The Battle for the Planet Aquarius

I can't say that I've ever been a big fan of computer games, except perhaps during a brief love affair with Tetris, but today, I'm quite fond of them. One of the cursesblessings of being a native English speaker is that I occasionally am asked by my friends and colleagues to edit things for them. This is not-so-fun when it involves a 50-page masters thesis on "public procurement practices in the Swedish defense industry" written in what only can be classified as "very bad swenglish." However, today I worked on something that will be the text for a video game for mobile phones, to be released shortly in UK. A friend, who along with four other guys, has started his own industrial design firm here in Stockholm is doing the graphics for it, so I'm helping him out with some copy editing. He hadn't told me much about the project (in fact, he told me NOTHING), so when I opened the file and read the first few lines, which included phrases such as "Convoy detected. Attack the fleet and destroy all enemy ships in the area," I was a bit confused. But, as I read on, the storyline became clearer and I finally figured out what it was for. It just goes to show the benefit of having any text double-checked so you don't publish things such as "two flies with one stone" instead of "two birds with one stone," at the same time that "rouge troops" should become "rogue troops." (I had to point out the them that the Red Army was something else altogether and was perhaps not what they had actually intended to include in their military ranks.)

I have to admit that now I have started to get into it a bit. I think I'm rooting for the Nordens to beat those pesky little Mangas, and am curious as to whether or not the Tankers will succumb to the nasty computer virus planted in their network.

My favorite line: "Hey! Don’t hurt the fish!"

I'm not entirely sure what that means, but I like it anyway.