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Bought a second copy of Sonic Advance 2 yesterday. One of my Chao (a red one in Station Square) keeps making this low-pitched sound every so often, and for a while, I didn't think much of it, but then I read online that it's probably sick and will not reincarnate upon death if not treated. This only happened to me once before, in Adventure 2: Battle, where there is already a doctor on call. There is none here, because in this game, he originally existed in the Dreamcast Visual Memory Unit, which the GameCube has no equivalent to. (Must have been an oversight in re-development.)

Good thing I co-bought Adventure 2 and played somewhat into that four years ago. It also helps that I'm only gonna be playing Adventure for until Brian and Marie come home today, and that I still have a Nintendo DS at least to play Advance 2 on. Once I unlock the Tiny Chao Garden, though, I'm then gonna need a second game link cable and a third Game Boy Advance in order to seek help for that one Chao (in case I fail to collect all five remaining Emblems and decide to continue playing later on).

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Brian and Marie just arrived about an hour ago, after wading through heavy traffic all day since breakfast.

Originally, Mom and I agreed to let Brian have my room during his stay here, but then she saw me on my computer and asked if I was about to turn my game back on. Just for tonight, we agreed to let him sleep in the living room, so that I can get up early to continue leveling my Chao up and competing in the remaining Chao races.

So, I turned my game on, and no sooner did I play yet another race did Brian and Marie come inside. They came to greet me, proceeded to watch with me, and what perfect timing, I actually scored 1st place in the Sapphire Jewel course and got my 127th emblem! Only the Pearl and Emerald courses and Sonic's time attack in Casinopolis* remain now.

(*I tend to decide with dice, which character to play as, how many "turns" to play (both with a cubic die), and which level and Chao Garden to visit for each turn. Sonic has ten levels in this game, and it just so happens that I only rolled a 3 out of 10 once with him this whole time.)

Proceeded to exit the Chao Race menu screen, and I just so happened to be playing as Gamma (he will be playing five turns first thing tomorrow morning), eliciting a comment from Brian as I left the Chao Garden itself before turning the game off (we both recall him walking in on his first cutscene the day I received my first copy).

(Also showed Marie a few minutes of episode 14 of Lucky Star, given her previous thoughts on that entry where I referred to Yutaka just last month.)

(Even though I am lucky enough to have gotten my "deadline" extended twice now, it isn't that big a deal if I still fail to unlock the last two games by the time Brian wakes up. I mean, I am glad to have gotten down to this two weeks ago, and obtaining five of the game's emblems in particular was kind of the whole point behind raising Chao in the first place. However, having cleared several of the Jewel Cup's races feels pretty satisfying in and of itself, but more importantly, it's not like those last two games even could have fit properly into my nostalgic memories. Tails Adventure could have been a last-minute sort of thing before we scrapped the Game Gear, but Sonic Blast came out a whole year later, a point at which the franchise itself just wasn't relevant to me anymore.)

(On that note, why are the games all unlocked in such a specific order, instead of being randomized? This isn't even the order in which they were all released. I guess I could understand Sonic the Hedgehog assuming first as the debut game, but then you unlock Sonic Drift, which came out on March 18, 1994 (only in Japan), and then Sonic Chaos (from four months earlier), three games still before Sonic the Hedgehog 2 (only GG Sonic game from '92, with only StH1 from '91).)

(On that note, what a coincidence it is, that Drift came out in Japan around the same time that I first got my Game Gear and StH2 for my 8th birthday two days earlier.)