DON'T PANIC!
I bought Seaman 2 today. For those of you not familiar with the original Seaman video game for Dreamcast, it was about raising an evolving man-faced fish and talking to him for about 15 minutes twice a day through the simplistic voice recognition program, bonding with this strangely wise organism as he grew from a creepy cannibalistic man-faced fish/tadpole baby with a vocabulary of "ouch," "yum," "gross," and "NO!" to a creepy sacrifice-myself-for-the-survival-of-my-single-consciousness-species man-faced frog, telling you that because you're an Aries, you become interested in things almost immediately but lose that interest almost as quickly and probably won't finish raising him and he fears a bit for his life. What I mean by single-consciousness is, even when one dies (through survivalistic cannibalism, mating, or laying eggs), the next one you talk to will remember everything you said and remain on the same topic of discussion. He asks you all sorts of things, like who you'll vote for in the upcoming election, if you're dating anyone, etc.
This time, Seaman is back, and since it's been quite a few years, he's evolved wings and man-legs. He's still quite a sassy dude. You don't raise him, though. You raise a tiny primitive human cloned from remains found in Beijing, and Seaman buys things you collect from the little guy's hard work, like pearls, animal skin, and lumber. Basically Seaman is telling you to run a little Beijing Man Sweatshop. Mine will probably have a kid soon with his new girlfriend, too. More workers for the floor, I guess. As my fellow teacher, Justin, says, "You need tiny hands to get that kind of detail." Well, they're not really making anything, but I always crack up when Justin tells me that, so I thought I should share it with you.
I was worried that this game wouldn't have the same atmosphere that I fell in love with in the last game. Well, it really doesn't. It's hard to explain since I'm just churning this all out before bed, but it's very different, and at the same time, it's rather similar to the first one. The biggest difference for me between the first one and the newest game is that I'm playing this one in Japanese. I'd say it'll probably be a good year before the US gets this game, if they ever do. There's an insane amount of voice acting in the game and I guarantee you that unless you played this game every single day (fifteen minutes or so each day) for about a year and kept giving Seaman a different identity to speak to, you wouldn't even get to hear half of it. Yeah, the game is pretty nuts like that.
It's really good practice for my Japanese listening, but man, is it tough. Seaman is just so darn sassy, he's hard to keep up with.
This time, Seaman is back, and since it's been quite a few years, he's evolved wings and man-legs. He's still quite a sassy dude. You don't raise him, though. You raise a tiny primitive human cloned from remains found in Beijing, and Seaman buys things you collect from the little guy's hard work, like pearls, animal skin, and lumber. Basically Seaman is telling you to run a little Beijing Man Sweatshop. Mine will probably have a kid soon with his new girlfriend, too. More workers for the floor, I guess. As my fellow teacher, Justin, says, "You need tiny hands to get that kind of detail." Well, they're not really making anything, but I always crack up when Justin tells me that, so I thought I should share it with you.
I was worried that this game wouldn't have the same atmosphere that I fell in love with in the last game. Well, it really doesn't. It's hard to explain since I'm just churning this all out before bed, but it's very different, and at the same time, it's rather similar to the first one. The biggest difference for me between the first one and the newest game is that I'm playing this one in Japanese. I'd say it'll probably be a good year before the US gets this game, if they ever do. There's an insane amount of voice acting in the game and I guarantee you that unless you played this game every single day (fifteen minutes or so each day) for about a year and kept giving Seaman a different identity to speak to, you wouldn't even get to hear half of it. Yeah, the game is pretty nuts like that.
It's really good practice for my Japanese listening, but man, is it tough. Seaman is just so darn sassy, he's hard to keep up with.