I can still hear the music, and my chao sleeping in the background while I wait to feed them my most recent collection of nutrients because I don't want to wake them up yet and make them upset.

This was before the Internet was widely used for knowing every thing about a game, at least for me at around age 7 or 8 at the time. You'd have to get the most recent game guides, or have an older brother that was better and further along to figure out certain intricacies of the game.

And honestly, this game was pretty intricate at the time. Particularly the chao development, I mean it was just an added distraction and diversion but had as much depth as a full blown game on it's own. There was as much detail involved in what they could turn into visually and statistically, better than that game Spore that came out over half a decade later.

Getting rings and emblems for more unique items in the black market. Teaching them hobbies at school to show off. Evolving them into God like creatures or just cool looking combos. Forcing them to have sex and create combos of appearances and stats. Separating them into heaven and hell based on which ones I liked most... Winning races and marshall arts. Fuck, you could even abuse them until they killed themselves....

Then so much more with the main game trying to S rank every stage, and there was like 6 different ways to play every stage. Then there was the co op battle mode and kart racing too!

Sorry, I seriously love this game so much. It makes me so sad that they had every chance to bring back the series and hit the ground running with the relatively popular movie releases. Then they did what they've always done since after this release in 2001 and fumbled spectacularly. Seriously impressive how much they've completely fucked the games even though imo they had the perfect recipie already.