Pros: Braid is a Puzzle/Platform game that puts the power of Time in the hands of the player. The experience is brief, but it is fun, very well...

Cons: The Cloud Bridge: It’s only the second room in the game, but the solutions to most of the puzzles in this room are too abstract. This...

Pros: Braid is a Puzzle/Platform game that puts the power of Time in the hands of the player. The experience is brief, but it is fun, very well designed, and will likely stay in your mind even after you put all of the pieces together.

As Tim, you are on a quest to rescue a princess that has been snatched by a horrible and evil monster because of a mistake that Tim made in the past. This is the basic plot that is presented to the player. There are paragraphs at the beginning of each chapter that explains how Tim is feeling at that point in the journey and offers clues on what kind of puzzles he is about to face. Braid has plenty of text, but is light on concrete answers. The story is purposely ambiguous and open to interpretation, so if you wish to squeeze more out of what’s going on than "Boy wants Girl", there’s certainly enough here to do so. Either way, the story (its ending, specifically) is quite impressive and is reason enough to play through the game.

Like in other Platforming games, Tim moves to the right, jumping, climbing, and stomping on bad guys. The object of the game is to collect jigsaw puzzle pieces in each room and complete the puzzle at the end of each chapter. The difference here is that you have the ability to freeze and rewind time. Other games (most notably, Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time) allow you to rewind time, but in Braid, you can do it as many times as you want to as far back as you want. There are no limits. At first, the mechanic is only useful for undoing mistakes, but each world adds another element to rewinding and Braid’s uniqueness quickly becomes apparent. In one area, some objects are immune to time manipulation, which forces you to think about when and why to rewind. Soon after that, everything in the environment only moves when you do. The puzzles that appear in the six worlds are extremely clever. None of them are particularly difficult, but the settings and mechanics surrounding them are so foreign that adjusting your thinking to solve them can take some time. If you become stumped at any point, you can simply move on to the next piece and try again later, but the endgame is locked away until everything before it is complete, so your mind may happily yet agonizingly be in two places at once. Considering all the possibilities is a fun process itself and you will feel like a genius when you finally get your hands on a hard to reach puzzle piece. Aside from a puzzle or two early on in the game, Braid is rewarding and perfectly paced from beginning to end.

A first playthrough should only take about two to four hours, but uncovering secrets in the gameplay and narrative can easily extend that. Beating the game unlocks Speed Run mode. You’re challenged to beat certain levels under the game’s challenge time and there is little room for error. The final challenge is to beat the entire game in 45 minutes, so people that like being pushed will be pleased, though gloating may be a challenge since there are no leaderboards. Time Trials and secrets extend the life of Braid somewhat, but your personal enjoyment of the game will be what keeps you coming back more than the in-game incentives.

Braid has excellent visuals. The sprite animations are fluid and expressive. The faces of enemies and Tim alike grimace when they are killed and their movement, in general, from climbing to jumping to falling off the screen is convincing and very well done. The environments look like paintings in a Children’s book. They range from sunny and happy to dark and foreboding. When you rewind time, the background shrinks, the colors change slightly, and precipitation rises into the clouds. The music is just as good and always sets the right mood. Each track is lengthy and is appropriate to the setting and the puzzle you’re solving. The song plays backwards when time is rewinding and changes pitch to match how quickly or slowly time is moving. A few of the tracks sound so good going backwards that you won’t realize they’re reversed. In short, the game looks and sounds beautiful. Your eyes and ears will keep you happy even while you strenuously wrap your head around how to get the next puzzle piece.

This game appeals to fans of Platforming that love thinking outside the box. The presentation is beautiful, the puzzles are simultaneously simple and devilish, and the final level is mind blowing regardless of how much weight you‘ve put on to the story. Any gamer that has or wants a mind for puzzles should download Braid.

Cons: The Cloud Bridge: It’s only the second room in the game, but the solutions to most of the puzzles in this room are too abstract. This room throws off the pacing of what is otherwise a completely straightforward game, gameplay wise, that is.

Speed Runs: No leaderboards and no in-game rewards for beating the Challenge Times.

Pros: Initially released for the iPhone/iPod Touch, Lilt Line has made its way to Nintendo’s WiiWare service. Although it is so light on...

Cons: Locked: You cannot access a track until you’ve passed the track before it. Players who buy this game solely for the music will be...

Pros: Initially released for the iPhone/iPod Touch, Lilt Line has made its way to Nintendo’s WiiWare service. Although it is so light on features that it comes off as more of an interactive Dubstep album than an actual game, Lilt Line is still an engaging rhythm-based experience.

This is one of those Rhythm games that asks the player to navigate a world shaped by music, rather than testing his or her ability to recreate it. The objective is to steer a line through a corridor while avoiding the walls and keeping the beat. Steering is done by holding the Wii Remote horizontally and rolling it towards or away from you. It sounds simple, but you have no more control over the speed of the line than you do the speed of the scrolling highway in Rock Band. Things start out reasonably enough, but as you approach the last few tracks, navigating the sudden and extreme turns could put your reflexes…and your wrists to the ultimate test. The track is peppered with vertical lines that tell you when to push a button to keep a beat. This is not very dissimilar from other Rhythm games, but the visible margin of error and the fact that the game is horizontal, flat 2D instead of the vertical, Vanishing Point 2D could make it difficult for some players to adjust. Like in other rhythm games, making an error by either hitting a wall or mistiming a beat reflects negatively on your score and in the soundtrack.

At the beginning of a track, you start with the maximum score and are deducted for every mistake. If the score reaches zero, the game ends. On one hand, you’ll never have to wonder if you can do better, but on the other, there is little, if any, incentive to play a track again once you get a perfect score. That being said, getting a perfect score on the latter levels can only be described as nightmarish. Ultimately, the replay value depends on how badly the player wants to fully complete the game. Those who play games just to finish them will find that Lilt Line ends rather quickly. There are only fifteen tracks and most of them are under 90 seconds long. The difficult ones can take quite a few tries to pass, but seeing everything the game has to offer shouldn’t take more than a couple of hours. At the same time, players looking to download this game simply to hear the music will find this to be too long since a track can only be accessed once the track before it is passed. Adding a few more tracks or remixing the current ones to be longer could have addressed the length issues, but as it stands, any given player will claim that Lilt Line is way too long or not long enough.

The presentation steals the show here. Each track is filled with bright neon colors that change to keep up with the mood of the record playing. The area outside the corridor is always pitch black, which keeps the focus on the gameplay and adds an claustrophobic atmosphere to the entire game. The one flaw is that a graphic splashes across the screen whenever you successfully hit a beat. This can actually get in your way in intense situations. Confining this effect to the borders or leaving it out would have been a better way to go. This being a Rhythm game, the Dubstep soundtrack is the main draw. No two records sound anything alike. Some are relaxing, while others are scary, and yet others are downright angry. Hitting a wall or skipping a beat ruins the audio to a depressing degree, which keeps the player more motivated to succeed than the score. If you’ve already decided that you want nothing to do with Dubstep, these 15 tracks won’t make you a believer, but fans will think of this as another way to enjoy it and those who have yet to pick a side will, at least, consider it to be an appropriate soundtrack to a unique in-game environment.

Anyone who likes or is curious about Dubstep should download this. It may not have the staying power of some other Rhythm games, but for 500 Wii Points, what’s here is definitely worth experiencing.

Cons: Locked: You cannot access a track until you’ve passed the track before it. Players who buy this game solely for the music will be annoyed.

Length: 15 Short Tracks. Since this is a port, it feels like a missed opportunity to add remixes, more records, and difficulty settings.

Beat Splash: The game feels like it’s punishing your success when you hit a beat. The graphic that covers the screen when you do so can be annoying and, in some cases, be the reason you miss the next beat.

Replay Value: Unless you love the soundtrack or are obsessed with getting a perfect score, there is no incentive to keep coming back.

Pros: Max Payne is a Third Person Shooter that puts a heavy emphasis on Cinema style gunplay and Noir storytelling. The game does show its age...

Cons: No Multiplayer Mode: While making Bullet Time work in multiplayer would have been a challenge, the game certainly has the gameplay,...

Pros: Max Payne is a Third Person Shooter that puts a heavy emphasis on Cinema style gunplay and Noir storytelling. The game does show its age in some areas, but the Action itself is still satisfying and, as one of the first examples of the widely used Bullet Time mechanic, Max Payne is still worth playing.

As Max Payne, an undercover DEA agent with a tragic past, the story starts proper when you walk in on a Mob operation on your way to meet a contact…and things only get worse from there. The tale leaves no stone unturned. The player will end up visiting almost every dark corner of New York City, encounter all sorts of colorful characters, and explore Max’s own motivation, emotions, and nightmares. Outside of the triggered cutscenes, supplemental story scenes can be found in the environment via radio messages, television clips, phone calls, and more. These are optional, but the game all but begs the player to watch these scenes so most people will end up experiencing Max’s story in its entirety. Overall, the story is engaging, extremely light on loose ends, and you’ll want to see it through to the end.

For the most part, the game is a standard, but well done, Third Person Shooter. You start at the beginning of a level, mow down thugs that get in your way, and reach the end of the level in one piece. To keep things from getting boring, most levels require more than an itchy trigger finger to stay alive. Some doors are locked and require a key or the flip of a switch, some segments involve some light puzzle solving, there’s some platforming, and a small number of brief escort missions. These elements will never impede your progress for too long, but considering the game’s focus on Action, the time you do spend searching for a key or a recently unlocked door can feel like an eternity. Max Payne’s signature is Bullet Time, the ability to slow time to a crawl but retain his ability to aim and fire at a normal rate. The feature looks very cool and, when used correctly, can be used to take out a group of enemies in a few short, or in this case, long seconds. Bullet Time runs off of a meter that must be refilled by scoring kills, but it is full by default and you usually will get a kill or two in when it is active so you will always have it when you need it. Max Payne does have some outdated qualities like grenades occupying a Weapon Slot and the lack of any kind of Multiplayer mode, but these gripes should not be big enough to ruin anyone’s experience, especially considering that this is a 2001 release.

The game doesn’t look horrible, but it’s not difficult to tell that it’s old. The characters, in particular, are quite blocky sporting facial expressions and clothing that appear to be painted and stapled on to the models. Vehicles and environments don’t fare much better. Rounded objects are made of visible right angles and the textures are simple all around. Thankfully, the game’s cutscenes are presented in Graphic Novel panels. These are so well drawn that they actually look more like Realist paintings than Comic Book images. The speech bubbles are read by voice actors that have fully embraced the game’s campy, Film Noir style. You’ll either love or hate how Max says things like “Flakes danced their way through the twilight sky down to the sleepless Urban Monster below like ash from a frozen volcano…” instead of “It’s snowing”. Each character is a caricature of their role, some to the point of being Super Villains. It only helps to sell the story and makes it more enjoyable to see, then take down, the goon around the next corner. The music falls in line too by using a depressing piano score to support the story scenes and being non-existent during most of the action. The sound effects are distinct, varied, and believable, right down to all of them mixing into one droning hum during Bullet Time to accentuate the seemingly distant and bass heavy gunshots.

While Max Payne still has a few elements that wouldn’t fly in today’s Shooter market, it is also responsible for putting slow motion in the hands of the player and tells a dark and engaging Detective story in the process. Players that have the opportunity to do so should definitely experience Max Payne.

Cons: No Multiplayer Mode: While making Bullet Time work in multiplayer would have been a challenge, the game certainly has the gameplay, characters, and environments to support multiple players.

No Sound: If you plan on playing the PC version on Windows Vista, the sound doesn’t work and there are no apparent plans for an official patch. You’ll have to search the internet for an alternate fix.

The Grind: To unlock the final Bonus Challenge, the game must be beaten on Hard Mode. To unlock Hard, the game must be beaten on Medium. To unlock Medium the game must be beaten on Easy. Forcing three full playthroughs to see everything the game has to offer was a bad game design choice.

No Checkpoints: If you die near the end of a level but forgot to save, you’re sent back to the beginning of the level. You can quick save at any time (outside of the Hardest Difficulty setting), but needing to remember to save yourself takes your head out of the game.