Free at Last...

Wednesday, I bought SimCity for the iPhone. Electronic Arts was having a sale, so I got it for $0.99. It has the graphics of SC4, but seems to be based on the original SimCity. I played with it off and on, and was having lots of fun.

Then yesterday, I got home, and immediately went to Facebook, and was about to "play" Castle Age.

Castle Age is (or was) the last clicky game I was playing. But it hit me that the game serves no purpose. Okay, even less purpose than other computer games. It doesn't make you think. It doesn't improve hand-eye coordination. You just click and are told a result. You can rarely fail unless your army is too small.

So yesterday, I made the decision to stop playing Castle Age. I went to the invite section of Facebook, and clicked once on "Block Application".

Then I went and read for an hour. I was getting sleepy, so I thought I would go make one last check for FB updates, and then go to bed. While sitting at the computer, I thought about loading SimCity 4 on the laptop, and playing for a bit. I got out the CDs from the big CD book and started the installation.

But then I saw that it required a code from the original CD case. I didn't have that in the office anymore, just the book of all the install CDs I have. So I went to the garage and got down the two file boxes of computer documentation. Digging through, I found that I had put the insert from the CD case in the booklet. So happily, I put the boxes back, and completed the installation.

Then suddenly it was 12:30 AM, and I'd been playing with my first city for an hour and a half.

Now, I'm thinking I'm going to have to do a personal computer game retrospective. Not necessarily on all of the games I used to play, but definitely all the systems. I don't know if I'll start later today or tomorrow. It'll have to depend on how the day goes.