Changing the World gets the High Score!

So I consider myself a bit of a gamer. Not a usual gamer - I don't tend to play first-person shooters, I have little interest in big-franchise games (except Watch Dogs, because that's awesome. Oh, and Titanfall) and I'm more interested in art, story and character than gameplay.

But here's the thing: I've been reading about games too. And it turns out, games have the power to change the world.

A Fun New Way to Learn Languages

I remember my school days, spent lounging at the back of Spanish class during my A-levels, idly doodling in my notepad or else trying to keep up with the rest of the class as I desperately tried to recall the Spanish for "Lorca uses lots of phallic imagery in his plays". The thing is, I wasn't all that bad at Spanish; it's just that, compared to the others, I wasn't all that good. Much of that was of course down to me: I rarely took the time to look at the vocabulary or revise until exams came by, at which point it was already too late. I seem to recall doodling during much of my preparation time for the oral exam, too, actually.

But the past month or so has led me back into languages, through a route I hadn't hitherto given much thought. With the advent of smaller, faster technology we have more and more ways to access information, a fact which Muzzy and Rosetta Stone have taken into account with their DVDs and computer software. But me? I've gone for something a little smaller, more... handheld.

Beautiful Games

The past month or so I've been playing a lot of new video games, because it's amazing what you can find for free if you know where to look. I'll go into some detail down below, but before that I want to say: it's amazing how beautiful you can make games in a short amount of time.