Methinks that the people that accuse it of plagiarizing Mario don't realize a few things:
1) It's OBVIOUS that there are 2 homages to Mario - with the princess/castle thing, and the Donkey Kong level.
2) Being able to jump on enemies' heads to defeat them it totally against why they are there. In Mario, you jump on their heads to score points, and such. In Braid, the enemies are parts of the puzzles themselves: You have to use them many times, to obtain specific puzzle pieces. So the enemies are critical to your success, in Mario, they are there for you to fail.
Thats why Braid is counter-intuitive to what we see in the Platform genre. And why it's a sudden masterpiece. If you didn't know about Braid, and it's "all of a sudden", it's because you haven't bothered looking at the big XBLA games that were coming up. Braid hype has been around for 6+ months now, and many knew it had the chance of getting the scores that it's currently receiving.
Back from the dead, I'm afraid.
