They say that variety is the spice of life, but I believe passion can be equally spicy. It’s what drives people to write fanfiction and to petition developers to turn dreams into reality.

Passion can be a double-edged sword, though. Sometimes, all it takes is a single real or perceived disappointment  to turn your feelings against the object of your emotional attachment.

Take the case of a little discussion I had with a friend of mine last night. Being die-hard fans of the Atlus’ Trauma Center series, my friend and I were understandably elated when we heard that Trauma Team would be coming to the Wii in the near future.

Please note that my friend is a BIG Nozomi Kimishima (aka Naomi Weaver) fan. Being the inquisitive student that she is, she immediately Googled around for more info about the game and her favorite character. What she discovered made her emotions do a complete one hundred and eighty degree turn. You see, she unfortunately came upon this little article.

Remember the comment I made in my other article about how some of the new doctors look like younger versions of verteran Trauma Center surgeons? It turns out I was partly right. The lady with silver-blue hair in the roster of Trauma Team specialists is apparently Dr. Kimishima herself, and she has graduated from being a hotshot doctor to being a forensics expert.

My friend immediately flew into a rage at the revelation. She vehemently argued that Dr. Kimishima is a master surgeon, not a CSI agent. This led to a bit of a discussion wherein I tried to calm her down. Perhaps this is an alternate universe Kimishima, I theorized. After all, didn’t producer Kanada-san mention something about Trauma Team being a whole new game and not a sequel?

Despite my best efforts, my friend would have none of it. Seething with righteous indignation, she seems to be dead set on boycotting this new medical sim completely.

On the other hand, I’m feeling a bit more forgiving. Granted, the good doctor may have made a rather…odd career move, and her new portrait makes her look suspiciously younger than she’s supposed to be (plastic surgery, perhaps?), but it’s still nice to see her alive and well after Second Opinion.

Now all Atlus has to do is to announce the existence of a playable obstetrician slash gynecolotist in Trauma Team and my day will be complete.

It really pays to subscribe to newsletters sometimes. You’ll never know what bit of fantastic news might just leap out at you when you least expect it.

I just opened my e-mail inbox recently when I came across an Atlus announcement: a new medical sim (a genre made popular by the Trauma Center series) will be coming to the Nintendo Wii sometime spring of next year. Dubbed Hospital slash Trauma Team, this new game passes the torch to six new doctors ready to continue the legacy of Drs. Styles, Weaver, Vaughn and Blaylock.

Of course, I’m assuming that those three veterans aren’t in the game to begin with. Three of the doctors look like younger and stylishly redrawn versions of the veteran surgeons. A fourth doctor in the series gives us a glimpse of what Dr. Styles may look like sans glasses, darker hair, vampiric bloodlust and an androgynous charm borrowed from a certain Persona 4 sleuth.

The prospect of having six specialists this time around instead of two miracle doctors who do all the work (with a hot nurse nagging them all throughout the process) sounds like an interesting concept. This way, you can have one doctor stitch up all the wounds  while another glues back broken pieces of bone with mystical antibiotic gel. A third surgeon can focus on removing tumors with impunity while the other two are preoccupied.

Of course, we’ll have to wait and see if all of them will actually be working together during the operation itself, or if they’ll be taking turns during the entire process of testing, diagnosis, surgery and post-op. The latter case may be likely, as one of the doctors is supposed to be a diagnostician.

Also, a quick glance at the initial screenshots will tell you that the classic syringe, forceps, gel et al are still in there. Some gameplay elements may also involve timing bits reminiscent of the defibrillator and “massage” scenarios of past games. There’s appears to be a part where you have to hammer some bones into place as well.

It’s most unfortunate that the official website contains very little info as of this time. I’ll be keeping my eyes peeled on this one, though. Anything that gives me a good excuse to probe a woman’s bare midriff is A-okay in my book.

What do you do when you’re faced with a major loss? Some people go for the extreme “solution” and commit suicide. Others attempt to drown out their sorrows with alcohol. Me, I fixate on video games.

This was especially true during the first half of 2007. During that year, two people were diagnosed with cancer.  One was the father of a friend of mine. The other one was my mother.

To make a long story short, my friend’s father pulled through. My mother didn’t.

I’d already played a bit of Trauma Center: Second Opinion before she died. After her passing, I went all out. I rented the Nintendo Wii at my friend’s Internet Cafe.  I played almost non-stop everyday from the time it opened till the time it closed its doors before dawn. At the time, it seemed to be one of my main forms of coping with the stages of Kubler-Ross’ model. (continue reading…)

Would you wait nine years before you bought a console of your own?

I’d like to think that the universe sends you signs when the time for something is right. For example, I noticed certain hints in the past few weeks, and all of them had at least one common denominator.

Sign Number One: a friend of mine who owns an Internet cafe (the very same cafe where I’ve been renting his PS2 per hour) said “maybe you should get your own console.”

Sign Number Two: I received a little news item when I logged on to Windows Live Messenger. Sony had apparently slashed the price of the PlayStation 2 down to US$100.

Sign Number Three: An ad on the Internet mentioned that someone was selling her PS2 for a little over US$50.

I figured these three signals were enough for me to go around. It was time. (continue reading…)

As a product of an oddly eclectic Christian upbringing, I’ve encountered quite a bit of radical stuff during my Sunday school classes.  One of the things I’ve always had problems with, however, is the principle of turning the other cheek.

Not that it made  sense to me at the time. For me, not retaliating was the ultimate excuse for being a doormat. Turn the other cheek? Yeah, right. I’d rather do the eye for an eye thingy–even in an MMORPG. (continue reading…)

Capcom has performed Pavlovian conditioning on me with regard to Resident Evil 5.

For those of you who may be unfamiliar with the term, Pavlovian or classical conditioning refers to getting someone to act a certain way by introducing a stimulus. This stimulus is paired with something else so that it triggers a certain response that you’re looking for, even when that something else is taken away.

This kind of conditioning was  named after it’s father, behavioral scientist Ivan Pavlov, who got his pet dog to salivate at the sound of a bell. Interestingly enough,that pretty much describes the reaction of some people I know when Capcom announces a new installment in any of their popular franchises.

(continue reading…)

WARNING: This article may contain spoilers for those of you who haven’t finished Persona 4 yet.

Sometimes, I just get the urge to put my social life on hold for a while and play marathon gaming sessions to my heart’s content. That’s exactly what I did with Persona 4 during my last vacation. It’s kind of ironic, considering that one of the distinguishing features of the game is its social link system.

For those of you who may not be familiar with the social link system,  this is how it works in a nutshell:  spending time with other characters in Persona 3 or 4 raises the main protagonist’s bond with that character. Level up events usually consist of ten sets of conversations lasting around a minute each.

Once a social link is at maximum level, it cannot reverse under any circumstances. Characters will often give gifts to your main character at this point in the relationship. What’s more, the main character  draws strength from those social links during the rough road ahead.

Nifty, isn’t it?  If only it were that simple. Unfortunately, the real world out there plays by a different set of rules.

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It’s not easy to be left waiting in the wings while fans in the United States are going gaga over Persona 4 right now.  Unfortunately, the fates have decreed that my Western counterparts get first dibs at enjoying the RPG. Alas, I have no choice but to continue my “wait training” until the much-coveted game arrives on my shores.

This isn’t the first time I’ve had to wait to obtain something I’ve really wanted, though, and for that, I’m thankful. In today’s world of instant noodles, instant gratification and instant everything, it’s still nice (even if it was forced upon me) to be given an opportunity to wait, to pause and to reflect.

If I were living in the United States, I’d probably have camped outside the retail outlets or pre-ordered the game to save myself the trouble. I’d have had a fit if those delays I’ve been reading about on the GameFAQS boards had happened to me.

I don’t like playing the waiting game at all. It grates on my patience (or lack of it) and has me climbing the walls. But when my emotions cool down (and they eventually do) and I get to do some thinking, I find that it isn’t so bad after all.

As strange as it may sound, aching for the object of my desire has actually made getting it so much sweeter. I can easily compare that to the times in the past when I easily got what I’d thought I’d desperately wanted, only to grow tired of it shortly afterward.

As I write this, I’m reminded of a certain friend of mine. Boy, does he tear through consoles like a rabid fan in a gaming convention. To date, he’s bought and sold a PlayStation 2, a Nintendo DS, a Nintendo Wii, and two PlayStation 3 models in less time than it has taken me to write an article about him.

In fact, if you were to draw a graph of my friend’s interest in consoles, it would probably resemble that of a graph of a young man’s physical interest in a woman—it ignites quickly, but it dissipates just as quickly once he gets what he wants.

I guess human beings are like that. We get interested, even passionate about something, we milk it for all its worth, we get bored with it, and then we leave it behind and move on to the next big thing.

What surprises me, though, is that waiting and anticipating something for a while seems put a lot more mileage and staying power into the object of interest. In other words, I find myself appreciating something more and longer if I’ve been made to work hard for it—or wait hard for it—first.

It may be compared to the way Blizzard Entertainment releases new games or updates. The company can make you wait an excruciatingly long time before it finally delivers on its promises. You feel like gnashing your teeth and hurling unmentionables at the company for the ridiculous delays. When that game or update finally comes around, however, it rocks your world.

Perhaps true love does wait after all.

Author’s note: By the time you read this article, I would’ve already received my copy of Persona 4. Yes, it was worth the wait. Very much so.