A couple of months ago I acquired a Nintendo DS game console, a second hand one to be precise and the main reason was that I had bought a game a month before the console! The game in question is quite famous, it’s called “Professor Layton and the curious village”
Now, on the packet it says “for years 7+”… but that didn’t put me off, I played the whole thing and I have to say I loved it!
The music is particularly lovely, and the video sequences are really good, the graphic is detailed and the puzzles are very interesting, some being quite easy, others a bit time consuming.
Buying something that mainly 9 year olds have made me think a bit.
Am I too old for this? I share the console with my daughter, who is completely in love with her “Nintendogs” game (which came with the console and 2 other games).
All this thinking led me to the conclusion that I am part of the first generation of computer lovers, being born in ‘75, I was about 11 when the Commodore 64 came out and we loved to play games on it, even waiting 20 minutes for the tape to load one very simple platform game didn’t put us off, I had friends coming round to play and spent many afternoons at my best friend’s house playing “Mission impossible” (which of course we never finished).
In bars we could play on the big machines, and it was either Street Fighter or Tetris.
Then I had the Game boy (only ever played Tetris on that one and was very happy too!!!).
Then came proper computers, I never was able to do any programming but I played my fair share of games, some of them I remember very fondly, “Little big Adventure”,”Alone in the Dark”(the first one), “Theme Hospital” (hilarious!!!) and “Ultima underworld”, and of course I played “Quake”, “Duke Nukem”, and “Tomb Raider”…
We now have a Playstation 2 which we use mainly as a dvd player, but I have a couple of games, and recently discovered “Katamari”, which is a crazy Japanese game in which you just have to roll a sticky ball to which objects stick…
I don’t feel I wasted my time playing all those hours, it was a fun thing to do with friends, and it’s a bit like reading a book, which I also do, and a lot more than playing games.
I won’t be one of those parents complaining of their children playing violent games all day long, it’s a bit like complaining that your child is reading De Sade, it’s all a matter of balance in the end, it’s normal for children to try as much as they can, and if something has a reputation of being bad for you then it will be the first thing they want to try.
I have read De Sade and played violent games and ended up being a vegetarian!
Tags: computer games