4.3 - Who is John Galt? Is he a gamer?

I enjoy video games. I enjoy them quite a bit, actually. Unfortunately, life is short, and the choices many, so I don't get to partake as often as I'd like. I'm sure my playing time will be even more limited as the job hunt continues and the semester progresses.

Since the kids were so great on our cross-country excursion, I bought me, er, them a Wii. What an amazingly fun piece of equipment that is. I know it has to be good exercise, too; the day after we hooked it up I was sore (my arms and back -- not my thumbs!).

I think Nintendo has been paying attention. Perhaps they've been learning from Apple's commitment to giving the customer what they want. The Wii does just enough, but not too much. It's simple to use and so much fun. I think I can even say that having played both Wii Golf and real-life mini-golf in the last week, I'd rather play on the Wii.

This wasn't supposed to be about the Wii. It's just so darned fun...

My favorite computer games have always been the ones most often labelled "First-Person Shooters." Whether you're actually shooting or not, I like putting myself into the game. Doom, Half-life, Myst, Unreal, Grand Theft Auto--all great (I can't wait to play a FPS on the Wii... sweet!... again I digress).

Anyway, I recently began hearing about BioShock, a new FPS which is set in Rapture, an underwater version of Ayn Rand's capitalist utopia gone awry. I think Ayn Rand got a lot of things right--most things perhaps--so that interests me. A friend of mine says the game is creepy. I'm not a huge fan of creepy, though I suppose half-life could be called creepy (FWIW, the Half-Life 2 soundtrack is perfect for halloween).

One review calls the world of BioShock "beautiful, brutal, and disquieting." It uses such great phrases as "moral conundrum" and "dystopian fantasy." I am intensely curious. There are few things as interesting as a post-apocalyptic world--especially one originally envisioned as a utopia. One of these nights I'll have to download the demo...