I came across this amazing story today in the HK tabloids:

http://www.thestandard.com.hk/news_detail.asp?pp_cat=21&art_id=90928&sid=26184474&con_type=1&d_str=20091123&sear_year=2009

There was a bunch of about 18 ladies, (a good proportion from HK and the mainland) who went onto a two day matchmaking event on a yacht in Shenzhen. They were brought in as dating potentials or matches, to match with 15 wealthy 'multimillionaire' batchelors from the mainland. The event was organised and brought together by a dating agency.

According to the reports about 9 couples had been successfully matched so far, one of whom were was a 26 year old girl matching up with a 39 year old man, who apparently looked like Chow Yun Fat and was just as wealthy! The girl apparently had her dreams come true because she wanted to marry a rich man.....

All this makes me think.......what is the price of love?

I dunno about you guys, but I have a real big secret love in life that I so far haven't yet divulged on these pages. What is it you wonder? It's the subject of.........adventure games!!! 

Recently I came across some games emulators for my PC and Mac, and came across some stuff that really brought back a lot of memories for me when I was a kid.

Ever since I was young, I'd always been a fan of really well-made adventure games. From Police Quest to Maniac Mansion; Zak McKraken to Martian Memorandum; or Monkey Island/Grim Fandango/Zork to Sam & Max/Leisure Suit Larry......I'd been a huge fan of the genre. I started playing when I was about 9, and I'm still playing them so-to-speak. Although in modern days its called an RPG under the name of WOW (World of Warcraft), Final Fantasy, Assassin's Creed or Dragon's Age Origins, its focus remains the same.....its exploration. But where it differs to the modern RPGs is that, there is a lot of descriptive text involved, which gives it a really good storyline.

Before the advent of modern computer games on systems like the Commodore Amiga, Atari ST and PC, I started off on adventure gaming with books. In the mid 80s in Britain, when home computing was just starting and imagination was the game of the day, there was a very famous author by the name of Ian Livingstone who created these really wonderful 'adventure gaming books'.

For example, one of the titles I remembered was called 'The City of Thieves'. Just thinking the title alone really got to me (remember, I was a kid then!). And what these books differed from the normal fiction books you normally read, was that you made decisions as you were reading the book.

What I loved about these books was that the book itself would have different numbered pages, and not all paragraphs were in order. There was a reason for this. It was because as you read the page, at the end of the paragraph, YOU had to make a decision. And depending on your chosen decision, you had to turn to the relevant numbered page (through the roll of a die), and then see what would happen next! 

Say for example you were a thief in the 'City of Thieves' book. After the short introduction to your character on the first page, it would describe you were in fact running away from a band of orcs having stolen one of their artefacts say. So at the end of that page, it would say you ran and came towards a corridor. Then it would ask you 'Do you want to go left, or do you want to go right?'. So then you would roll your die. If you wanted to go left, it would have to be a certain low number and you turn to page 15, and if you wanted to go right it would be a 5 or 6 say, and so you turn to page 36. It was so clever and unpredictable that during my younger years I had bought almost the entire collection of those books. It was so much fun! I really loved the series, specially the book about the future worlds where there were robots involved!!

Anyways.....shortly after my book reading adventures, I gravitated onto computers, as the home versions just started to appear then. At the time, text adventures were the hottest things of the day! I started my first text-based adventure when I was about 7 on a BBC B Micro, on a game called Sphinx Adventure. I still remember it. To load the game I had to play tape to the machine! It was so old fashioned! At the time the game was controlled by very basic commands. As you read the page you had to type in stuff like GO NORTH, GO WEST, PICK UP LAMP etc to navigate. While it was tedious, it certainly made life fun, especially after school where my local secondary also had it installed!

Now as you may know, this was way before the Playstation era, so we didn't have good graphics about, especially on the BBC (even though it could move blocky objects). But around 1986, an innovative British company called Magnetic Scrolls brought about probably the first graphic-intensive text based adventures onto the computer market. Beginning with the Amiga and Atari ST, they brought out what I consider to be the most original and most fondly remembered games I'd ever played. I remembered one day in July 1985, a friend of my dad's brought over an Amiga 1000 computer for me to try. This was a huge computer with a PC keyboard, mouse and a 3.5" disk drive. The computer had a 256K memory slot on the front of the case, and was brand spanking new with a rare 16-bit colour screen. It was one of the first units to arrive in the UK at that time, and the reason I knew this was because our friend had just finished reviewing the unit for a UK computer magazine!

Because it was an early machine, I was given only two games at the time. The first I remembered was Marble Madness by EOA (now known as EA or Electronic Arts) which was a hugely addictive game using a mouse (which was really really futuristic then!). And the second was The Pawn by Magnetic Scrolls. This had a musical score on the front (a first for a computer game at that time!) and is considered (I think) one of the most beautifully illustrated games of all time.

This was the box cover of The Pawn:

and this was one of the screenshots I was confronted with! (this version I took from my Mac Magnetic Scrolls emulator).

They had another game called Guild of Thieves. This is one of the screenshots from that game:

Our friend lent the Amiga to me to try out for a month, and was probably one of the most memorable moments I've had, where I felt really inspired both by computers, and by storytelling in the most elegant and inspiring way! 

So currently President Obama is visiting China and Asia.....what more can I say? Other than he is very welcome in my home country, I believe most Chinese are proud to have him here. For the first time, we have someone in the Oval Office who is humble by any account, and not displaying any form of arrogance the moment they touch down. Far removed from policies of before, this is certainly a welcome development. Sadly it takes might and money for China to show this before anybody listens to them.......such is the ironies of life. If only they displayed this level of courtesy to China much earlier in history........maybe things would have been better for all......

In the light of his visit, the question of 'economy' and the current world slump/crisis springs to my mind. I've often pondered this question, and think to myself 'what can we do as individuals and people or nations, in this current world crisis, to help avert the situation?'. My suggestion would be simply........to spend money. 

After a long thought, I've come to this very simple answer because I've realised.....this is the only way we are going to get out of our rut (at the moment) until we have a better solution than our current system. The truth is, if we do not spend the money it is going to be sitting there, and it's going to do nobody any good whatsoever. Look at the economies of the UK vs Germany for instance. The UK economy has been lasting the longest in all of Europe because of heavy consumer spending the last few years, whereas in Germany it was virtually stagnant because everyone was just saving and unwilling to spend. It shouldn't be like this........

My recommendation to all my friends and family is........if you can afford it, spend it. If you want something, just go and buy it.....you will be helping a lot of people in the process. Keep some of it, but above all, try to utilise it in some way......invest it or give it away, but don't keep it in the bank because the world needs it. Think of it as an energy of life......it is needed to refresh and to help the world.

Another point also is.......do not try to worry about the impact of consumer spending on the environment from a physical or spiritual perspective......the Earth I've found, has ways to recover itself. What I've noticed the last few years is that people are worried about the spending of money into consumer goods in case they further affect the environment by the filling of landfill sites. I say don't worry about this....the truth is there are far more companies doing recycling now more than ever before, and if you spend your money from an environmentally conscious perspective it will impact future consumer policies for sure. What you can do to help is to invest into ethical and environmentally friendly products, plans and projects and just be aware. ie. buy and eat less packaged goods, buy more environmentally friendly cars.

Talking of environmentally friendly products, on Saturday I came across this wonderful product in Mongkok:

It is an environmentally friendly washing ball from a Korean company called Biocera. Using 'Nano' technology it is capable of being totally clean and anti-bacterial and can produce up to 1,000 washes.......or a single wash for every day for the next 3 years. The great thing about this is it costs only about $450 HKD and you can wash with it till then, without the need for any more chemicals!!!! So no more chemicals going down the drain and no more tens of plastic bottles filling the landfills per household. How is that for being an ingenious product?