Monsters In My Pocket?

In the past three days, I have been playing a game from a franchise that I thought I was done with. I haven't played a game (or this one, for that matter) in this franchise for a few years and while new installments have released I haven't played those either and honestly didn't really intend to.

What is this franchise and more importantly, game? Pokemon Ruby.

Yes Pokemon, of all games, is the game I have been playing again recently. The reason for it is simple, due to my typical achievement whore ways I was making progress towards some achievements in Perfect Dark Zero (1k Deathmatches and 1k Dark Ops games played) and due to it being boring as hell, I needed to find something to do to help pass the time. Unfortunately for me I can't do picture-in-picture on my TV so I can't watch TV while doing the mundane whoring, so that left the options of either reading or playing the DS. As I have to press start every 40 seconds or so on the 360 controller, I opted against reading because of it being constantly interrupted so that left just the DS.

My DS doesn't get much play unfortunately and that is because I am done with the games I own for it. Until I get more, the handheld will continue to be neglected so with this in mind I had no idea what to play. That was until I looked through my Gameboy Advance collection. I contemplated playing Golden Sun, Metroid Fusion, Mario Kart: Super Circuit and other GBA titles and perhaps I will return to them at some point too as they are awesome games, but I eventually decided on Pokemon Ruby. I can tell you that it was a surprise to see myself enjoying the game again and three days later, I can safely say that I think I am addicted again.

Back in my school days I was a Pokemon fan just like most were; My love for the games begun with Blue, Red and Yellow and continued well into the Silver/Gold period. In fact I still maintain that Silver is one of my favourite games of all time. Anyway with the release of Ruby/Sapphire, I again played through the games and enjoyed it but at the same time I started to realise that I wasn't enjoying it as much as I used to. Doing basically the same thing again and again in the games got a bit tedious for me after a while I guess and eventually I just got bored with the franchise. I never thought the games were bad but they just weren't for me anymore either.

Fast forward to now and the old spark is back and if me playing it for 7 hours over the past few days is any indication, then I can definitely say I am addicted once more to the act of catching them all. It has been great catching the various Pokemon, training them and of course beating the Gyms again and I look forward to doing more of it in the near future. Even when I finish my mundane whoring of Perfect Dark's achievements, I can still see myself playing Pokemon Ruby until it is finished. As a completionist, finished will most likely mean a fully fleshed out Pokedex so with any luck I can manage it. Of course, there's those rare Pokemon that might be hard to collect (especially now) so maybe I will have to settle for a close to finished Pokedex and leave it at that. I would be fine with that actually despite my desire to 100% everything. Playing Ruby has made me want to try the DS versions (Diamond/Pearl) so when I get some money I think I might buy those games. Thanks to their online ability, a complete Pokedex in those games seems a lot more plausible than one in Ruby so we'll see.

Naturally, I will blog about the purchases if and when they happen, what I think of the games and other things like that. In the meantime I am going to continue my quest through Ruby and will update my progress on here soon. Speaking of progress, I have another Metal Gear Solid 2 update on the way as well. I have played it some more but because I'm lazy, I haven't posted about it on here. Blame The Wire, or something. The Wire > you.

Now, where's that Mudkip of mine?