Speaking to the boys and girls at Joystiq, reigning indie figurehead Jonathan Blow has suggested that his ecstatically received Xbox Live Arcade platformer Braid might – just might – make the transition to a handheld console.
There are plenty of ifs and buts though. "I have thought about it, but there are a lot of technical and design challenges and maybe it’s not worth it," Blow admitted. "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."
The PlayStation Portable would be the most likely candidate for a Braid port, Blow went on, but only if Sony can pull its collective finger out on the downloadable games front.
"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," he said.
"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)."
More encouragingly, Blow revealed that he was "talking to some folks about ports to other platforms." One for the PSP’s fatso high definition sibling, perhaps? Cross those fingers.