Yawn yawn. Okay, so I got woken up at around 0300 to stand a random watch with an m16 ontop of a ship and look out into just darkness and water. What does this mean? I've been out to sea for 3 weeks, which isn't long compared to my career, but it means I won't be seeing land for a little while either. On this note, me and my DS have become great friends. I have beaten Elite Beat Agents, almost beat Pokemon Pearl, and beat Ace Attorney #1. Now I am on Digimon Dusk. I love it. Simply love it. So at the end of this blog will be a nice interum review. Dumb Ideas. I go to the forums these days to see what the 'kids' are thinking about. When I say kids, I mean anyone I wouldn't give respect too. So you can be 13, but if you have a head on your shoulders I'll treat you like you were 20. I see some amazing things said on the forums. Maybe it's because I am frequent at the DS forums so it attracts more kids, or what. But the things they come up with is beyond me. I have nothing to show, but I think I am going to start taking screen shots and sharing how ridiculous these people can be. For note, today as an example, the 'kids' are discussing the success of an idea about 'making Mario into a show'. This shows me a few things. It shows me A: These kids were born in the 90's. B: These kids have no sense of a good show. and C: They probably like Naruto [Please reference previous Blog about banning]. Mario was a show 3 times, a horrible movie [Which I own], and simply doesn't have a story line that can arc past an hour of actual run time. Oh - because 75% of the mario games can be beaten in an hour or less. Now - Digimon Dusk. I have not played Dawn, and to tell the truth when I bought Dusk I played 10 minutes of it and put it down for months. So long I wasn't even sure what I was doing in the ten minutes I was playing. I recently picked it back up though and I have placed over 10 hours of gameplay into it since. This may not seem like a huge amount of time, but for a man who works 14-19 hour days, it's alot. The game starts off HORRIBLY. You're pretty much in a crappy looking ruin where your 'cult' like 'clan/guild' are hanging out at and there is a disturbance. You and your insanely powerful digimon go take care of business. You seriously knock out your enemies in about a rounds worth of combat. I was bothered by this because well - I don't like to start off mammothly powerful. I kept playing and five minutes later I am in some high tech place where I have to fight in a tournament. I hated this because I don't know why I am there and why do I deserve to be there? Oh well - you win with your eyes closed. This is where I put the game down. I picked it back up because I just beat Ace Attorney and I wasn't in the mood to get my a** taxed in pokemon so I picked up Digimon and looked up a few spoiler tips online. It said my Digimon would be busted down after the tournament so it sparked a certain interest to how well I would level and digivolve. Now for the actual review: In the Digimon Dusk game you will be in command of 3 starting pokemon of your choice out of 3 or 4 packages. For the sake of fact I chose Lunamon, Skullgreymon, and WGarurumon. They all get knocked down to their rookie stages. You get a free Island, which my friend always calls a gym. You can upgrade your island with 'size' to allow more equipment and digimon to live on it, and with equipment for your digimon to train on. Your top screen thusly becomes a live feed to all your islands. You can have multiple islands all of which have your digimon on it. In this game you catch Digimon through scanning, like previous games. You must encounter the digimon a certain amount of times, on average 15 times, to get a full scan of them and when you return back to your HQ you can 'digiconvert' or 'create' the digimon. Perhaps the coolest thing about the game is that you can keep degenerating and digivolving the same digimon. What's the purpose of this? When you degenerate your digimon, they maintain a percentage of their stats, so when you level them up again, they get even stronger and faster. What do you sacrifice? Not much really. You probably won't see the difference your first time doing it, but after the first two or three times, you will see the more you do the cycle, the stronger they get. The other awesome thing is when a digimon levels up all stats go up by at LEAST 1. And when you degenerate or digivolve, you go back to level one, maintain all your original moves, and percentage of your max stats, but level 1-9 can be accomplished in about two battles most of the time! It's the first game I have played hours on end on a portable game system since Pokemon Red. NOT FIRE RED! Pokemon Effing Red! I bought it at SEARs when I was 13!!!! I am almost 23! WTF! Lol. Anyways. If you like a monster RPG with alot of freedom, this game has no linear basis. I ignore almost all my missions and simply train my digimon. Oh! Back to the islands. The digimon that are not on your team, can be placed in the island and they will train. You can also train your digimon on average 5 times every 30 minutes. Also. When you fight, your top three digimon are in battle no matter what. You then have 3 reserved. ALL DIGIMON in the party no matter their placement or activity get the same EXP as the other digimon - making 'power leveling' that much easier. Man - this game is intense!