Braid, Anniversary Edition on Steam
Braid, Anniversary Edition on Steam
Control the flow of time to solve puzzles in this new version of the indie classic, featuring fully repainted artwork, a new world of puzzles, and seriously in-depth commentary.
I remember loving this game. It was one of those games that made me sit quickly and think a when I finished it, like a good book or movie.
I've got Braid. Played it, enjoyed it, moved on. Why would I buy it again to listen to someone rambling over it? Some AI upscaled graphics? What's the point?
Can't answer as to why you would buy it again, but for me, I thought about replaying Braid recently only to discover that it was a pretty blurry mess. This looks a lot nicer, and commentary on video game design and development can be really interesting to me, especially since a lot of that is kept behind closed doors still.
Some AI upscaled graphics?
I'm pretty sure its an artist redraw.
Back when Braid was originally being developed, with its launch platform being the Xbox 360, 720p seemed like a pretty high resolution. Neither the Xbox 360 nor the PlayStation 3 could render most games at higher resolution than that; a few games could barely do 1080p, if they were very spare with regard to per-pixel detail, which Braid was not (Braid's style involves drawing lots of translucent particles over each other, which means each pixel is drawn many times!). But when David Hellman came on to the project to do the game's visuals, we decided we would future-proof the game by drawing all the source art at twice 720p, then scale it down for the game's release. At the time, around the year 2007, this was difficult to do; the tools we were using would chug unresponsively when trying to edit such large bitmaps. But surely this would all be worth it, because it would allow us to re-release the game with sharper graphics later on!
We just didn't think far enough ahead, I guess; before too long, 4k monitors became available, some folks are using 5k monitors, and 8k is on the horizon (though that seems pretty excessive to me, right now!) If you play original Braid on a 4k monitor, the result is blurry and unpleasant to look at. The original double-scale art that we had archived for Braid would still be blurry at 4k, and anyway it was never really meant to be seen at that level of detail.
So, if we want people with modern computers to be able to enjoy the game the way it was meant to be played, how do we do that? Well, I guess the answer is for David to repaint the whole game at much higher levels of detail, so that is what we did.
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