Month: March 2022

30: I Discover I Can Be Ambivalent About Pokémon

This week I’m going to be covering an older pokémon game that I didn’t have the chance to experience until I was older, Pokémon Ruby. While the DS Lite had a GBA slot, as a kid I didn’t know that you could put Game Boy games in there and never encountered Pokémon Ruby, Sapphire, or Emerald in, say, a GameStop. This game was something I bought for myself last year, as I was curious to try out the gen 3 games but didn’t want to spend over 100 dollars to get Emerald. While this game wasn’t part of my childhood, I’ve been really enjoying it so far.

FUN RATING: 3/5. This has been a pretty enjoyable game so far, although I have had to do a little grinding in order to continue being successful in pokémon battles. Because I’m playing this game on the DS Lite rather than a Gameboy Advance or Gameboy Advance SP, I don’t have the option to do trading between games (plus I don’t have anyone to trade with as all my friends have those games at home rather than at college). This takes out some options for me that I would have liked to have otherwise (looking at you, Kingdra), but it doesn’t really affect my playthrough too much- I can beat the game without extra pokémon, but I think that it would have been more fun for me if I got to explore all the options typically available for players. There’s some quality of life things missing from the older games, such as limited bag space. This doesn’t really put a damper on things either, but a bunch of smaller things that could be fixed kind of add up to decrease the “fun” rating for me. However, there are fun aspects about the game: the plot is enjoyable, I really like the diving aspect of these games (you have to dive to get to one city), and the safari zone is always enjoyable (you can catch different pokémon by yourself without using pokémon in this area, and it’s super interesting). There are slots in this game that were removed in the remakes, which I’m not very good at. There’s also the roulette wheel, which I’m slightly less terrible at (always go for yellow Wynaut). There’s contests you can do with your pokémon as well, for ribbons to put on your pokémon- there’s a whole community on Reddit for getting every ribbon possible on a pokémon.

EASE RATING: 3/5. This game isn’t super easy, but it isn’t too difficult either. I’d say that for ease, this is a middle-of-the-road game. If you grind your pokémon up enough, you can deal with most threats pretty handily, it’s just a little bit of a time sink. For alternate playstyles like nuzlockes (you can only catch one pokémon per in-game route, the first one that appears, and if a pokémon faints in battle it dies and you can’t use it again), this game is pretty difficult- champion Steven Stone is kind of a wall for these challenges, and the Elite 4 is harder than it typically is when you have to be super careful about planning every move you make. Typically, you have to make a strategy when going for the Elite 4 and champion in this game, or you’re going to have a bad time.

REPLAYABILITY RATING: 2/5. This game is not really designed for replays- there’s no new game plus, and you have to delete your save file in order to restart your game, unlike the newer switch games where you can just use another account to play the game starting from scratch. However, I’m giving this two points because you can replay this game, and have a good time doing it. I would probably wait a little bit after finishing before doing more, because I don’t think this is the kind of game you can instantly restart after finishing- I don’t like it enough to play it over and over again without any breaks.

OVERALL: I think I’d recommend this if you don’t mind paying a decent amount of money for a cartridge in this day and age- with the nostalgia from older games, there’s been a price increase since Covid started. It’s pretty much just as good as any other older pokémon game, despite some quality of life problems that were fixed in gen 4 and onwards. Personally, between the gen 4 games and this one, I would probably choose a gen 4 game instead, but that’s just my preference. It’s an enjoyable game, but I don’t know that it’s better than any of the other games. That said, as a baseline the pokémon games are all pretty good quality, and the game still holds up today.

29: Issue Brief Introduction

Homelessness has become a prevalent issue in today’s America, especially due to the affordable housing crisis we are currently experiencing, and the less recent housing crash following the 2008 recession. Homelessness can happen to anyone for any variety of reasons, and it’s unfortunately easy to get into a situation where you are unhoused. However, it’s not so easy to get out of. Even though interviews are supposed to be based solely on interviewee qualifications and whether or not they’re a good fit for the workplace, many interviewers are biased against job applicants if they find out they don’t have a permanent housing situation, and even if a homeless person does secure a job, transportation can be difficult, and shelters often only let people staying the night out at specific hours, which can create conflict with work hours. There should be better support systems in place for unhoused individuals in order to help them get back on their feet.

Quite honestly, I really don’t like this, and I’m probably going to scrap most of it, but here it is. I’m planning on setting this up into a couple paragraphs talking about the relationship between homelessness and unemployment as background info, get into some specific problems faced by homeless individuals when trying to find a job, and what support systems could entail and how it could be possible to create and better them.

28: Coming Back to my Roots

This week I’m going to be covering an older game I used to play when I was younger, Animal Crossing New Leaf. It has since been overshadowed by its successor with better graphics but less content, Animal Crossing New Horizons, but I’ve come back to the game after over 1200 hours played since that game’s release in 2020. I’m burnt out from that game, so I’m getting my Animal Crossing fix this way. It’s a little more nerve-wracking to me, because some of the quality of life mechanics aren’t there, but I’ve been enjoying it so far. There’s definitely charm to 3DS games. In Animal Crossing New Leaf, you play as the mayor of a town (you become the mayor by mistake, coming off the train on your way here and the secretary, the famous dog Isabelle, simply will not take no for an answer) and you bring it up into a spot on the map. You add to the town museum through catching fish and bugs, unearthing fossils, and testing your luck against finding fake vs real art, you can start public works projects to decorate the town and expand or establish buildings, and grow your relationships with different animals who are “villagers” in your town.

 Exploring another town through Dream Address

FUN RATING: 3/5. This game is more about vaguely repetitive daily tasks than it is about anything else, but that’s okay. It can still be interesting even with that! You have the option to go to Tortimer Island and do different minigames like catching a specific amount of bugs, matching up furniture in houses, etc. You can go online with Club Tortimer and play with other people, but that’s not really advised unless it’s late at night, as you can run into little kids and hackers in equal measure (the 3DS games are not as heavily policed now that the Switch is out). You can also pay 500 of the in-game currency, bells- the cost of a couple shells off your town beach, to go explore other people’s towns in dreams.

 Meeting a publics work project donation goal

EASE RATING: 4/5. This game is pretty easy. It’s not supposed to be a challenge. The only problems you’ll have are villagers moving in on top of your flowerbeds and getting enough money to pay off the public works projects all on your own, as the villagers are very unlikely to help you pay off much of the goal of hundreds of bells. If you’re comfortable with just spending a couple hours on Tortimer island catching rare beetles, and laying down paths where you don’t want villagers to move, you should be fine in this game. Animal Crossing is not intended to be hard, although there have been some frustrating moments.

Getting your luck fortune told by Katrina, the fortune-teller

REPLAYABILITY RATING: 1/5. Some people might not like me for this, but I think this game is not very replayable. You can make a couple of towns, but you have to erase your data. In-game progress is based on real time, so it takes a long time to make real progress unless you want to hack your game, which can potentially ruin your cartridge if done extremely poorly. You can keep going in this game for ages, but if you want to restart it’ll sure be awhile before you get anywhere.

OVERALL: Despite my poor review of some of this game, I’ve actually really been enjoying it. In order to stay on top of the daily stuff in this game, I play for approximately 15 minutes when I have time, and that’s been about the extent of it recently. I’m only about three weeks into this save file, so my Dream Address is incredibly boring, so I won’t be providing it here, but ask me again in a month and I could probably give you something decent to look at. There’s not much of a community left for this game anymore, with many people having migrated to New Horizons, but I’m using this as a way to deal with New Horizons burnout and still get the Animal Crossing content I enjoy. It’s been interesting coming back after so long with new Animal Crossing knowledge and seeing what’s different. I never ended up getting further than a couple of months in this game as a kid because me staying on task for a particular game is very difficult if I’m not hooked on it, but I understand the complaints some players have about the lack of the same furniture from New Leaf- that’s actually one of the reasons I came back to New Leaf. I’ve been enjoying it so far, but I’m not sure how long I’ll keep playing it. I might look into manipulating my town save file to move some stuff around, as Nintendo isn’t super bothered by that anymore, and that might keep my interest for longer.