I almost forgot to tell you how I entertain myself when I'm blocking out raving maniacs on the train
Well, at least until very recently, I was playing Monkey Puncher, which is an old GBC game released in Japan and Europe, but not in the US for some cruel reason. The basic gist of the game is that you're raising a pet monkey to be a boxer in a competitive monkey fighting circuit. There's some bullshit story about your family being kidnapped by a shadowy organization of evil monkey trainers who still fight by the rules of the boxing league in unlicensed matches.
You have very little direct control over the game, aside from some managerial/virtual pet stuff and tapping A in a steady rhythm during training sessions to boost your monkey's stats. The gameplay's pretty dry, actually, and I'd definitely not recommend it as a game to like, throw on your GBA Player so you can sit back on the couch with a couple of brewskies and draw little circles around your bellybutton with your finger or whatever. I found it perfect, however, for killing time when I was waiting for stuff or riding trains around.
One thing it really reminded me of, in terms of the breeding and eating mechanics and all that, was Derby Owners Club, which is this bomb-ass arcade game you've probably seen if you ever went to one of the large scale arcade/bar/restaurant places like Dave & Busters or Gameworks. It's the same basic concept as Monkey Puncher, except you're raising a horse for racing and you actually have some control over the race (Sadly, you have no control over the fights in monkey puncher aside from deciding which of four strategies you want your monkey to do in the next round) I played the ever-loving shit out of Derby Owners Club back in the mid 2000s, and Monkey Puncher helped me realize how much I'd kind of missed these low-gameplay managerial games, where the satisfaction and fun comes more from watching your animal develop and become successful. This is especially fun when your monkey/horse outclasses its opposition by horrifying degrees, letting you watch with glee as your living war machine turns its opponent into delicious meat product. Or beats it by a considerable margin in a race, depending on what game we're talking about.
I've kind of gotten tired of playing it now, though. I finished the main story mode, which means my only goal now is to climb the World Monkeyslaughter rankings, or whatever (which is basically just an amped-up version of the tournament you climb through during the story). Unfortunately, I've hit a bit of a wall, so the only thing I can really do from here is buying and developing new monkeys so I can cross breed them to make an ubermensch that can topple the world warriors. This means a lot of starting monkeys from scratch, and after doing it four times in a row already, I'd pretty much had my fill.
As an aside, the translation is fantastic. Not in that it's good or accurate or natural in any way, but it's entertaining as hell, and that's really more important, right?
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