hellion62

[hellion62]

Aah, the weekend

This is the first weekend we don't have to worry about going to the old rental place we moved out of to clean and/or pack up s*@# that we hadn't already moved over to the new place. I feel relaxed but also annoyingly still have a residual feeling like there's something we have to do at the old place. 😛 Gotta shake that feeling!

I want to go out later to the nearby park and try to catch some shiny Ralts for PoGO community day. And I want to set up my Wii so I can play Animal Crossing: City Folk, which I got for my birthday a couple years ago and couldn't play because I had no idea where my sensor bar and Wii controllers were (required for backwards compatibility with the Wii U). But in the course of moving I found the Wii, so City Folk, here I come! I've never played an Animal Crossing mainline game on the TV before (New Leaf was my intro to the franchise), so I figure City Folk would be a nice way to acclimate myself before New Horizons comes out.

Those are my only two goals for the weekend! Sure I'm still going to work on unpacking, cleaning, and organizing stuff around the new house, but I am not going to get too crazy about it, since I had more than enough stressful packing and crap from the last few weeks of moving out of the old place.

[hellion62]

💜🎇🎆

[hellion62]

🕹️

Sewer Cover Cleverly Transformed Into Pac-Man

[hellion62]

It me. Most times when I take time off from work, I just stay home and do nothing interesting. 🤦

[hellion62]

Pixel, for some reason, loves laying down in this Amazon box with crumpled brown paper in it. We put some more paper in it after he overly flattened the stuff that used to be in there. I saw him nestled in and had to take a picture.

[hellion62]

Gift idea.

P Is for Pterodactyl, A Hilarious Alphabet Book That Highlights the Bizarre Rules of the English Language

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🤣

One Out of Every Three Snakes Is an Asshole

[hellion62]

Random ACNL Thought

It feels weird that you can only toss letters out of your mailbox in New Leaf if you’re outside… So I’m littering? (I guess you can toss letters in the Post Office, too, but shhhhh)

[hellion62]

Currently in the process of updating my paths with these tiles. Thanks! I'm not doing anything super-elaborate with these, just changing out some brick tiles that I picked long ago because they matched one of my bridges. 🙂

I updated my stepping stones and my alteration of @mayor-calyx‘s flowers to match midsummer grass better. My game is still set about two months behind, but I’m catching up slowly!

Original flower tile by Mayor Calyx

My stepping stones: autumn - winter - spring

[hellion62]

Today's Pocket Camp highlight: reaching level 90! I haven't been playing a whole lot the last few days because a) I'm annoyed at Nintendo for not announcing (not even teasing) anything about an Animal Crossing game for Switch, b) the latest Historical furniture and amenities aren't interesting to me (they're the exact opposite of the Modern furniture and amenities in my camp right now), and c) I've been busy at work. Even so, I'm up to level 90 which is kinda cool. Please Nintendo, announce Animal Crossing for Switch this year even if it doesn't come out this year (ugh).

[hellion62]

Blarg

I don't know what happened to the post I created before my shiny Magikarp post, but I can't see it in the Tumblr app, even though I can see the Magikarp post. 🙄

If that older post really didn't post, I guess it'll be missing forever. I'm not going to try to post it again. Psh.

[hellion62]

And because for whatever reason, Tumblr (the Android app) limits posts to have 10 images, so I have to create a new post just for my one last bonus image: A shiny Magikarp I caught today! First ever, finally!

Unfortunately it is low level and has bad IVs, but I'll probably still evolve it into a red Gyarados. 😀

[hellion62]

If I can remember, I will post daily highlights from my Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp gameplay. I've been taking all of these screenshots of my fortune cookie prizes and other things... might as well post them. 🙂

[hellion62]

Stardew Valley on Nintendo Switch, Newbie Thoughts

Stardew Valley trailer on YouTube

I didn't know much about Stardew Valley really, but I had seen a couple "let's play" videos from a YouTuber that I follow. I'm an Animal Crossing fan, and have enjoyed so-called "builder" games on mobile like Happy Street, Hay Day, and Paradise Bay, so Stardew Valley seemed like a way to get an Animal Crossing-ish game on Switch (but I still really want a full Animal Crossing game on the Switch, Nintendo!). Anyway, it looked cute, so I bought it the day it came out. I didn't play it until yesterday, because I was a bit concerned about getting into a game that I might become obsessed with, when I have a bunch of stuff going on at work. But I finally started playing and have a few thoughts on it so far. I've played through the spring season already, meaning I've played through 28 days in game time.

The controls are...okay. I really wish they had taken advantage of the touchscreen instead of just using the two joysticks to navigate the existing UI. It seems a bit buggy when selecting things from the crafting menu. There were a few times when an item was completely skipped over, with no way to select it. I had to open the crafting menu in a different situation to get around that.

I'm frustrated with the accelerated timeline, mainly because it takes so much time to walk around the town to get things done, especially when I don't fully have the map committed to memory and sometimes get lost or take a long way to get somewhere. It also takes a long time to get the farming stuff done in the mornings before leaving for town. So by the time I get somewhere, the place might be closed, or the person is off at lunch or whatever, so I have to wait around or try again another day. This makes the game less zen than I would think the devs intended, but that's just my initial impression.

I am happy, though, that it isn't like the real-time timing of Animal Crossing, because if I do take a break from it, I won't be missing out on a bunch of stuff and have to deal with angry villagers who've been wondering where I've been all this time...

Because some crops take several days to mature, you have to be pretty strategic to get the most out of them (meaning money), since many crops only grow within a particular season. I tend not to play these kinds of games strategically, nor do I really want to (if I wanted strategy, I'd play something else), so this kind of annoys me. I was never the type of player to bust out spreadsheets to maximize certain aspects of the game, but the short seasons and long harvest times for some crops kind of force you to think more about what you want to do. Or I suppose I could just do whatever and try again the next season, since they are kind of short.

Limited energy is so annoying... I know I have to figure out how to cook and buy some cooked food from the saloon or something in the meantime (field snacks found in garbage bins have been helpful!), and work towards upgrading tools, but it's just so annoying right now not to be able to clear out some fields and stuff in one day.

I really wish there were something like "fast travel". Perhaps this is why I need to build some animal buildings and get a horse?

Watering crops is tedious. Again, will be fixed later when I upgrade tools and maybe craft some sprinklers, though I'm not sure how helpful sprinklers will really be, given their description.

Retro graphics and music are cute, but I do feel a little bit of fatigue for this style, just because a lot of mobile games are using it. Almost seems a bit lazy, if you want to have a cynical attitude about it. I know they're probably doing this to pay tribute to games like Harvest Moon, but still.

I like the mini-game in the saloon, even though I'm worse at it than I should be. :-)

I know this sounds generally negative... I don't mean to be. These just happen to be my gripes so far. Perhaps after another season or two, I will have learned or progressed enough such that these annoyances fall away. We'll see. I actually like playing it and having something else besides Zelda on my Switch (I know there are many other games I could play on Switch, Zelda is the only one that I played extensively before getting into Stardew Valley). Anyway, I'll continue playing it and hopefully post some updates as I progress.

[hellion62]

Pokemon Moon, newbie random thoughts

When Pokemon first came on the scene, I wasn’t paying attention. I think at the time I was already either a senior in HS or freshman in college, not that that meant I wasn’t into video games or whatever, just that at the time I wasn’t grabbed by the franchise. It’s kind of weird because I was really into anime back then (still am, just don’t watch it much these days), so I don’t really have a great reason why I didn’t get into it. Anyway, this is a roundabout way of saying I was not an original Pokemon fan. But, as happened to many people, I’m guessing, the Pokemon GO phenomenon pulled them in, either igniting or reigniting their interest in Pokemon. Yes, I still play Pokemon GO. I recently hit level 30 and am still waiting for gen 2 Pokemon to drop! 

But I also got curious about the main game series. Sometime after I got into playing PoGO, I bought Pokemon X for my 3DS XL. I had been intrigued by it when it first came out because the legendary on the cover looked really cool, but all I knew of Pokemon was that it seemed like an RPG, and generally I am not into RPGs.  

So for the longest time I kept my distance. But being under the influence of PoGO, and just wanting to buy a game for my 3DS, I decided I’d get Pokemon X. Also, why Pokemon X and not one of the latest games, Alpha Sapphire or Omega Ruby? I just read a bunch of reviews for both sets of games and decided on X (the legendary on the X cover probably being the real deciding factor :D ). I didn’t get too far into it, though, due to work and devoting time to hunting Pokemon for PoGO on weekends. Then, I heard that new Pokemon games were coming out, which seemed pretty exciting. As soon as I could, I downloaded Pokemon Moon, but again, because of being busy at work and taking up my spare time with PoGO, I didn’t get super far into Moon the first few weeks. But when the cold, rainy weather settled in, I found I could get my Pokemon fix by playing Moon. :) And now I am fairly obsessed. 

The game has a crazy amount of stuff going on - the main story line, hunting breeding, training, trading, battling. Just recently they updated the Pokemon Bank to work with Sun and Moon so now there are a ton of new pokemon flooding GTS and Wonder Trade. It has inspired a new level of FOMO for me because I don’t really have any Pokemon outside of what is available in Moon (besides the few that I’ve gotten today in Wonder Trade). As I mentioned before I didn’t get far in Pokemon X. I opened it up yesterday and realized that I didn’t remember anything about the storyline or what I was supposed to be doing, so I deleted my game save data with the intention of starting over. I actually did this before I realized that Pokemon Bank had been updated. I was getting slightly bored just playing Moon, so I thought I would try getting into X again. Once I realized that Pokemon Bank was updated (through seeing new Pokemon names in the activities my trading partners recapped), I seriously felt like, “Dammit, now I gotta get back into playing X so I can transfer over a bunch of new Pokemon!” ^_^;;; Slightly related, if you’ve ever seen the subreddits for Pokemon Sun and Moon, there’s so much information there that provoke both a feeling of “wow, I gotta try that” and “ugh, that’s just more detail than I ever want to get into in this game.”

It’s probably good I wasn’t into Pokemon back in its initial days because I might have spent way too much time and money on it when I was younger, though I am kind of making up for it now. :P I have a ton of Pokemon merchandise on my Amazon wish list and started playing Pokemon Duel (not too into it, but love the graphics for the game pieces...would buy those if they made them in real life!). And unfortunately playing Moon has disproportionately taken up my spare time. I mean, I enjoy it a lot, but I do know in the back of my mind that I could be doing other things like editing my Yosemite photos, or cleaning up and cataloguing my other digital and film photos scattered everywhere... *sigh* Eventually I think this obsession will die down and allow me to spend time on my other hobbies, but for now, if anyone wants to trade with me in Pokemon Moon, let me know. :)

P.S. If you’re interested in checking out Pokemon GO YouTubers, please see Trainer Tips and Mystic7. I watch those guys regularly. :)

[hellion62]

Since we watched Hackers a couple (?) weeks ago, watching this to balance it out. 😀

[hellion62]

Sounds interesting.