You’ve no doubt heard of Pokémon by now. It’s hard for me to believe that it’s been over ten years now since the series first came out. But it did, and sure hit the US like a sack of wet cats.
So what is the game, exactly? The best I can describe is that you go around, capture creatures (the titular ‘Pocket Monsters’), teach them special moves, and combine them to make your unbeatable team. There’s a story in the game, but it’s largely irrelevant. It’s just an excuse to slowly introduce you to the mechanics of the game. The real meat of this game is figuring out how to make your unbeatable team, and you have lots of choices.
I got this game during my Sophomore year at college. I didn’t actually have a driver’s license at the time, so I needed something to kill the time on the bus to and from school. So I got very familiar with this game. I thought that mixing and matching monsters and moves to create your perfect unbeatable team was just about the best feature that I’d seen in a role-playing game up till that point. The only thing that I didn’t like about the game was that you really needed to have friends who also play the game to get the full experience.
See, there were two versions of this game, Blue and Red, and a third, Yellow, that came out later. Each version has a different subset of the total 150ish total creatures, which means that in order to actually build your perfect team, or just to see all of the monsters available, you have to trade monsters with someone who has a different version. I suppose that’s not going to be a problem for most people, but most of the folks I went to college with either didn’t play Teh Game Boyz, or they did it so covertly that I couldn’t find any. I did manage to convince one of my non-college friends to get the complimentary version to mine, but I don’t think he really got into it so much. In fact, so far as I know, he hasn’t yet finished the very straightforward and non-complicated story portion.
I should probably check out his progress on that.
[...] 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. [...]
[...] original Pokémon game that I played was pretty fun, and I guess a few million people agreed with me. And what do you do [...]
[...] two Pokémon games under my belt that were fairly similar, why in the world would I want to play the [...]