new toys! new toyz!

[baratron]

wuzzie has bought me a GameBoy Advance SP. I am In Love.

It's soo cool. I've been wanting one since this time last year, when the guy we know in Computer Exchange showed us photos, and I've been so annoyed not to have had enough spare money to buy one. But Richard is feeling slightly flush with cash atm, so... I can now buy all the games I've been wanting since the GBA came out, but couldn't get because I couldn't see well enough to play on a GBA. (Soon after the original GBA came out, meeping & I were shopping in one of the big London chain stores, and they had promotional stands where you could try the new console. The stands came with an enormous fluorescent light right over the console - it should have been perfect lighting conditions, but we could still barely see to play! Thus I was hardly going to buy one. Over time, as more and more people found they just couldn't see to play, some of the Japanese gaming sites came up with backlight mods (e.g. the Afterburner) - but installing any of those was risky, invalidated your warranty, and made the battery life abysmal. Therefore, when they announced the GBA SP, with its beautiful clear frontlit screen and return to the classic GameBoy shape, I should've been first in the queue to buy one. But I was completely broke.)

So, eeeeee. If you want me, I'll be playing Pokemon Sapphire :) Or maybe Spyro 2: Season of Ice, if I can figure out the damn controls (the GB has a 4-way directional pad, called a D-pad - hardly surprising, as Nintendo invented it. But Spyro uses an isometric view (like The Sims). What this means is the directional pad works best in the directions up, down, left and right, but the game requires you to move diagonally. Thus I keep running off the edge of the land and falling in the water, and because Spyro forgets how to swim in between each game, I keep dying horribly. After dying horribly a few times because of some design feature in a game, I tend to get pretty irritated at that game. Funny, that.) Depending on what the reviews from sites I trust look like, I might get The Sims: Bustin' Out for GBA, and then I might end up with square eyes :) I'm already worried I might carry the GBA around with me all the time, and turn every conceivable spare minute into game-playing time. (Well, it's not like I actually have spare time in the evenings...)