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?

I recently saw Terry Gilliam’s Brazil after hearing discussion of the main character being a hacker as part of a recurring segment on The Command Line where the podcaster compares characters from literature and movies to hackers (in the original sense of the word).  Watching this 1985 movie in 2011 was a very interesting experience.

***WARNING: there may be spoilers ahead***

Just to get this out of the way: Brazil does not take place in Brazil.  It takes place in some unnamed country full of British speaking people and a couple of people with American accents.  The title of the movie comes from a famous song (in our world as well as the world of the movie) that often has its title shortened to Brazil.  Temporally, the movie takes place “in the future”.  The country depicted in this future is very similar to George Orwell’s 1984, complete with Ministry of Truth-like propaganda posters up all over the place.

I have three main hobbies: photography, my webcomic and programming.  After spending a year working on my 365 Project, I’ve been taking a lot less photos as that part of my brain takes a break.  After working with Dan to get the story for INM worked out through May of this year and working on strips that will appear this March, I wanted to take a bit of a break from that.  The one bit of code I wrote for myself that I use on a daily basis is my flickr views code.

You can see it here online and get your own. It’s all my 365 project this time.

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.

It took a bit of convincing from Dan, but eventually I read the Scott Pilgrim graphic novels.  I knew right away that this was a book written for people like me.  Just like Dr Horrible’s Sing-a-long Blog, people older or younger than me would never get the full appreciation of all the references.  I thoroughly hated the eponymous protagonist until I got near the end of the book and realized why he was so annoying.  So, once my brother got the movie on Blu-ray, I knew it’d be just a matter of time before I saw it.  I think the movie’s casting was spot-on.  The actors who played Kim Pine, Knives Chau, Wallace Well, and Young Neil were perfect.  Their delivery (and, to some extent, appearance) was exactly what I pictured it would be like.  Michael Cera was even a really good choice for Scott.  He wasn’t as perfect, but he did a good job and it fit his acting abilities.  Ramona Flowers’ actress was also good, although not as great as the others.

See it on their site and get your own here.

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.

Here’s your calendar for January 2011.  It’s a goose getting dry on top of a shelf of ice on a lake that was partially frozen over.  Click on the image you want then right-click to set it as your background or save it to your computer and then set it that way.

For Square Monitors:

[caption id=“attachment_4012” align=“aligncenter” width=“400” caption=“Jan 2011 background for square monitors”] [/caption]

I wrote this code a while back because a website that does the same thing seemed to miss my posts every other week.  So I figured I’d write my own in python to do the same thing to me.  Then I just put it into a cron job to automatically run it every Sunday.  I’m going to be posting the code on my GPL code page.  Here it is for you to see and for Google to index.  Just fill in the appropriate variables with the secret keys you get from each site’s API.