I know it's 3 AM, but I totally don't wanna sleep, so I'm gonna write instead.

Atlantica Online was a bust -- after spending so much time "downloding" it, it would not even start up without the Korean language pack installed. At least PW games will run without the Chinese language pack, as long as you stay in windowed mode.

I tried another game called Luna Online, which is said to be EXTREMELY cute (and it is) but the fact that mouse-clicking was my ONLY allowed method of movement (no WASD keys here!), plus the cacaphony of noise that assaulted my speakers the moment I ventured anywhere near the monsters I had to kill for the first quest, made this one a definite NO. Also, quests were a little complicated to pick up -- I would go through the quest dialogue, and it would just stay there on the last page of the dialogue with no concluding response that would close the dialogue and inform me that I had picked up the quest.

But good news -- Khoa got Oblivion working -- on HIS computer. I don't know why, and I'm not gonna try to figure it out. His computer is older than mine, his graphics card is not as good, etc. He built my computer after his. For some reason, Oblivion works perfectly fine on his computer. So I've spent the past few nights completely maxing out my character's stats. At level 40, all of my stats are at 100. I've maxed out Conjuration, Alteration, Mysticism and Speechcraft, so I can use really high-level spells. After I finished, I uninstalled my skill journal addon and my x16 skill experience addon, and now I'm just going to enjoy the story and sidequests of the game without having to worry about levels.

And also, Khoa found a way to get me hooked on Pokemon yet again. He realized that I prefer to have a completionist strategy. I want to catch every pokemon, then keep them all around the same level and use them ALL more or less as the situation warrants. The only problem is, wild pokemon give so little exp, that once I hit level 20 or so, the vast amounts of grinding necessary for this becomes too much for me to handle -- so either I catch everything I see but never use anything but my main team, focusing most of my trainer-gained exp on them, or I don't play at all.

He's found a way that I can do this in a non-frustrating way, by way of a gameshark cheat. Basically, it allows me to hold down R when I kill a wild pokemon, to gain 1280 experience instead of like... 20. He copied Pearl with the cheat code onto my R4 cart earlier tonight and I forsake Oblivion to play Pearl for the remainder of the night. He says that if I get to a point where 1280 experience isn't enough, I can enable the other cheat code that will raise it to 9999 experience. This is gonna be so much fun. I've never actually played any meaningful distance through Pearl (I think after I bought it, I got to around level 20 and got bored) so all of this is completely new to me. Whee!

Gonna go see UP tomorrow morning, then probably spend the rest of the day planting flowers with my sister. Her wedding just HAD to be the day before the open beta, didn't it? Oh well.