Braid maker talks chances of it coming to PSP and DS

You might have heard of Braid. It's an abstract time-bending platformer which caused a stir when released as a downloadable game on Xbox Live Arcade this summer for being one of the best things since the last original game everyone got excited about. That would be Portal.

Review aggregate website Metacritic currently rates it at a score of 93, which makes it the highest rated Xbox Live Arcade game on the site.

Now Braid's maker, Jonathan Blow, has been speaking in an interview with Joystiq about the possibility of making the game for handheld, which could be a very good thing.

Except for the fact he says it's not going to happen.

"I have thought about it," says Blow "but there are a lot of technical and design challenges and maybe it's not worth it. For the DS the game would have to be completely re-created from the ground up, and I won't do that (I would rather be working on my next game), and I don't know anyone I would trust to do a high-quality job on that. So it is probably not going to happen."

However, he does go on to say the game would be more feasible on PSP, but only if Sony pulls its finger out with its direct download service.

"PSP might be more feasible if it's a downloadable game (so that it doesn't have to run off the UMD, because the music streaming stuff in Braid would not work off a UMD), but the direct-download-to-PSP market isn't really there yet, and again there would be a substantial investment in making the game run at a high quality level there, and I'm not sure who I trust to do it (though it would probably be easier to find someone to do a good job there than on the DS)."

So it sounds unlikely to happen on PSP either.

Never mind, there's still some hope as Blow concludes "I am hoping that next year someone announces a next-generation handheld that is a better fit - but I don't know what the chances of that are."

Hmm, neither do we.