The Pocket Monster Diaries, Part 3

Dear PokéDiary,

Don’t get me wrong: I’m grateful for the Pokémon Centers. The people who work there are polite, competent, and efficient — you never have to wait for more than a few minutes — and, of course, it’s all completely free. It’s a miracle of public health care, really. To top it all off, the staff are unfailingly cheerful. But I can’t quite shake the feeling that sometimes they’re just a little bit too cheerful. The nurses are always so perky and chirpy, and yet they see some pretty nasty stuff every day. How do they do it? Maybe I’m just being paranoid. I had recently been through a pretty stressful experience, after all. But as I sat on the plush waiting room chair, reading an issue of PokéLife that was published before I had the ability to form coherent sentences, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I had entrusted Mr. Suds to the care of a facility staffed entirely by identical robots.

Dark Souls: Will it be hard game, or most best hardest game?

Demon’s Souls, 2009’s surprise hit action/RPG/n00b gristmill by From Software, is one of my favorite games of all time. If you’ve ever played Demon’s Souls, even for a minute, you probably know that it is very hard. You may also know that its spiritual successor, Dark Souls, is being released on October 11th, 2011, and that From Software has promised that it will be even harder than the first, testicle-stompingly difficult installment. In fact, the most recent trailer for Dark Souls was basically just a montage of player deaths. There are certainly some cheeky devils at From Software, but they make damn fine games.

So, to kill time until October, I recut the trailer to go with some apropos music:

I can’t for it to kill me again and again and again.