Sun I am disappoint.

I was really, really excited for the new Golden Sun game. Like, I don't buy video games often, but I would have bought this one. But then I went on the website and read the character summaries and... ugh! They're so derivative of the last generation of games! I know that generation Xerox is a trope, but we've even got villains pushing the protagonists to accomplish their mission and a mysterious masked man. I don't know much about the plot yet, but for a game set 30 years after the original pair and released some ten years later, this is upsetting.

The original Golden Sun games were hailed for their originality in story, setting, and gameplay. While the battles are nothing new if you've ever played any incarnation of Final Fantasy ever, they were pretty fun, and there were a lot of good/nerve wracking puzzles to figure out. The new game looks like it's sticking too closely to the original, and it worries me.

At any rate, the game doesn't hit North America until November 29th, so I'll wait for some American reviews before I decide whether or not to get it. At any rate, playing it would be good for nostalgia, and I am a bit eager to return to that exciting, imaginative world the first games took me to. :)

Today is ape day.

This picture from Zooborns just kind of made my week. :) Apparently some dumb kid was playing video games instead of paying attention at the zoo, dropped his DS, and this happened. Gorillas that play pac man! What's next?

Pokemon training is expensive.

Today I finally beat the Elite Four in Pokemon Soulsilver. While I was preparing for the match (five extremely difficult battles in a row), I went to New Bark Town and took out all the money I'd saved up over the game, and spent nearly all of it on full restores, hyper potions, and revives so I could stand a chance of winning. It occurred to me that if Pokemon were real life, it would be the equivalent of spending your life savings on a single event that, if you lose the battle, you're basically screwed because you've used all your items, you don't have any money, and you've beaten all the other trainers in the region.

But I won, so it doesn't matter. The elite four have some of the best payouts of any trainers in the game. Savings = restored.

The soul silver credits aren't as nice as even the Ruby/Saphire credits, which is disappointing because that was a whole system ago.

A Sims-induced Coma

There are only two video games that I really play consistently and obsessively: Pokemon and The Sims. I've played The Sims in every version, more or less, since version one, although I don't but every single expansion pack. But yesterday I was buying my poor, toothless brother Spore and Ambitions was on sale and I was like, "Hey, why not?"

Good choice, except now I've been playing for two days straight. But the town that Ambitions ships with is based on the Louisiana bayou and it's just a lot of fun to play. Fog effects <3!>

I jumped right in and made a new sim just to test it out, a fiesty Chinese girl named Sally Chu. I played through the whole firefighter career with her (exciting!) and she was very successful at it, but part of the fun in the Sims is seeing where the genetics go, so once I was done with that I paired her off with a Townie and gave her a second career as an inventor. And so ended generation one.

I grabbed her daughter for the next generation, and played the Private Investigator career for a while while figuring out where I wanted to take the genetics next. The last patch changed the way skin tone inherited, so I decided to pair her off with the darkest guy I could find, just to see how it works (when I play the Sims, it turns into a mendelian eugenics experiment pretty quickly), but then I got bored with the family so I switched to a branching line of the family tree and decided to check back later.

After mucking around in the parallel branch for a bit and ensuring it would continue for another generation (I get kinda bonsai on my family trees when I like them - I've noticed that when you don't constantly maintain them, the population tends to experience mass bed death and not reproduce.), I decided to really test it out by importing a pair of pre-existing sims into the new town. And so Fish and Dwayne moved to Twinbrook.

This got a bit tricky, because they were made for the base game - their lifetime goals are, like, Leader of the Free World and Editor in Chief, but I've played through those paths a few times with these guys. So instead I mucked around with their traits a tiny bit, totally disregarded their lifetime goals, and made Fish an angler and Dwayne a sculptor, which are fun things to muck with. I'd never had a reason to actually figure out the fishing system before, but now that I've bothered I've gotta say it's pretty neat.

One of these days I'll go back and remake Fish and Dwayne to actually fit the EP. I think their face sculpts are way off model, too. (Fish has an ugly nose, Dwayne is too thin and doesn't look particularly distinctive.)

And then I wound up quitting before I checked back on my genetics and inheritance experiment, but the family preview image looked promising for the new inheritance patterns. So tomorrow we shall see.

I totally just wrote a really long blog post about The Sims 3.

Uh.

Yeah.

I've got nothing.

Leez.