My net connection was out yesterday, so I couldn’t catch up on the Rock Band releases until today, and I picked up the new songs this week (SOAD and some other random guys). Since they’re all ‘metal’, they were a bit more difficult than your average songs, and I failed to 100% any of them. I’d hate to see what they’re like on Expert…

And I also bought Braid on XBLA today. There was a lot of positive hype about it on the forums, and…they’re exactly right. It’s a profoundly different game in that it initially looks and plays like a Super Mario Bros-ish platformer, but at it’s heart it’s really a fiendish puzzle game. You have to collect jigsaw puzzle pieces in each level, but many of them require some trickery to reach, and the trick is that you can manipulate time and have to do so in all sorts of different ways.

You can rewind time, which is useful not just for undoing deaths and mistakes but is sometimes necessary just to revert back to a certain state once you’ve done something else, like picked up one of the keys or opened one of the doors that glow green (a sign that they’re unaffected by time effects). There are also world-specific effects, like one where time is affected by your own movement and only proceeds forward when you move right, and rewinds when you move left. There, you can’t simply wait for enemies to move out of your way because they won’t move until you move.

It’s a hard game too, where many of the pieces look like they’re totally impossible to reach, even after you’ve fiddled with the time effects for a bit. But that just makes it all the more satisfying when that “eureka!” moment hits and it suddenly makes perfect sense. I’ve fully completed World 2 so far, but the rest are going to take a bit more thinking…