by Alexx » Thu Oct 17, 2013 4:31 pm
A secondhand account of a new Pokemon game, bought by my wife:
- Pokemon X/Y comes out. I was under the assumption that my wife would get it, but not play it yet. She has a thing about playing things in order, and she never finished Black/White and never started Black/White 2. So imagine my surprise when she said she wanted to skip those and start the new one! I was about to shoot the robot imposter, but she assured me she was real and that the new one had enough changes to make it a bit more interesting to check out right away.
- She buys X. Our nephew and my friend Simon are buying Y, so I guess that takes care of whatever you get from someone else having the other one. There is no guide out at the stores around us yet (as of yesterday).
- Starter troubles! I've helped her pick a starter before, but she was a bit more torn with these, as they all had VERY different end results from thier originals. On top of that, she hadn't done her usual research before the game came out, so she didn't have any pre-thought out ideas on who she liked best. We decided on the Chespin, because it's green "hoodie" eventually grows into armor and that's hilarious.
- NAMES. Started with the Chespin, who she wanted to name Spike. Apparently Spike is too close to "spik", the enthnic slur, so you couldn't use it. Ended up naming it "Hoodie" because of the green part of it's back and head. Next came the trickle of new Pokemon as she caught them, and naming them in turn! She's okay when she has a theme, but just thinking them up on the fly - she usually asks me (her last theme was naming them all after drugs, since she's a pharmacist).
- BLINDNESS. She's apparently running blind at the moment, without a guide. She uses them frequently to look up Pokemon and see what they turn into and how useful they are...all that. I don't know the full story; I've never actually played these myself. She can look it up online, but it's a bit more of a hassle having to be at the computer or someplace with wifi all the time so she can look things up.
So she's sort of waiting for a guide, but the computer is still doing the same work at the moment. On top of that, Animal Crossing is still being played regularly, so it's hard to juggle at the moment. She's stated that the Animal Crossing boards have sort of seized up since Pokemon came out, but her interest in Animal Crossing hasn't wained. I'm sure things will kick into higher gear once our nephew starts his endless stream of Pokemon talk (never once remembering that I don't know half of what he's talking about, and that she should be talking to his aunt) and then my friend Simon will begin and play much like my wife does: with planning and precision.
"Since you got here by not thinking, it seems reasonable to expect that, in order to get out, you must start thinking." ~ Tock, the Watchdog