Nostalgia

Last night, a Friday, and my wife out for a leaving do... her's I think, and here I was, home alone with my chips and OJ, playing two olde games that I haven't played in some 15 years, thanks to the guys over at: SCUMM for creating the portal on which to play. Now, I'm a nostalgic fellow, often playing a song, and instantly recalling a time when I first heard it, or when it was played a lot - seeing, visually the place and the people in that lost time when... when I was happy.

Ah, halcyon days of playing for hours in a friend's bedroom... on their Amiga... AMIGA (not playing of any other sort, thank you). Possibly a wasted youth when I look around now at what other people are capable of, time that I spent playing computer games, they've learnt things, moved on.

Nostalgia is such a personal thing, but it wasn't just for nostalgia that I returned to Monkey Island 2, and Beneath a Steel Sky. I remembered that adventure games of their ilk had great stories that appeared laid far more bare than these days - where the story is so linked in with an action game that you feel like you're watching a movie. No, these felt pure... often annoying the convoluted manner of their puzzles, certainly epic, as a Saturday night sleep over quickly ran into the wee hours of Sunday morning (at twelve, by late Sunday, trust me, you'd wished you'd slept. School was always hell the next day)... but definitely pure, so much so, that having spent hours, days, weeks, months trying to suss out the puzzles, you'd fall in love with the characters just as you do with TV series' these days. So much so that the denument would have that same end-of-season feeling you get when Lost, 24, or Heroes concludes.

Ah, the sweet pleasure of total immersive entertainment.