[The posts for this month are reposts from the site www.honotogroabemo.org, on which a host of hirsute individuals including yours truly would grow beards to raise money for breast cancer research. The site is defunct, but I thought I’d resurrect the game-related posts. This was originally posted on 2011-11-21.]

(And on the seventh day there was gin)

So look at this planet I have created. Perhaps I will populate it with little people and make them dance to my will! Though I should probably create some land first, or give them some boats, lest they drown.

Day Twenty featured a heroine who likes to take pictures. One possibility is Fatal Frame, where you take pictures of ghosts to defeat them. Another is Pokemon Snap, where you get Pokemon to do fashion poses (beats using them in a glorified dog-fighting ring). In retrospect, both would have qualified as vintage, being more than 10 years old. But silly me, I go for the more recent Beyond Good and Evil, which also has the distinction of having the most obscure title of the set. In this game, the heroine, Jade, is a photojournalist who uses her camera to collect evidence against the evil government. It’s most an action-adventure game, but also sort of a sandbox game, in that there is a large world to explore and you expose the game’s plot as you go.

Beyond Good and Evil reviewed well, but possibly because Prince of Persia: Sands of Time got most of the marketing budget that season it sold poorly. Despite that, an HD version was created in 2011 for download from Playstation Network and Xbox Live, and there is a sequel in the works [still is – Ed.], so stay tuned for more adventures of Jade.