Divide By Zero - a blog by Kamran Ayub

I was introduced to Braid through a friend of mine, who said it was “an amazing concept for a game.� I had heard mention of this beast in Penny Arcade’s news post, but only fleetingly.

So Saturday I sat down and played the Trial Demo. I instantly liked it. I bought it and I’m still working on it. I’m on World 5 now, and damn it’s getting tough.

Basically the whole mechanic Braid relies on is time manipulation. At first, it’s pretty simple… you can rewind time and you use it to get to the puzzle pieces. However, each world gets increasingly more complicated. By World 4, I was scratching my head and wondering what the hell. First, there are objects that are sparkly green which are not affected by time. Second, at some points you have to rewind time very fast before a door closes or a platform returns to its position. Then, you have to use enemies as allies, to get keys in hard to reach spaces. Now I am at the point where there is a shadow dimension, and when you rewind time, your shadow does what you did in the future. It makes it way more complicated.

The price for the game is $15. To some people, this is the end of the world. While they are fine paying for their fast food and their carbonated soda, they shun the notion of paying $15 for a quality game. Here’s the thing: Braid is a good game. Some have mentioned that it’s just a Flash-game lookalike. So… because a game is 2D, it must mean that it’s a Flash rip-off? Last time I checked there were a few consoles way back in the day that did something akin to 2D games. But wait, silly me, I forgot that Flash invented the 2D platformer! Besides the fact that most flash games are stupid and poorly designed, what does it matter? It wasn’t created by a teenager in his mom’s basement. It was created by an independent developer who paid money and spent time to make the game.

My point is that $15 isn’t a whole lot to pay. It’s one dinner at a restaurant. It’s one and a half albums. It’s two outings to Arby’s. It’s a new movie. However you want to view it, it’s not that much. Don’t you have a job or something? That’s 1.5-2 hours of work or less! If you spent 2 hours making the money to buy it and you get 6+ hours of entertainment out of it, doesn’t that pay for itself?

Irish Fest

The other thing I did this weekend was go to Irish Fest and see Flogging Molly. I’ve seen them before when they came to the U but this was a different beast.

It was a lot of fun. I got a keychain with my Irish family name on it, Gallagher.

I also went with my girlfriend, her mom, and my other two friends so I was surrounded by pretty women.

That tall guy in the upper right with the white shirt was pretty high the whole time.

Needless to say, Flogging Molly was awesome. Here follow some photos of the event:

My camera can’t take the best pictures… my friend had the nice camera:

It was a lot of fun and I was just glad I got to go this year. Parking over on Harriet Island was tough but we found a good place that had a lot of spaces open and wasn’t too far away.

The crowd during the show was crazy. We weren’t super close but we were in that zone of people who want to get closer, so we were continuously pushing people around. My girlfriend went back earlier to get water and had a tough time finding us, but she did and after a short while moved back to a more relaxed portion of the crowd to properly enjoy the show. Since you can’t get out of there without shoving people aside, some guy took offense to me trying to burrow my way through, but he let me through anyway even though he tried to shove me back a bit. I’m sorry I had to push you, sir, but suck it, I had my girlfriend in tow.

Football

I went to the Vikings pre-season game last, when was it, Friday? Yes, that’s it. My friend’s family had extra tickets so I went with her. I had never been to a football game before so I decided I’d try something new. It was interesting, to say the least. I know the mechanics of the game so I understood what was happening but I still enjoy watching basketball more. The football crowd, however, is more entertaining. Lots of drunk people saying nonsense.

There were some guys to the upper left of us who were hilarious, though. They were smashed but they were funny, not unfunny obnoxious-like. The guys behind us were obnoxious and only slightly funny. One of them asked me who I thought would make it to play-offs: Vikings or Dallas. Not really caring or knowing much about such matters, I just said Vikings, to which one guy nodded his head in enigmatic agreement and the other saying that I was “smoking� and “high on shit,� but in a joking sort of way. I wasn’t about to argue.

Of course, if you followed the game, you know what we lost… which wasn’t a massive surprise. We left close to the end, though about half the stadium beat us to it.

Aquatennial

Earlier in the month we went to the Aquatennial fireworks display, reportedly the fifth best in the nation, according to my buddy. They were fantastic, that’s for sure! I didn’t get to see any fireworks on the 4th, so this substituted very well instead.

Besides the big tree in the way, it was superb.