So, to wind down after fourteen hour coding days ( ! ), I’ve recently been playing Enslaved: Odyssey to the West on the PS3. (Which means that druid and Jaysen should feel free to avoid this thread, given that they believe computer games are the first sign of the apocalypse.) My computer-game playing is rather sporadic: it takes a very good game to get me involved. I buy a fair few games, play them for an hour and never touch them again - there are too many decent books to read and films to watch, after all. (I say that, but really I spend most of my spare time watching bad TV, staring into space, and fiddling on my laptop, feeling guilty that I’m not reading a good book or doing something more constructive instead.) But about once or twice a year, if I’m lucky, I find a game that I like enough to play to the end over a few weeks. I’m always sorry when I finish them, too, because I enjoy being involved in a well-created virtual world (no matter how shallow that enjoyment might be compared to analogue media) and I know it will be months before I find another I like.
So: Enslaved is just such a game - exactly the sort of thing I enjoy, being both beautiful to look at and also involving a variation of puzzles, action and climbing. But no one cares about that, and you can find reviews online if you’re into that sort of thing. No, the main thing - the absolutely coolest thing - is this:
It’s based, however loosely, on Monkey Magic!
I loved that show! Altogether now:
Born from an egg on a mountain top…
Uh, yeah, back to coding then.
P.S. On a related note, my son recently came home from school to tell me he and his friends had been playing “Call of Duty” at playtime. It turns out that he meant they had been playing what I used to call “soldiers” - English and Germans shooting each other (no comments on the actual constitution of Allies and Axis, please, I’m just reporting how it is in the brain of a six-year-old). Upon hearing this, for a moment I shared druid and Jaysen’s horror of computer games, and was appalled to realise that my son’s generation’s idea of war and battles come from video games. Until I remembered that when I was six my own knowledge didn’t exactly come from burying my head in history books, but from old war movies - which were probably even less realistic.
