So if you've wondered what I've been up to in my recreational time lately, the answer is I discovered that Transport Tycoon came out for the iPad. This is the classic game that I always looked on enviously in the 90s, because like most simulation games it came out for Windows and as far as I could tell never for Macs, and I did play it some when I had a borrowed Windows laptop for various somewhat legitimate reasons. I'm not sure when the game got adapted to iOS but I am delighted because I just love this sort of simulation and world-building game and can't get enough of them. I'm disappointed there's so few games like that of any substance for the iPad.
There are some minor user-interface messes, most of them the result of trying to squeeze a complicated game to something that doesn't have a real keyboard, but most of those are minor nuisances, like how everything snaps the game out of pause mode, or how if there's a way to turn off or at least make transparent trees or buildings so you can see where you're putting down roads or tracks I haven't been able to find it. But for the most part it's just the wonder of building an imitation world and there's never enough of that.
Also a delight to me: the game's a simple purchase with no in-game purchasing or even pleas to buy anything more. I got it, and have it, and that's all there is to it. Even Civilization Revolutions circles around the subject of how it would like me to give them some more money in exchange for playing it, even if it doesn't insist on such. Now if we can get a decent SimCity-like game and a non-problematic Roller Coaster Tycoon for it.
Trivia: James Parker of Woodbridge published The Constitutional Courant on the 21st of September, 1765, apparently the first newspaper of New Jersey. It lasted the one issue. Source: New Jersey From Colony To State, 1609 - 1789, Richard P McCormick.
Currently Reading: Dimensional Methods and their Applications, Charles M Focken.