Pokémon Blue was a pretty good game. I really liked playing through it, catching all of the monsters and formulating strategies. But I got kind of bored after a while. The crux of the game is battling your little monsters, and since I didn’t have any regular opponents (i.e. real life opponents) and didn’t really want to start the game over and lose all of my progress, I was pretty well stuck.
A while later, though, and all that changed.
Pokémon Stadium is a lot of things, but primarily it’s a pretty 3D interface to your generic pokémon battling. See, when you fight in the Game Boy game, you just get a static picture that might waggle around a little, but pretty much doesn’t do much. This game, though, has your hordes of monsters rendered in glorious 3D fighting it out. And as an added bonus, you get to transfer the team you’ve slaved over on your portable system to the 3D system. And you’ll have to do just that to get the full enjoyment out of this game.
The game throws several dozen scenarios at you to test your battling mettle, which is pretty nice… if you like that kind of thing. You have to have a special affinity for managing statistics and probabilities to really have much success at these battles. I only kind of do, so I only kind of had success at the battling. But it was an ever-present challenge, so that’s something.
The other thing you could do to break up the constant battling was a collection of minigames. Which are mostly kind of lame, but are a reasonable distraction for a while.
I liked this game a lot. I liked trying out my different combinations of monsters, and I really liked being able to use the enhanced organization features that this game offered (the organization feature of the Game Boy version was pretty much nonexistant). But, since you really needed to have the Game Boy version to get the full enjoyment out of it, I can see why a lot of people wouldn’t have played it.
[...] Pokémon Stadium games were always kind of niche titles. They aren’t really much on their own, and they depend [...]