I must share this with you. It's a game called 3rd World Farmer.
I discovered TWF a couple years ago, in its first incarnation. You had a family of four or five (I can't recall), and you had to grow crops and try to survive.
Back then, the game was basically impossible. I guess it was programmed to know what you did to succeed and would instantly pop up the failure screen. The tantalising thing was that the game looked like success was possible. You could eventually purchase cattle and tractors: there had to be a way.
I don't think there was back then, but now they've revamped the game a bit. This time, you can earn improvements on your village, send your children to school, get married; you can succeed. It's sort of like Harvest Moon meets The Sims with, um, a third world death and flies take on it.
My current record is nowhere near a high score, but I kept the game running for nearly 400 years before I finally got so bored I had to finish the family off. Once you succeed, it's very hard to stop succeeding, and it's boring to be successful because there are no real blows unless you can't get your family married off, because these little guys have an amazing health plan. As long as you keep curing them, they appear to live forever (which is why when they hit 80, I've stopped giving them medication, it's cruel, but I can only have 8 family members and the younger generation is stronger and cheaper to maintain).
Anyway, if you have a while, check the game out.
I'm disgusted to learn that the local library does not have any Jeeves and Wooster books, so I cannot fulfill my Edwardian England fix that way.
Instead, I've been re-reading All Creatures Great and Small. I've finished the first three books and moved on to the fourth, though, so I'll be looking for something else to read soon enough.
The Boy, under protests that he doesn't like animals, any animals, is reading the first book. I've said before that he likes animals, he just believes he doesn't, for some reason. Same goes for reading, which he tells me he doesn't like.
This past summer, I've had him read The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (the blue version with Mostly Harmless and Zaphod Beeblebrox Plays it Safe), Anne of Green Gables, Anne of Avonlea, Anne of the Island (he won't read any more of the Anne books now that he knows she marries Gilbert; he said he couldn't live with himself if he knew he'd actually read that many girl books, which they are, but I knew he'd like 'em), The Hound of the Baskervilles and The Great Gatsby. This whole process, of course, is part of my master plan to make TB read literature.
Up to now, the most sophisticated thing he's ever read that wasn't a play was written by Stephen King. We all know my opinion of Mr. King by now, so there's no need to continue that line of thought. TB claims that he doesn't like to read because he's a slow reader (which, I read approximately three times as fast as he does, and I read twice as fast as most people), and books don't interest him. I think he's still recoiling from the fact that he never, ever, took decent courses in school, so of course he was never presented with good books. His brothers were both saved by their profound interest in comic books and nerdy friends who wouldn't have let them live without having read Narnia, LOTR and Hitchhiker.
So, counting the Douglas Adams books separately, that's at least twelve books he'll have read since May. He rolls his eyes when I hand him books but I asked him how many of the books I gave him he honestly didn't like, and he admitted he liked all of them. He does like to read, he's just never been given anything worth reading before now.
I'm actually surprised he liked the Hitchhiker books. We rented the movie the other night, now he's finished them. I'd not seen the movie before, and it's OK. It's not the books, but then, the whole joke of the books being "ultimate" and "complete" and "more than complete" is that they're all very different from one incarnation to the next (the various radio broadcasts, television shows, etc.), so there is no definitive version. I didn't know DNA had been so involved in the film, and there are plenty o' references to other incarnations.
I have to say I disliked the Arthur/Trillian relationship, but a movie has to have a love story and they didn't have time to make it all the way to So Long and Thanks for All the Fish to include Fenchurch. Actually, Mostly Harmless bothers me a little in that Arthur never does find her, and does find Trillian.
I did think it hilarious that Marvin is a combination of the actors playing Flitwick and Snape. And for once, a movie pulled off a visual effect almost exactly the way I imagined it: the Magrathea factory floor.
Actually, when it came to a lot of the visual effects, we agreed that as far as scale and simplicity, a lot of them were better than Star Wars, just because they weren't so obviously playing at "Hey, look at our effects! Aren't these neat, guys?". The final destruction of Earth in particular was elegant, as opposed to the messy explosions in Star Wars. I suppose explosions would be messy, but it looked so much cooler. The Vogon Destructor Fleet making the jump to Hyperspace was more impressive than the Millennium Falcon too.
We also rented Ferris Bueller's Day Off, because I wasn't born until 1984 and would've been far too young to see the film in theatres (Roger Rabbit, yes, Ferris Bueller, no), and no one ever brought it on charter bus field trips. I've seen bits and pieces, but never the entire thing.
Other than slight disbelief that people actually did dress like that in the 80's (though I've seen the magazines to prove it) and having correctly anticipated, "Heh, Charlie Sheen in the police station, what's he in for, drugs?" It was funny, and much better than a lot of 80's movies I've seen.
OK, enough culture for one day.