This game that’s been capturing nearly all my free time in February was an impulse buy.  At $10 I might have passed it up, but in a midweek sale it was $5 and I decided it looked interesting enough to pick up.  This is a great example of what I spoke about here with respect to getting more people to buy a digital good by putting it on sale even if they don’t have shelf space to clear.  Part of what drew me to the game was the decidedly retro-futuristic art style.  It gives the game a very unique set of visuals.  The 1920-40s music (I’m not 100% sure which decade) also helps add to the atmosphere.

This is just a mini blog post I’m going to try and remember to do monthly to keep track of the games I played to make it easier to tally up for the end of the year “Games of 2011” blog post.

Assassin’s Creed II - 27 hours Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood - 25 hrs blogged about them here and here.

The Secret of Monkey Island - 4.5 hrs blogged about it here.

Greed Corp - 8 hrs An awesome little game I bought on Steam on a whim during a mid-week sale. More to appear about this game in the future.

Back at the beginning of January, I compared the first and second installments in the Assassin’s Creed main line of games. A couple weeks ago I finished up Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood, a continuation of Desmond and Ezio’s stories. I don’t have too much more to add to what I wrote about the second game before. For the most part, I feel the same about it as before. The ending was pretty awesome. It took what you learned about the pieces of Eden from the first game and turned it to 11. Reading through TVtropes, I learned that I missed out on a bit of backstory in the first game by not getting on the Abstergo computer. The same could easily happen if you don’t do the optional Subject 16 puzzles in Assassin’s Creed II. As someone who LOVE getting into a game’s universe/backstory I’m a bit miffed that these bits are so optional. On the one hand, it’s great for those who don’t give a crap about the backstory and just want to assassinate some dudes. But it’s really easy to miss how epic the game really is. If it weren’t for the backstory, I wouldn’t be as anxious as I am for the next installment to come out. Unfortunately for my pocketbook, the smart money is on Ubisoft annualizing the Assassins’ Creed series. This may mean we don’t get a good, conclusive ending. Of course, they could go in the super-creative route and give a satisfactory ending and then have new games just fill in story in the past or with other assassin groups.

As with my discussion of Recettear, playing The Secret of Monkey Island involved revisiting a gaming genre from my past.  Unlike Recettear, TSoMI is not a parodic look back at an old genre, it is an original game from that time period.  TSoMI is an adventure game, a genre that is pretty much only kept alive through the LucasArts Telltale Games ( edit: thanks for the fix, Dan) who is re-releasing old games like the Monkey Island series, publishing new takes on old games like Monkey Island, Sam and Max, and publishing completely new games like Back to the Future.

It’s funny, growing up, I loved Square’s RPGs, but I really only played two of them - Chrono Trigger and Final Fantasy 6 (originally released as 3 in the US).  They just left THAT MUCH of an impression.  And not just on me, they profoundly affected Dan as well.  Alas, Nintendo losing the license to the Square games resulted in my losing out on playing the games as they came out.  It was the main motivation for me buying a used Playstation in college and for eventually getting a PS2.  I’ve played way more on my PS3 (which I’ve only had for about a year - 2 years max).  Why?  Because I kinda lost the somewhat infinite free time I had in my youth.  On top of that, when I’ve played through 7, 9, and parts of 8 and 10, I start to wonder if maybe these games were more amazing to my middle school self than they would ever be to my adult self.

During Giant Bomb’s Game of the Year deliberations, one of the panelists was talking about how the difference between Pacman and Pacman Championship Edition DX reflects the difference in video game design over the past thirty years.  The original Pacman is a stress-enducing game while Pacman CE DX is an empowering experience.  Pacman punishes you for the smallest mistake, only gives you four power pellets per maze, and gets more punishing the further you go.  By contrast, Pacman CE DX uses a bullet-time effect to give you a chance to turn past ghosts you might otherwise have crashed into, the power pellet regenerate, and the game becomes generally more fun the faster and more frenetic it gets.  The ghosts, save one or two, follow you around and aren’t much of a menace unless you come back around to your tail as in the game snake or need to exit through a hole where a sleeping ghost waits.  And this wasn’t limited to Pacman, tvtropes has a whole trope dedicated to this called Nintendo hard.  Why has this change come about?

Because I rarely play games when they first come out, I had the occasion to play Assassin’s Creed and Assassin’s Creed II back-to-back.  As I’ve mentioned before ( near the end of the post ) getting to experience sequels one after another can yield some benefits over waiting years in between.  (Plus, in the case of stuff like Harry Potter (which I haven’t read yet) you don’t have the tension between books)  In this case, it was interesting to see how much had changed while keeping the core game the same.  There may be some very mild spoilers below, but I’m trying to keep it so that you can read it even if you intend to play the games.

I played a lot of games this year.  Perhaps more than in any previous year since leaving high school.  Since I usually don’t buy games when they first come out, the winner will not necessarily be a game that came out this year.  I went to my raptr page and took a look at all the games I played this year.  Following is a list of the games and a little about what I thought of them.  At the end will be my pick for 2010.

I was on the phone with my dad a couple weekends ago and he asked if I was playing Civilization 5.  He’d heard that Dan was playing it and was surprised that it was still around and Dan and I were still playing it.  I told him I was playing it and reminded him that it was he who indirectly got us stuck on the series.

Back in the old days of the early 1990s, no one gave a second thought to sharing computer software with each other.  Most people didn’t know about the public Internet or BBSes so, for the most part, there was no onerous digital restriction management (DRM) to keep people from sharing software.  Some games had codes that you had to type in which were found in the manual, but manuals could be photocopied - after all, there were no authentication servers to connect to.  I’ve spoken about this before, but those early “wild west” days lay the seeds for my software purchases over the last decade.  A friend lent me 3.5” disks of Sim City 2000.  I played that sucker everywhere.  I’d take it wherever there would be computers and install it there to play until my parents said it was time to go.  To this day, I’ve bought all the mainline Sim City products and expansion packs.  So, who’s to say that today’s illicit software users aren’t building up affinities for software brands they’ll be loyal to when they have the cash.

To finish up talking about the game I left off in my last post, I won my first civ 5 game via conquest - a new one for me.  I usually turtle and do a culture victory or science victory.  It was only near the end of my time playing Civ IV that I started to become comfortable with domination victories.  I ended up with a score of 2679, a score I have yet to best.  The way the ending is now structured makes it easy to miss the old charts and graphs they’d always make you click through.  So on that first game I missed out on finding out what historical leader I compared with.  And, there doesn’t seem to be a way to access that.  Other thoughts from this first game include that the construction pace feels a bit slower (like less buildings units built in a game) and Dan concurred once he played his own games.  Great people now make their buildings outisde the city.  This makes using them to make their special building more of a strategic process than in Civ IV.  Great artists make monuments and those could end up obliterating a farm or some other tile modification.  A final fun bit of art imitating life: in this game the Americans had taken over middle east.