When I bought the Nintendo DS I intended it to be a stress relieve as I really felt stressed. I actually was probably more stressed than I felt, inside, as the doctors concour only on one thing: my pancreatitis was also, and maybe mainly, caused by stress. Stress that was of course composed of family/house stress, but also work stress (or rather lack-of-work stress) and obviously Free Software stress. Although I tried to keep myself more relaxed when I returned, I really ended up stressing myself anyway it seems.
Anyway, leaving alone the stress before, I’m now wondering if the balance of stress relieve and stress of the Nintendo DS is really that good. You might find it childish, but the main game I was looking forward to play was the new generation of Pokémon games, I played most of them through the ten years they were released, so I didn’t want to miss this opportunity, especially since now even someone like me, who knows nobody else interested in the game, can finally trade them through the Wireless connection.
Yeah but I also expected to be able to import the old Poḱemons from the Sapphire cartridge for the GBA, that I bought together with the DS to relax and to have ready for the release of Diamond. If you read my blog, you probably read that I can’t do that because the Sapphire cartridge is of a different language from the Diamond card.
Now, I know you’ll probably consider childish playing with Pokémon and even more childish ranting about being unable to use some extra feature, but it’s really ruining the experience. Add to that that Nintendo added even more Pokémons that can only be caught through a Nintendo event (and some can only be caught through old Nintendo events with the old cartridges and then pushed to Diamond), so Pokémons I’ll never be able to get, and you know why it’s frustrating me to play with it: even if I can get every Pokémon directly available in the game, and trade the common ones, I’ll never be able to complete even this game. I really hoped this would be the first game I was able to complete as I had trading capability now, thing I lacked before, as you needed to know people playing the games too.
Okay, so I decided to take a break from Pokémon and resume playing with Yu-Gi-Oh, it’s a nice game, too, I was playing it alternatively from Pokémon before ending up in the hospital, and I was starting to like it even more. What’s the problem now? Well, it’s difficult to find people at my level (search takes way longer than before) because a lot of people playing with it are playing for months now, and the “top three” features players who were able to overflow the points counter with some really overpowered cards (I tried playing against the Champion ghost, while I was able to win, even if it was hard, against the former Champion ghost last summer, there’s no way I can get more than three turns with the current one: he just need to find one card, and the game is over for me).
And when I’m finally able to find a challenger down to my level, and also being able to win (yes, I lose most of the times anyway)… he shuts down the DS before confirming! Damn Konami! Once again, I’m getting more stress than I’m relieving.
And now? Now I don’t know. I don’t really know what I might do to relieve my stress in the near future, even if the Nintendo DS is a nice portable console (better than my sister’s PSP for sure), the three games I bought up to now were ridden with bugs (Lego Star Wars II), poorly designed multiplayer game (Yu-Gi-Oh! World Championship 2007) or obnoxious region-locking (Pokémon Diamond).
So I need a new stress relieve, possibly one that doesn’t involve the risk of cutting myself, like my beloved bricolage, which is not very good in my current state (beside the amount of warfarin I have to take, I’m probably low on blood, so I’d rather avoid cuttign myself), and that doesn’t ask me to go out with the freezing temperature there’s out there. I’m left with reading and watching DVDs of course, but it’s more a way to forget the stress for a while, rather than relieve it.
