So I got my Ruby and Sapphire in the mail on Thursday. I started playing Sapphire the same day, and it kept freezing up on me. So I cleaned it, ever so carefully with a Q-tip and a teenytiny amount of Heptan (an alcohol based solution based used among other things to remove band-aid glue from your skin). And it worked fine after that.
Until about an hour ago, when I was turning on my DS to play and it stared with the message "previous save file has been deleted, you can now play the game". Which meant, literally, that my save had been deleted. I had between 20 and 25 hours of gameplay on that thing, and now I have to start all over. I figured, I am gonna play until I have 7 Pokémon, and then PalPark 6 of them over to my SoulSilver game. And I am gonna do this until I have all the 3rd gen starters on Souls Silver. I am collecting starters at the moment^^,
If it happens again, I am gonna have to write to guy I bought them from and complain.
In addition, when I started the game over again, don't you think it froze in the middle of my first battle?
Luckily I am have gone all out OCD on saving, so I didn't have to replay the entire intro sequence more than once. And let me tell you, I have now played Pokémon intro sequences so staggeringly many times that I can tell you exactly how it goes, blindfolded in the dark while asleep.
It so incredibly boring, and thou I realize they make them because new players need an introduction to the general idea of the game, I really REALLY wish there was a skip button.
What I hate most with intro sections are the "I will force feed you this tutorial even if it kills me" attitude of certain characters. This will result in this sequence of dialogue:
"Do you know how (insert gadget here) works?"
"Why, yes I do, but thank you for asking."
"Don't you just (insert long explanation of said gadget only in question form here)."
This phenomena is not in any way exclusive to Pokémon, it's present in just about any game where there either isn't a tutorial mode, or you can skip it. The more technical doodads appear in the game, the more you get of these, and the later they appear for the first time, the more like it is you will have the tutorial flown in to your mouth on a teaspoon while the game is making "here comes the aeroplane. Wooooooosh. It's coming in for landing" noises.
It's incredibly annoying.
I get that ten year olds, who aren't used to figuring out the more or (more often) less complicated controls or inner workings of their brand new game, might need this. I can see where it can be handy.
But seriously, game companies: please stop fooling yourself into thinking that kids are your main demographic. They aren't.
Except for the very few Pooh-bear and Disney-movie specific games that are released, you main demographic is people who grew up playing your games. The biggest part of people playing Zelda are 20- and 30-somethings that have played since they got their first NES console, and their kids. Kids that have been playing since the day they stopped drooling all over the controllers.
I have been playing Pokémon since I was 10 years old. I have been playing Pokémon since '98, 12 freakin' years, and thou I do realize that for Pokémon, the main demographic IS kids, and that most of the veterans have jumped ship. But are kids these days really so stupid that they need every tiniest scrap of gameplay mechanics forcefed to them in this manner?
When I was young (you did see that coming didn't you?) we stuffed the manual back in the box, and figured how the game worked ourselves. (Should be mentioned that I personally usually kept the manual nearby in case I needed to look up something that I really could not figure out on my own.)
I remember when my Dearest Little Sister got her first Tamagotchi knock off, and my father came to me in awe and asked if I had thought her how to take care of her little virtual puppy. I of course hadn't, which prompted a shock-awe response from him. Turned out she hadn't even taken the manual out of the box.
I can also tell you about how my father came to me once, when I was sitting and animating jumping shapes with Office Word (yeah, you can actually do that if you have a really slow computer. You can't record it, but it's fun anyway. A once built an entire farm in Office Word. Now she uses Poser. But the Word farm is darned impressive), and said that I knew so much more about computers than he did. And I was self taught. He said that he didn't dare mess around going "what happens if I do this", and that that had led me to get better than him. Yes, Dad, you said that^^, I still find it's a fun memory, the day you came and said I could do more with computers than you=D=D
It got me kicked out of my elementary computer class thou. It appeared I knew more about computers than the teacher O.o
Which really makes me think the teachers must have be awfully non computer savvy, because I really didn't know all that much.O.o
You know, I have my Linguistics exam in 3 weeks. I am gonna go pretend to study a little^^,
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