Guilty Pleasure Games

In the random intermittent phases that my internet decides to have a paddy and refuse to connect I have decided to type out my very first blog entry.

The release of Sims 3 inspired me to have a search around and look for the Sims 2 as I haven't played it in an awfully long time. Of course, as is always the way when I look for things, I couldn't find it anywhere but came across many other hidden distractions along the way. These reminded me just how good computer games of the past have been.

I'm not an avid gamer. I feel slighltly nauseous just walking past the shop front of GAME or the such like and having a quick peek inside to see the greasy teenage boys hunched over and shuffling intently along row upon row of homogenous boxes, harsh fluorescent strip lighting bouncing off their mottled, crater like skin, occasionally stopping to sweep the greasy tendrils of hair from out of their bloodshot eyes to get a closer look at Final World of Fantasy Empires 4.3 or whatever. However, some games really do just transcend all stereotypes, all target markets and seem to me to be just utterly wonderful.

Theme Hospital. Absolutely, inimitably, utterly butterly, inexplicably incredible. Why should a game in which you run a place where most people (staff and visitors alike) would be extremely hardpushed to describe as 'fun' be so... fun? Why should I take such joy in reaching a cure count of 234 virtual illnesses of virtual people? And why, at the age of twenty, with the whole of London to amuse and entertain me, a shelf full of pristine, unread books and the pressing issue of academic work do I sit for hours on end sprawled out across my bed with laptop, quite rightly, on lap redirecting emergency patients to the psychiatric ward to cure their 'TV Personalities' and getting irate that my surgeons will just not seem to stay put in the operating theatre. It's a bloody nightmare.

Similarly, Sim City 4, Theme Park World and Timon and Pumbaa's Jungle Games seem to have the same pull on me. The only downside is that Vista seems to make playing them incredibly difficult or impossible, forcing me to other pursuits such as humble solitaire, or you know, visiting friends, finally rounding up the mugs (with contents in various states of decay) that surround me like a fortress and taking them down to the kitchen to be washed (sterilised, bleached, binned... depending on their contents) or perhaps even looking into getting a real job where my efforts can be used for actual, real gain and acheivement. Perhaps.