The unthinkable!

I grew up in the era when computers were merely entertainment machines with green and black screens and requiring actual floppy disks to do anything at all; I was over the moon when I hit seventh grade and was able to type papers instead of writing them longhand.  By then the computer games had also evolved to include color and an attempt at 3-D graphics.  It was also about this time I fell in love with the Sim games (no, not the Sims, but the less flashy and far more interesting forebears including Sim Ant, Sim Farm, and Sim Earth (I was never a Sim City fan...too bucolic!)).  I spent hours (months?) mastering the games.  But, as with all great games, the technology evolved and those beloved classics are now but a thing of myth and legend.  I've dabbled in a few of the more modern 'app' games of a similar mien but haven't found anything that captivated me like those old floppy games did.  Either the world was tedious and uncreative or there was too much waiting or ad time or there was no point or strategy or challenge.

I had given up on anything even half so interesting as my childhood favorites, wondering if all creativity had died with the new millennium, but happily I was wrong.  This last week I ran across a game called Dragonvale, and I am hooked.  It is something like Sim Farm meets Pokeman (I've only played the version for the original gameboy) without those silly 'matches.'  It makes both my biology nerd and fantasy geek sides happy and it may also do the impossible for this 'must have satisfaction this instant' generation, namely making you wait up to two days to breed some of the rarer dragons; it's almost like surfing the internet via dial-up!  The art work is beautiful, there is geeky genius and humor everywhere, you can't master it in three days but there is enough to keep you occupied that you don't give up in despair either.  Overall, I'm very happy with my discovery, and even better, unlike some games where the more you tap the more things happen, there is a limited amount of things you can do before having to wait, forcing you to have a real, non-virtual life.  Who thought an app could teach you patience?