John Walker's Electronic House

Review: Lost In Blue

by on Oct.26, 2005, under The Rest

It was Enid Blyton who had me fall in love with adventure. It’s easy to mock the crazed old loon, and indeed it’s necessary to look harshly upon her casual racism, but even though she wasn’t a particularly good wordsmith, she could sure as hell tell a story.

The Famous Five is the name that leaps first to most people’s minds, but for me the stand out stories were the short-lived tales of The Adventurous Four, and the …Of Adventure books. Both The Adventurous Four, and The Valley Of Adventure, featured stories of children stranded in the wild, foraging to survive. There was something primal, a base response in my under-developed mind that made these stories vivid and romantic, such that I dreamed of being the survivor of a crashed plane in a lost valley, or washing up with a shipwreck onto the beach of a deserted island. Of course, these locations would be re-appropriated by my maturing imagination a few years later, this time with one more survivor to keep me company. And even today such a circumstance fulfils the role of “my happy place”. Lost In Blue would thus seem just about the most perfect subject ever.

The latest in my flurry of DS reviews. All extremely interesting games.


7 Comments for this entry

  • Andy Krouwel
    October 26th, 2005 on 12:13

    Is Myst going to be available for the DS?

  • JohnMid
    October 26th, 2005 on 12:18

    “His life is put into your hands; the left one on the D-pad, the right asked to manage the buttons and the stylus.”

    As one of those annoying cuddies, I can’t help but think back on the film, Hunted, and that Japanese bloke screaming at Christopher Lambert- “IN JAPAN THERE IS NO LEFT HANDED!”

  • Richard
    October 26th, 2005 on 15:59

    I loved those adventure books… still have them. The island one was my favourite.

  • Steve Wilkinson
    October 27th, 2005 on 08:02

    I’m a little surprised at your blasé attitude towards the revised editions of the Famous Five books. The passages you mention were a reflection of a way of thinking prevalent in certain quarters at the time, and is there not an argument to made that it dangerous to rewrite history in this manner, even with something so trivial as a book for children?

    For my part, I’m unsure. Nonetheless, it’s an interesting additional complexity.

  • RowanDT
    October 27th, 2005 on 19:12

    Toppingly, I used to do the voices in Enid Blyton story tapes in my youth and I ended up playing some kind of foreign prince in the … Of Adventure stories, as well as such Blyton heavyweights as Julian from the FF and Peter from the SS. And they’re still available at all good retailers!

  • admin
    October 28th, 2005 on 00:11

    You’re the best person who’s read my site ever!

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