It is a fact of life that things will be bootlegged. (commonly called pirated, but this is one area where I strongly agree with rms. Piracy is a horrible thing where people get kidnapped on the ocean and die. I have in-law relatives who have died from pirates. So I don’t find it cute to compare that with people who acquire things without paying for them) We usually think of digital items, but go to Chinatown in New York and you’ll see the same thing going on with physical objects. So what’s a company to do? My least favorite route is digital restrictions management (DRM) because it just makes things a real pain in the butt for legitimate users. (It also makes criminals of people who just want to rip their DVDs and BluRays to their laptops or media centers) My favorite tactic (which works best with games, but I’ve seen it with music and movies), is to mess with the person who didn’t pay for it. I’ve seen games that are extremely mean about it (mean being in the eye of the beholder since these people didn’t pay for the game) where they make it so that the final bad guy is unbeatable (after all those hours!). Others glitch out halfway through.  Game Dev Tycoon developer Greenheart Games was able to use the subject of their game (in which you’re a game developer - META!) to come up with a unique solution. On the same day the game came out, they started a torrent with a slightly modified version of the game. It works just like the paid version for a while.  Then you get this message from your developers:

In addition to the game I played this month, I’ve decided from now on to  include a running total of the top games to see if/how they change with time. For example, when I wasn’t paying attention, Saints Row: The Third made the Top 7.  (Which, raptr, is a weird number.  Usually these things are multiples of five)

I am really, really enjoying building up my city.  There are new zoning densities that open up as you get more and more populous.  For a while I was using a strategy similar to what’s going on in my in-law’s neighborhood - raze the single family homes to build apartments.  Then later raze those to build sky-rises.  But then I abandoned that for suburban sprawl since the map was so huge.  As most people (I think) do in these city simulation games, I started off with an area similar to what happens in real life.  In order to keep taxes low, you don’t want long roads separating your citizens from their jobs.  So the first residential area is kinda dingy and exists near some really dirty industrial manufacturing.  So I decided to build a nicer part of town, with more parks and cleaner air, across the river.  However, they still needed to get to work, so traffic started building up on the bridge.  So I had to make another and another and…..

Saints Row: The Third (3 hrs) - I finished Saint’s Row: The Third in March. Overall, my enjoyment suffered a bit from a lack of play, but it was necessary due to planning for Scarlett’s birthday and starting a new semester of my graduate work. In the final mission you’re given a choice of pursuing Killbane or saving Shaundi.  Angel de la Muerte asks you to go after Killbane because of their personal relationship, but I went after Shaundi because I thought that’s what my character would have done - he goes back with Shaundi way further than with Angel.  Also, I was reading a walkthrough to help me get through the last mission as quickly as possible and (which influenced me to upgrade to the point where I could summon tanks and helicopters).  So I knew I’d face off with Killbane in the Ganstas in Space DLC.  The mission was awesome with “I need a hero” playing in the background as I raced to save her.  It’s the perfect song for looping without getting annoying.  But I felt the ending was way too anti-climactic.  There isn’t even any fallout from Angel for having not chosen to pursue Killbane.  Then I got to Gangstas in Space.  The walkthrough I’d been reading didn’t mention it was essentially the movie the Third Street Saints were in.  (I think it was mentioned throughout the game, but I’d forgotten)  So while I DID faceoff with Killbane, it wasn’t a true battle.

I first played Cities XL in May of 2011.  I last played a year ago in April 2012.  At the time I said I couldn’t wait until Sim City came out.  However, we know what a fiasco that has become.  So, discouraged about playing Sim City I decided to load up Cities XL.  This is the first one - not 2011, 2012, or Deluxe.  The graphics are pretty amazing and rival anything in the current Sim City.

Saint’s Row: The Third (15 hrs) - I played a lot of fun missions, including Deckers.die, but in order to get there I had to get Dan’s help on this helicopter escort mission.  It was fun having him join in.  I might need him in March as I finish up the game.

First of all, a quick reminder that my Game of the Year doesn’t necessarily have to come out in 2012.  Because I don’t have the time to dedicate to video games, the price premium of buying it new rarely makes sense to me.  So my Game of the Year will be my favorite game that I played in 2012.

As I compiled my list I realized that I played a lot less games in 2012.  I may not have played a lot less hours (I haven’t bothered comparing the totals with 2011), but I definitely had a lot less variety.  A lot of that has to do with the birth of my daughter this year.  Only as the year has gone on have I been able to carve out some time here and there to play story-based games.  In addition, I resumed pursuing my master’s degree in the fall, right around the time I was able to have a bit more time to myself.  I didn’t have any gameplay at all in March, September or October.

Saint’s Row the Third (14 hrs):  I got a lot of video games for my birthday and Christmas (mostly on Steam).  So I wanted to finish up the last narrative game I had started before playing those games.  I played a few missions in Saint’s Row The Third.  As I had surmised before, the loose narrative based mostly on archetypes and stereotypes made it extremely easy to jump in.  It wasn’t like in Mass Effect or Final Fantasy 10 where I couldn’t remember why I should be caring about these characters.  The missions with the VTOL planes (STAG missions) were pretty hard.

Civilization V (17 hrs) - I took advantage of the Steam Fall Sale to finally pick up the Gods and Kings expansion to Civ V.  I have enjoyed founding my own religion, Otakuism.  Religion plays a much more key role than they did in Civ IV.  In the previous game, I would pretty much just found a religion because each city would pay me gold (with certain buildings or government choices) and I’d get a window into cities.  In Civ V the religion plays like another level of policies.  You get to choose a series of attributes for your religion such as temples giving you gold or faster territory expansion.  It tends to make the expansion of religion to other cities and civs a much more important task than before.  I’m still a little unsure of how cities pressure other cities to adopt religion because I seemed to have one city flipping even though I couldn’t see any reason for it.  (Could have been another civ sending prophets my way)  Spies are also added.  The spy missions remind me of Assassin’s Creed:Brotherhood  assassin missions.  Unlike previous iterations of Civ, the spies aren’t on the map.  You assign them to a city or city-state and then they either steal you tech (which may not be useful if you’re super advanced and/or playing normal or easier), rig elections in city states (gaining you influence), or protect your cities from being screwed over by other spies.  I must admit that I haven’t done much investigating in the civclopedia, but I can’t really see how to generate more spies and so the whole system seems like a mini-game diversion.  I continued my strategy of non-aggression unless another civ attacks me or denounces me.  Then I drop my hammer on them and take over their capital city and, sometimes, eliminate them entirely.  I like that the requirements on resources for building some units has been reconfigured.  I usually ended up not using a lot of early-game siege weapons because iron tended to be too scarce.  I think it’s a lot more balanced on which units need resources like oil, iron, and horses than before the expansion pack.

Recently I was putting away my old video game systems into deep storage.  The Playstation 2 hadn’t been played in a year and I didn’t want to clutter up my entertainment console with unused systems.  So I started exploring the emulation landscape on last generation’s systems.  Would I be able to play last generation’s games on my computer if it tickled my fancy?  It turns out that, at least for Playstation 1 and 2, they work just as well as on the system for all the games I own.  When I first discovered emulators, I used them to play Chrono Trigger in the high school library when I was bored.  When I went back to them in college, it was to play arcade games from my childhood on MAME.