It’s the year of the cat for the Vietnamese Zodiac.  Here’s wishing you happiness, prosperity, and health.  If you want to find out your animal, just visit my Vietnamese Zodiac web app.

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.

[caption id=“attachment_4108” align=“aligncenter” width=“400” caption=“Assassin’s Creed II (photo by SingleBuilder)”] [/caption]

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.

Here’s the background for February.  A little shoutout to my alma mater.  Click on the image and then right click to set as your desktop or save to your computer to manually set to the desktop.

[caption id=“attachment_4050” align=“aligncenter” width=“400” caption=“Feb 2011 desktop for more square monitors (1024x768)”] [/caption]

[caption id=“attachment_4051” align=“aligncenter” width=“480” caption=“Feb 2011 desktop for widescreen monitors (1680x1050)”] [/caption]

I’ve had a few changes. My photo of professor Delchamps continues to fall from #1 and we have the Tweedle Dee & Tweedle Dum photo enter the top 10 for the first time.

#1 11,699

#2 5,362

#3 2,785

#4 2,485

One awesome thing that is easy to notice in free/libre software is how international it is.  While proprietary software is mainly based out of the US - Windows/OSX - free/libre software comes from all over the place. Mandriva is based out of Brazil and France.  SUSE was originally developed in Germany.  Miguel de Icaza, one of the founders of Gnome, was born in Mexico.  Choqok, the best KDE-native microblogging software is created by an Iranian.  So something that Linux has always done better than Windows is support more languages. Microsoft has to pay to create language translations so they have to make a market analysis about which languages to support (and it still doesn’t cover non-Microsoft programs)  With Linux, it’s all volunteer work (or paid by companies that care about localization) and if the programs are written correctly for KDE and Gnome, they will all be able to take advantage of the translation work for their program.  “Save” should probably translate well across all well-written programs.  I think this is one of the reason why all the regions of Spain have their own Linux distros.  I don’t know this for a fact, but I would guess that Windows probably only comes out in Castillian (official or regular Spanish) and not in Catalan, Andalusian, Basque, etc

[caption id=“attachment_4063” align=“aligncenter” width=“406” caption=“Yes, patience may be needed….”] [/caption]

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?