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.

For those of you who may not be familiar with Dr. Kubler-Ross model, allow me to explain. There are supposedly five stages that people go through when they’re faced with traumatic loss: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. It’s a highly contested model, as the stages aren’t exactly set in stone.

For some reason, I skipped the denial and bargaining stages entirely and went straight to anger and depression, flitting back and forth between the two as I played Trauma Center with a vengeance.

Was it escapism? Definitely. I needed to forget my problems, if only for a little while. Dr. Derek Stiles, the main character of the game, possessed superhuman healing powers that helped me do just that.

Whenever I extracted a tumor from my virtual patient in the game, I imagined I was extracting the tumors from my mother’s body. Whenever I had Dr. Stiles activate his Healing Touch, I played make-believe and envisioned him operating on my mother and saving her life.

Of course, I only had so much time to do that. When the shop eventually closed, I was right back where I started: grieving, hurting, and absolutely clueless as to what to do next.

I’ve often likened my gaming habits at the time to going deep-sea diving. Sometimes, divers may be tempted not to return to the surface because it’s so beautiful down in the ocean depths. They can stay in their fantasy world and forget about all their problems…until they run out of oxygen.

At some point, I moved on. I don’t remember exactly what triggered it–I just decided to do it, and I did it.

Perhaps I’d gotten tired of grieving. Perhaps I’d told myself that getting on with my life was what my mother would’ve wanted. Perhaps I realized that failing to move on would have been a grave dishonor to her memory. Perhaps it’s because I’d finished Trauma Center’s story mode.

In any case, I picked up Trauma Center: New Blood months later. There was one big difference this time: I didn’t play it to forget; I played it to have fun.

It’s been two years since Mom passed away. I’d like to think that she’s looking down at me from Heaven and smiling. Perhaps I’ll invest in a Nintendo DS and try out Trauma Center 2 as well.

Happy Mother’s Day, Mom. I’ll see you, Grandma Mai, Grandma Zeny and Grandpa Pai again someday.

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.

I sent an SMS to the seller and made a new friend that day. We chatted online and I interrogated her about the details of the unit she was selling. Turns out it was an old, bulky, dusty SCPH-30001 model PlayStation 2.  The package came with a memory card and a few games like Capcom Classics Collection Volume 2 and TMNT.

The not-so-nice part was that it came with no AC or A/V cables and no controller. She claimed it still worked fine, but given the fact that she lived a few thousand kilometers away, I wouldn’t have been able to test her claims until the unit arrived. If she was up to any hanky-panky, it would’ve been too late by then.

I’m normally not inclined to taking risks like that, but for some reason, I gave her the benefit of the doubt. I deposited the payment in her bank account and eagerly awaited the unit’s arrival.  The seller had it delivered to my doorstep, free of charge.

I thought I’d be able to play once I got the cables and the controller. Boy, was I wrong. The unit was still functional, but the lens no longer read discs very well, so it had to be replaced.

I visited the tech people at three or four different shops,  all of whom gave me either a shrug or a grim diagnosis.  It was only the adventurous technicians at the third shop who took on the challenge of acquiring and installing the right lens.

I liked their attitude, so I left the unit and my phone number with them. They got back to me the very next day and asked me to help test out the replacement lens they’d found.

The new lens worked, but not perfectly; it still needed a bit of coaxing from time to time. Besides, it read my Persona 4 disc just fine. That sealed the deal.

As I type this article out, I’m reminded of the words of Nintendo’s Satoru Iwata. He claimed that Japanese get tired of new entertainment more quickly than overseas gamers. And there I was, getting all excited over a console which is several years old.

Is it any real surprise, though? Given the fact that the Japanese have the means to churn out the games quickly,  it follows that they tend to tire of those games just as quickly. After all, they didn’t have to wait nine long years to get a PS2 of their own.

Perhaps that character from the old TV show The West Wing was right after all (I paraphrase):  “We esteem lightly that which we acquire easily.” With respect to that, I suspect it’ll be a while before I tire of this PS2. Who knows? Maybe it’ll be another nine years before I upgrade to this year’s next-gen consoles.

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.

I got my first taste of PvP combat in CCR’s Rising Force Online. That was my first and my last massive scale PvP game. While it was fun at first, the prospect of enduring repeated backstabbing by higher level players got to me after a while.

To make a long story short, I eventually mellowed out, PVP-wise. While I still log onto the game, I tend to use it as an over-glorified chatroom these days.

Strangely, the specter of potential PvP refused to leave me alone. An editor of mine recently assigned me to cover the local launch of a new PvP-based game called Rohan Online.

For those of you who may not be familiar with the game, this is how the Rohan Online revenge system works: whenever someone KOs you, that player character’s name will conveniently appear on your hit list. You may then choose to be instantly teleported to that character’s location (more specifically, behind that character’s back) so that you may exact your  revenge.

The trade-off is that if you ever get to repay him or her, your character’s name will then appear on your foe’s hit list. That way, the cycle of vengeance can go on indefinitely.

This was one of the points that I brought up during the Q & A portion of the launch. Since I was in a bit of a weird mood at the time, I asked the question that some small, inner voice had been prompting me to ask for the past hour.

“Does Rohan Online give you any incentive for not exacting revenge on someone who has backstabbed you?”

The game’s marketing manager looked at me as if I’d grown another pair of eyes.

After he’d recovered, he told me that there was no real reason for not getting revenge. The best thing a player could do, he said, was to “make friends with your former enemy and then go out and backstab someone else together.”

It sounded like a strange way to turn the other cheek. Satisfied, I held my peace for the rest of the launch event, fully intending not to play this game at all.

Don’t get me wrong. I think Rohan Online has the potential to be a good game–for PVP enthusiasts, that is. The local marketing head of Rohan Online here gave a good presentation, but it wasn’t enough for me to get out of my “no PvP” comfort zone.

You see, I’d discovered something even more satisfying than exacting revenge: that of making other players your friends even before they have a chance to become your enemies.

I learned this principle from some of the nicest folks I’d ever met online, and this has brought about a total paradigm shift.  After all, I very well know what it feels like to be on the receiving end of a backstab. Why should I do the very thing I hate to someone else, especially when there are better alternatives available? Easy? No. Ultimately satisfying? Definitely.

Maybe there’s something to turning the other cheek after all.

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.

Admittedly, I’m one of them. You see, I’m not really the type to rent something or to do some prior research on the product I’m interested in–at least, not always. There are instances when my primal nature asserts itself. I throw caution to the winds and I buy games that I crave for. Resident Evil 5 is one of those games.

Not all people are as easily conditioned, however. As I’m writing this, I’m recalling a thread I read on the GameFAQS forums earlier. One person decided to cancel his or her pre-order of the game, claiming that Resident Evil 5 just “wasn’t Resident Evil anymore.”

That begs the question: what exactly makes Resident Evil Resident Evil? Fiendish puzzles? Multiple heart-stopping moments? A severely scarce supply of available ammunition? Cheesy B-movie lines and voice acting? An inability to shoot while moving at the same time? All of the above?

An even  bigger question is this:  how do you reconcile the popular Part 4–the installment that introduced some major gameplay changes–with the rest of the “classic” series?

Opinions on the thread have varied greatly, but here’s my own take on the subject: the game is by no means “classic” Resident Evil. It really feels more like Resident Evil 4.5, with some Gears of War elements thrown in for good measure. Frankly, that’s okay with me.

The one thing people shouldn’t do with RE5 is to call it “survival horror” as the term no longer fits the bill.  Besides giving us more action and less horror, Capcom has also systematically  desensitized us to the latter–that is, we’ve been repeatedly exposed to the horror over the years so that it no longer horrifies us in the least.

So to that person who canceled his or her pre-order, I respect your decision for doing so. In fact, I even commend you for sticking to your guns. As for me, I’ll be getting my steady diet of mindless Resident Evil violence this weekend.

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.

Case in point: I was once friends with a guy I met in high school. We were both geeks back then, so we got along really well.  My social link rank with him could have been at max level — capable of withstanding the test of time.

Or so I thought.

A single misunderstanding was all it took for us to part company years later. I tried to reconcile with the guy, but I only got the silent treatment in return. We haven’t spoken to each other since.

So much for forging unbreakable bonds.

The hard truth is that relationships can take a long time to build, only to come crashing down after a single act of real or perceived betrayal. In real life, your “maxed” romantic social links will reverse on you if you so much as consider dating other women at the same time.  Consider the possible scenario below:

What’s even trickier is the fact that relationships still require regular maintenance in order to survive, even at supposedly  “maximum rank.” In a sense, you never really arrive when it comes to dealing with other people. There’s always a particular aspect of a person that remains hidden from view, waiting to be discovered and explored.

Alternatively, it’s also possible to be treated kindly by people you have absolutely no social link with prior to meeting them. The strangest thing is that I’ve occasionally been on the receiving end of gifts from complete strangers.

One example was the time managed to I lock myself out of the car I was driving . A total stranger noticed my predicament, grabbed a piece of wire and opened the car door for me.  I didn’t see him again after that.

Now does that mean that we can’t learn anything from social links in the Persona games? Not at all.

For one thing, it’s true that people can draw strength from one another. I’ve seen it happen time and time again in my own family, particularly when my mother was diagnosed with cancer. Shared experience, especially if it’s difficult, still has a way of bringing people together.

The most striking lesson about Persona 3 and 4’s  social links, however, is tied in with that of  having a silent protagonist. If anything, it only emphasizes the importance of being there for the people you care about.

One member of the GameFAQS forums revealed some sharp insights regarding this principle. He or she mentioned that, for the majority of the social links in the last two Persona installments, all the main character has to do to raise the link is to provide quiet emotional support for the other character–no more, no less.

This, ladies and gents, works in either virtual or real life. Guys like myself are often conditioned to try and solve problems, when all the other person really needs is someone to listen to them and to encourage them — Persona MC style.

And now, if you’ll excuse me, I have some real life social links in need of strengthening right now.

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.