gang you meet up with in GTA IV and lead in GTA IV: Lost and Damned.  Chinatown Wars is an incredible amount of fun, made even more fun by the ability to recognize places I passed by every day when playing the game’s older brothers.

So I’m playing this fantastic portable version of GTA and I’m straight off the heels of playing Lost and the Damned which was as good a piece of DLC you’re likely to find out there and I thought, man, wouldn’t it be great if you could get DLC for Chinatown Wars the same way you could for GTA IV?  (The fact that I read that new races would be available for all versions of the upcoming Blood Bowl after release except for the DS version didn’t hurt either.)  Then it hit me.  The DSi supports SD cards, which means more storage.  The DSi will be able to play games off of the SD cards, or at least move content off of the cards and into the onboard storage for game access.

Holy crap.  Is DLC now a possibility on the DSi?  Will I be able to buy a Chinatown Wars expansion pack with more characters, more missions and more weapons?  Not knowing what the hardware limitations are in regards to accessing the SD card storage while playing a game, I could just be dreaming here, but if Nintendo was able to enable SD card game play on the Wii with nothing more than a software update, why not have the same thing for the DSi.

Once I got started thinking about this, my mind went to even more glorious places.  Imagine a game like GTA for the Wii and the DSi where you can play all you want, doing whatever in the Wii version, and then, once you’re done, you can save your player, with all of his or her stats to your SD card, slap that card into a DSi and then continue your adventures in the portable version.  Once done in the DSi version, you took the card out, put in the Wii and continued.  Maybe each version has missions or features that are only in that version, as an incentive to buy both versions.   Obviously, there would have to be some concessions made in each version to make up for what the other doesn’t have, but still, even with this, if the game had a big enough hook so that you didn’t want to stop playing it, being able to bring it with you when you leave would mean that you never had to stop playing it.

If the ultimate ending point is a unified console, as some pundits would lead you to believe, then this type of connectivity should be part of it.  I buy two copies of Galactrix, one for my PSWii360 and one for my DSP.  When I’m done earning experience on the console, my save can be loaded up in the handheld.  I don’t have to sacrifice time playing on one version for time spent on another.  All time is towards progress in both versions.  Good Lord.  Can you imagine?

In the mean time, I’m going to try and be happy with what the DSi brings, rather than dream what could happen, only to find that it won’t happen.  Still though, when I unbox the DSi and slide the SD card in, it’ll be hard not to dream of a day when leaving home means you don’t have to leave your games behind.

Note: I’m aware that this stuff stays on the internet forever, and so I’ll change the subject and preface the original content with the note that this was an April Fools gag.

Just yesterday, Bioware announced that it’s working on a sequel to the 1999 RPG Planescape: Torment. After what happened with The Nameless One at the end of the original game, many said that a sequel could never happen. Still, it seems to be in development, using the same engine as Dragon Age: Origins. I for one will be looking forward to it.

There are a number of already-released games I’m dying to play and just haven’t had the time to get around to. Resident Evil 5, Puzzle Quest: Galactrix, and Far Cry 2 are amongst them. Likewise, games like Street Fighter 4 and Braid have been out for a while, but only on consoles. I’m awaiting the PC release. The new Riddick game looks fantastic, but I’ve got no 360 to play it. And I’ll be buying Dragon Age: Origins as soon as I can. That game looks fantastic. Still, many of my most anticipated games are still months out, and I thought I’d share my eager anticipation with Lungfishopolis’s readers.

Resident Evil: Darkside Chronicles is the sequel to Resident Evil: Umbrella Chronicles. I definitely enjoyed Umbrella Chronicles, but while Umbrella Chronicles covered Resident Evil 0, 1, and 3, Darkside Chronicles covers my very favorite title in the series: Resident Evil 2.

I’ll grant you that I’ll be playing it largely for nostalgia purposes, but I will enjoy it. Re-encountering reimagined scenes from the first console title I truly loved will be pretty sweet. It looks like I’ll be waiting until Christmas for the game, but that’s okay. I can wait.

While I found the original God of War to be a far better title than its sequel, I have high hopes for God of War 3. I’ll admit that there can be only so much that Kraatos can go through before the storyline becomes old and worn, my hope is that a trilogy is not too much to ask.

In the same way that Resident Evil 4 was a reinvention of the franchise, God of War needs something fresh and new if it’s not going to die of sequelitis. I can only hope that David Jaffee is up to it.

I’ve been a huge fan of Desktop Tower Defense ever since I found the HandDrawnGames site. I also always said that I’d love to see it on DS. On April 29th, I get my wish. Of all the many tower defense games I’ve played, this is likely my favorite, tied with Pixeljunk Monsters. While playing the flash version on the PC is fun, being able to play it on a handheld anywhere will be even better.

I’ve been looking forward to Heavy Rain since I heard about it as an unofficial sequel to Indigo Prophecy. I played Indigo Prophecy and loved it, despite the mind-bogglingly bizarre plot that emerged toward the ending. I also played the European version of the game, Fahrenheit, which was essentially the same game, only with a couple nude scenes and a sex minigame. Nothing you wouldn’t see in a rated-R movie, but I felt like I needed the full experience.

Aside from ridiculously good graphics, Heavy Rain’s main draw is dynamic storytelling. Apparently, your character can die and the plot will continue without him/her. I’m also looking forward to the mechanics introduced in Indigo Prophecy. The adventure game with action minigame elements, timed conversation responses, and minor stealth game elements. The game’s diversity is a big part of why I loved it.

Lastly, my most anticipated game: Starcraft 2. I’ve been a big fan of the original for many years, and I’m constantly impressed by the fact that it’s the only decade-old game that I always see on store shelves when I’m at a Best Buy or Circuit City.

I’m less than ecstatic about the fact that it will be packaged as three separate race-specific titles, but I have faith that Blizzard will make their product worth the cash. Aside from the MMOs, I’ve always enjoyed Blizzard’s games.