Fire broke out in Bodin today with respondig firetrucks and all, but unless the whole place burns down I really couldn`t care less seing as there are 11 days left until I`m leaving for good. But enough of my booring military life.

Playing games that are pure gameplay games is a thing for gamers. That sentence was really bad I know but it`s true, some games are ok for regular folk and some are ok for people who loves a good game no matter what the theme or look of the game is. Gran Turismo and Grand Theft Auto being excelent examples of games that are ok for everyone, Pokemon being a great example for the other camp of games that are good but only people who can enjoy a good game no matter what the package it comes in would play (or in the case of pokemon only gamers and kids under the age of 14).

Based on this self aquired and practiced knowledge I have started to classify people as either A) Only play acceptable main stream games or B) Plays any game as loong as it`s good. I fall in the B category and most of my friends do to allthough sometimes they (and I admit that I do it to) don`t play the game because of it`s appearence or the things that are linked to the game. In my militiary service I mostly meet category A people and when I`m with cat. A people I tend to dampen my enthusiasm for proclaiming the latest amazing game for everyone. But yesterday I was really surpised by this one guy in my troop. I had just gotten back and had my DS stuff in my backpack, I sat down in the tv quarters for the Transport department that we dispose on our free time and watched tv. We are three people in the room, then K. starts to rumage my backpack looking for the DS. I have often gotten some dissing from K. that I`m a geek and so on in a typical friendly manner so I was expecting him to tinker with the DS, proclaim it as childish crap and say something about the PSP being better. That did not happen at all, instead he asked me to put in the "falling down" game he had seen me playing with others in the barracks, he was asking to play Puyo Pop Fever. Now personally I love Puyo Pop, but the game looks very childish and is packed with super sweet anime music and looks. Also the game is very simple in princible but has lots of multiplayer depht and requires the player to get under the skin of these falling blobs of color. I don`t consider Puyo Pop fever a cat. A game at all so I was expecting that he was going to try it for ca. 5 seconds and then proclaim it as crap. This did not happen either. Instead he played for ten minutes, then he asked for some explonation of the rules and gameplay. After ca. 5 minutes of him playing while I explain he got the hang of the basics and played for another 10 minutes. He then said that he needed some more explaining (this was my fault really because I figured if I said all the rules at once he would just call the game silly right away, something I expected anyway so I didn`t put much effort in the help I gave), I gave him the full low down of the rules and dynamics and he played on for hours to end!

I was qutie frankly a little shocked over K`s enthusiasm for Puyo Pop Fever, I did not expect him to enjoy it at all, instead he sat and played the rest of the day. He would play, get stuck and put the DS down, then pick it up again ten minutes later. Just as any gamer would take small breaks when the game got to frustrating but can`t stop the desire to pick it up again after a very short pause.
The point of this little story is that I can now se the DS being accepted in all social layers, the one real advantage I saw the PSP having for itself was the coolness factor and how social acceptable it would be to sit in public and play it. Personally I play the DS any where any time, something I thought that cat. A people would be more hessistant to, but seing how K. just could not stop playing Puyo Pop I now belive that playing the DS will not be something you will be embarassed to do in public. And hey, with the possibility that Nintendogs will be for girls of all ages what Pokemon was for boys of all ages, maybe flipping up your DS and a copy of Nintendogs in public will increase your chance of meeting others? :question: