40 Meter 5

But if you must, you can refer to the website called Sleeping In Airports to learn which ones are the best to pitch your tent in - if you must.

Here is another of my public library DVD discoveries.  Somewhat in the vein of Upstairs, Downstairs, The Duchess of Duke Street (1976) traces the career of Louisa Trotter, a young London woman who is determined to become a master chef.  Set in the very early 20th century (King Edward appears in several episodes), each 50-minute episode immerses the viewer in the milieu of Edwardian England, and the more we see of Louisa, the more we like her.

Donald Liebenson puts it this way in his review of the first of the series’ two seasons:

Fortunately, my library has both seasons! I’m partway through the first season now. So far, every episode has brought unforeseen plot twists and greater insights into the story’s characters. I’ll be sorry to get to the end of this story.

I have been a fan of computer and video games since the days of the Atari 2600 and the Amiga. For a while recently, I was totally on top of the videogame world with my PlayStation 2, XBox, and GameCube all set up and ready to go. I could rent a new game without bothering to check which system it was for!

With time I have become less au courant videogames-wise. I didn’t upgrade any of my systems, because their next-gen replacements were much more expensive but didn’t seem that much better, or even that much different. (Can anyone distinguish between 95% perfect and 96% perfect at twice the price?)

I like playing Final-Fantasy type RPG games on the PS2, so it’s still hooked up. I occasionally pop in SSX Tricky, and I play a round of PS2 golf with my music buddy after our recording sessions. But for the most part, what little gaming I do these days is on the PC. Here, I enjoy point-and-click “adventure” type games based on some exotic story or mystery. Among my favorites have been The Longest Journey and Syberia, both of which I recommend extremely highly.

After all this time, I still enjoy pcking up a new game for the PC. With luck, it will have some special feature - great story, detailed graphics, many locations, humor, whatever - that will set it aside from all the other seemingly similar offerings. I expect to discover great new games from time to time. What I don’t expect to discover is a great new kind of game. Yet Mystery Case Files: Ravenhearst was just that for me: an inexpensive, fun game of a genre I had never even realized existed!

Where’s Waldo?

Ravenhearst is what they call a “hidden object” game. That’s right, just like those hidden-object puzzles of your youth, you are supposed to locate the olive, the mandolin, the basketball, and the bird within an incredibly detailed photo-like portrayal of a scene filled with many, many objects. I know, it sounds kind of dull, but somehow it becomes real addictive real fast.

There’s a little more to the game than “find these seven things in the alotted time,” but not much. Every level has an ingenious mechanical contrivance for you to assemble and get working to open the final door, and there is a jigsaw puzzle to do after each level is complete. There’s a story, too: some claptrap about a missing diary. But the bulk of the game is finding those objects in those scenes, and it’s a riot. And, when I’m done with the game, there is a sequel, plus other games in this genre!

Here’s a screenshot of a typical game scene, so you can see what I’m talking about. (Click on the image to see a larger version.)

During the summer of 1969, I had a temporary job with the Cleveland Post Office, part of a Civil Service deal going on at that time with the aim of gainfully employing vacationing college students. I was assigned to the Special Delivery unit downtown, meaning I got to drive cool red-white-and-blue station wagons to various areas of the city and its suburbs, ringing people’s doorbells and bringing them the good news (or the bad).

One of the other students doing Special Delivery that summer was a cool, vaguely pre-Fonzie-ish guy named Bob Koly. (In Googling him today, I could only find this Bob Koly, of my Bob’s age and from the Cleveland area, who died the next year in Vietnam. I hope it wasn’t him, but I’m afraid it probably was.)

Anyway, the job involved a lot of reading, since there wasn’t all that much mail coming through and we weren’t allowed to come back early from a run and be seen loitering at the station. Bob insisted that I had to read this huge paperback he gave me, a book by John Barth called The Sot-Weed Factor. It was 800 pages long! But as I said, there was a lot of free time, and in a few weeks I had finished it off. What a ride! Parts of it are still vivid for me today.

Here’s what Barth’s Wikipedia entry says about the book:

Another great Barth book I first read that same summer is Lost In the Funhouse, a collection of stories of a decidedly post-modern bent. (For example, one is a stories-within-stories micro-epic featuring seven layers of quotation marks.) Every now and then I come across a person that I think will appreciate this book, so I give them my copy and buy a new one. I’ve probably bought eight copies of this book over the years. In fact, there’s a brand-new one on my bookshelf right now!