14 DAY TRIAL // Last year was a truly great one for independently-made games, as we've seen a lot of very interesting titles emerge. Among those, only two really shined and offered countless hours of fun to gamers around the world – World of Goo and the hit arcade platformer Braid.
Braid was launched exclusively to the Xbox 360 Live Arcade, but it now seems that a PC version will be made and, with any luck, a Mac and a PlayStation 3 edition might also appear in the near future. Until the PC version will be released, Braid is still played on the Xbox 360 so, as a token of appreciation, Jonathan Blow, the designer and mastermind behind the game, made a premium dashboard theme for the New Xbox Experience, which was launched in November last year.
The announcement, made on the game blog, shows users how to download the premium theme, but it also contains a message from Blow and the people who worked on it, in which they apologize for charging money in exchange for the theme. The team says that it wished for it to be free, but, because of the policies Microsoft had, such a thing wasn't possible.
“Unfortunately, we had to charge the standard Premium Theme price of 250 Microsoft Points (which is about 3.10 dollars in American money). We want to make it free, but Microsoft doesn’t like giving things out for free. But if you do buy it, you can be secure in the knowledge that you own one of the few Premium Themes that is not an advertisement — there is no text in the Braid theme anywhere.”
Although the theme does cost a bit, it looks pretty good and will certainly be a must-buy for any fan of the popular indie game. Those who want it can download it from the Game Marketplace / Themes & Gamer Pictures / New Arrivals section or from the Game Marketplace / Arcade / Browse / B / Braid where they will find all the Braid-related content available.
Let's just hope that the PC version will be launched soon and that a lot of gamers will be able to enjoy this quite innovative title.