Friends, meet Nino.

Nino! (Of note: The only other electronic device I've ever named after a real person is my computer, KenKen. ♥)

So I accompanied Will to GameStop today and ended up coming home with this pretty little number. I'm mostly going to be using him as a Japanese dictionary (because if I go with my current plan, I'll be writing my East Asian Studies thesis based on a book in Japanese, and I'll need a better method for looking up mysterious characters than searching by radical on Jim Breen). I've ordered the dictionary game, which will hopefully make it here sometime next week at the latest (because if not, it'll be sitting in my Haverford mailbox for three weeks), but in the meantime, I picked up Pokémon Pearl to play. *vui* (Will got Diamond.)

I never finished Silver, and I didn't even bother with anything from the third generation (though I've been babysitting my friend's Gameboy Advance since high school, and I'm pretty sure he said to me one day, "You can keep it."), but the graphics in Pearl are slick, man.

The game was used = cheaper!, and we looked at the last guy's game. He had data for all 493 Pokémon and had logged over 300 hours on his game. It's like the beefed up version of my Yellow game -- 151 Pokémon, 189 hours, a hell of a lot of teamwork and trading with my brother, and a lucky friend who got Mew at a Nintendo event of some kind -- except that it's apparently impossible to have all 493 unless you do a lot of maneuvering/cheats. Realistically for me, I'm not going to have time to seriously play the game like I did Yellow, so I'm just going to casually sift through it when I can.

... How long has it been since I've geeked out about Pokémon? Oh, childhood, how I've missed you.