So, when I saw that the companion game for the DS versions of the portable series was coming out for the Wii, I pretty well disregarded the reviews that I saw. All of the companion games score pretty low as a rule, mostly because they’re reviewed as standalone products instead of the companion products that they really are. Which is to say, if you don’t have the portable game that goes along with each console title, your fun is going to be extremely limited, and that’s fair.

But I do have Pokémon Diamond, so it was pretty well a no-brainer that I’d pick up the companion game for it.

Pokémon Battle Revolution is a whole lot like the Stadium and Colosseum games that came before it. You take your team of monsters that you raised up in your portable adventure and make them fight each other in a ridiculous amount of preprepared situations. After three games, that’s not really much to write home about any more.

But, like the other games that preceded it, the most fun you’re going to have is when you get a friend wrangled into playing the game with you, so you can see who’s the better Pokétrainer. But, that can actually get kind of tough, so this game actually takes advantage of the Wii’s newfangled ability to connect to the Internet to allow you to play battles against folks all over the world… who are mostly far, far better than you are.

But other than the battles, what kind of other features do you get with this game?

Nothing, really.

The only real thing you can do, other than the battles, is look at a few static pages of text that offer up some battle strategy, most of which is so basic that it’s essentially worthless. There are no mini-games, no tutorial battles, no extra RPG mode, and no Pokémanagement utilities.

What you get is a kind-of okay, sort-of flashy 3D interface to your battles, which is nice, but it just doesn’t seem like you get a lot to do for the $50 entrance fee.

No bonus points for guessing the gist of the next game in the series.

Pokémon Colosseum is basically the same as Stadium and Stadium 2. You take your team of monsters that you’ve caught and trained in your portable game and you have them battle it out in glorious 3D. There are a couple of differences in the game mechanics, but they don’t really matter much. The differences I was concerned about were of a different variety.

The big one for me was that the Nintendo 64 versions supported the Transfer Pak, a device that let you plug the game directly into one of your controllers. Which, I admit, doesn’t sound all that exciting, but those games gave you some fairly powerful management abilities as a side effect, which was actually really awesome because the management abilities in the game were nearly nonexistent.

Colosseum, though, uses a cable to connect your Game Boy to your Game Cube. You forgo lots of your management abilities with this new arrangement, for some reason, but you do get slightly better management capabilities in the portable part, so that’s pretty much a wash.

One of the things that is slightly different about this game, other than the supremely-annoying announcer going away, is the removal of the mini-games. It’s not a great loss or anything, the games weren’t anything special but were kind of a nice diversion. But they’ve been replaced with something a little more substantial, a mini-RPG.

The RPG is kind of like a watered-down version of the full Game Boy game. You take your guy on a little quest to rescue Pokémon who have had their ‘hearts closed’ by some evil organization, which makes them all shadowy and evil. Your job is to find them, catch them, and purify them… while stopping the evil organization if you have the time.

I got kind of a bit of play out of the Battle Mode of this game, but didn’t really make it too far. This is mostly because the game didn’t really offer me anything new over the last two games. Yeah, the tag-team battles were nice, and the rewards were kind of neat, if I would have taken the time to get them. But this game is a lot more fun to play against an actual person instead of the computer, and since most of my friends that have Game Boys didn’t actually get games that were compatible with it, that wasn’t really going to happen.

But, there’s that RPG mode!

The RPG modes of the Game Boy games have always been about roaming the world, catching wild pokémon, and assembling them into an awesome team. In this one, though, you just fight random people who may or may not have a ‘corrupted’ pokémon for you to rescue. So you have to kind of assemble your team out of this hodgepodge of creatures that you rescue, which is kind of OK. Except that you can’t really use them right away. See, when you get the pokémon, they don’t know any worthwhile moves and they won’t gain any experience and no experience = they don’t get any stronger. So what you end up doing is catching a pokémon from a trainer, then use it in battles, but it can’t really do anything. Then, after it wins so many fights, then you can use it to its fullest. But the thing is, it takes quite a while for them to get to that point, and there are lots of the little buggers to catch.

What all that means is that you’re going to spend a lot of time collecting your ‘corrupted’ pokémon and making them fight so that you can purify them so you can assemble your crackerjack team. But that’s ridiculously tedious, and it was something that I could only do for so long before I gave up on the game. According to the strategy guide that I would eventually get, that was about halfway through the thing, but I’ve tried, and I just don’t have the energy to get back into it… And I probably won’t for a while to come.

Pokémon Puzzle Challenge is actually more like the Tetris Attack game for the Super NES than Pokémon Puzzle League for the Nintendo 64. But what that means is that this game looks to be nearly identical to the Super NES one, but with different characters and sound effects.

So what do you do in this game? You have your steadily-rising pile of multi-colored blocks and can move them left and/or right to try and line up three or more in a row. Match more than three or set off chain reactions and your opponent loses health. When it loses all of its health, then you win!

But the thing in this version is that you have different Pokémon to choose from, each one representing a different element in the Pokémon universe. If you pick a pokémon that has a type that its opponent is weak to, then your attacks do more damage, and you’ll win quicker. Pick the wrong one, though, and you’ll have to do a lot more chains and combos to win.

I played this game a fair bit, mostly because it was an update to the old Tetris Attack game that I had nearly worn out on my Game Boy, plus it was in glorious COLOR! Which made it pretty ideal for showing off my Game Boy Color, and for practicing up on my Puzzle League skills on the go. Which I find pretty important. You never really know when an impromptu game of Puzzle League can break out, so it pays to be prepared.

You might be asking yourself why on Earth would I want to buy another Pokémon game. And to that I can only say that you apparently don’t know me very well. I just kind of like the series, that’s all. The games are as deep as you want them to be, and I have the opportunity to catch innocent wild creatures and force them to do my bidding, satiating my God complex… Okay, not really. I just like goofing around with it, trying out the different moves, checking out the variety of monsters, and generally trying to create my super-awesome nigh-unbeatable team… which actually usually turns out to be quite beatable.

There is a story in this game, but it really is just kind of a framework for you to work in that slowly introduces you to the world, its inhabitants, and the bizarre organized pokémon fighting culture that has somehow pervaded its world.

Or you could catch them and dress them up to participate in contests instead of fighting them. Or you could dispense with fighting completely and navigate the underground network and attempt to find hidden treasures.

But probably the most interesting part of the game is that it takes advantage of the DS’s wireless capabilities to connect to the Nebulous Internet. You can use this newfangled tech-a-nology to trade whatever you’ve collected with other folks around the world. The interface could use a little work. You can’t, for instance, search for something unless you’ve seen it first. This makes it kind of tough to ‘catch ‘em all’ since lots of the ones you’ll need to actually do that will never cross your paths without some… creative shenanigans.

You might remember that the DS, on the bottom, has a slot that will accommodate one Game Boy Advance cartridge. Once you reach a certain point in your DS adventure, you can utilize the kinda super-secret transfer method to move your monsters that you worked so hard to get in the Game Boy titles over to your DS game. Which certainly will help speed things along, but will definitely leave your prior-generation title bereft of all your hard-gotten uber-characters, which would make it kind of tough to go back and play it… if you were so inclined. Which, history has shown, will happen from time to time.

Of course, if you have a family member who gives you a copy of one of the GBA games that she found in the parking lot of some school, and the game was run over a few times, but still worked fine. Then you would probably not have any qualms about taking all of that kid’s monsters.

At least, I didn’t.

With the introduction of WiiWare, Nintendo created a conduit where they could funnel games directly to me at a cheaper price, and since one of them had Pokémons on it, I guess they’d figure that they could make lots of sales on the thing, so long as it was passably mediocre, but I’m getting ahead of myself.

In the portable Pokémon adventures you capture and train little creatures to fight battles for you with the ultimate goal of being the best in the land. Problem is, though, that there is an ever-growing menagerie of creatures for you to capture, but the problem is that if you want to “catch ‘em all” you’re going to quickly run out of the kind-of limited storage space that you’re afforded in the games. The solution, then, is to buy some kind of add-on game that lets you satiate the desires of your inner pack rat.

Which is essentially what My Pokémon Ranch is. It’s just a massive storage utility in the guise of a ranch that you can send your pokémon to so that they can rest, relax and have fun. You can also send your Miis into the ranch to interact with your little critters. But you don’t really do much of the interaction. You just kind of watch them as they mill around and do their thing, which is every bit as exciting as it sounds.

So the ‘game’ kind of goes like this: you catch a whole bunch of beasties in your game, you transfer them to the ranch, then you just kind of sit there and watch them. Occasionally some ‘toy’ will fall into the ranch and you can bust it open to let the wandering pokémon play with it. And that’s pretty much the extent of your interaction with the game. Occasionally your monsters will do something spontaneous like creating a totem pole or something like that, but that’s not really interactive. Mostly you’re sitting around watching what amounts to a virtual terrarium.

But there’s a hook. A nefarious hook. The ranch-master, Hayley, will bring different pokémon to the ranch depending on a number of factors. As it happens, one of the conditions is that you deposit 1,000 pokémon into the ranch, and she’ll bring to you one of the super-rare and highly sought after creatures, Mew. Which really seems like a whole lot of work for the payoff, but I guess I’m going to end up doing it anyway.

Gotta get some kind of reward for my ten dollars.

Pokémon Sapphire is a whole lot like the other games in the series so far. You take control of some kid that travels the world and tries to be the best Pokémon trainer in the world, oh, and possibly stop the machinations of a power-hungry group bent on world domination. The main differences being that you have a new landmass to explore, lots of new creatures to catch, you can play the game as a boy or a girl, and it’s on a new-fangled system, so it looks a lot prettier.

Yeah, the game’s a lot like the older games in the series, just refined a little more. There are a few additions here and there, like making berries, tag-team battles, and refinements to the breeding system, but it’s largely the same game. Which is fine by me, mostly because the concept was solid to start with, and each iteration just kind of polishes it up a little more.

Now does that explain how I’ve managed to while away over 120 hours at this game so far? Probably not, but that’s OK.

Pokémon Stadium 2 is largely the same as the previous Stadium game, but with a few additions. Most of them are pretty minor, but the one that I was most interested in was the academy. There you were presented with lots of information on just about every aspect of the Pokémon universe. You have charts to show you what’s weak to what. You have lessons on all kinds of battling and breeding techniques (with some canned examples!). As well as detailed profiles of all of the little monsters. You’re going to get more information there than you every thought you’d need to know.

Like the prior game, you don’t get a lot out of this unless you have the accompanying portable title to go with it. It’s designed to be a companion game, so if you judge it purely on its own, then it kind of falls short; there’s just not that much for you to do in it. It’s only when you link to your portable full-on adventure game do you really get the full benefit of this game. And if you do, then it’s really fun and informative. Otherwise you’re going to have that blank “Is this all there is?” look on your face about ten minutes into it.

Pokémon Silver (and Gold) is, essentially, the same as Pokémon Blue (and Red) with a couple of minor changes: it takes place in a new region to explore, the battle mechanics have been tweaked, there are several more creatures to fawn over, which can now breed somehow, and the landmass from the original game is included to go and explore.

The story is basically the same as the previous generation. You decide to set out in the world to become a Pokémon trainer, and along the way you cross paths with Team Rocket (still the bad guys) and foil whatever nefarious plans they concoct. But, ultimately, this game is largely the same as the older one. You still go around and have to find, capture, train, and fight your ultimate team of beasties and try to be the best.

I spent far too long with this game. The first one was really fun, and this one, being basically the same game but refined a little bit was just as fun. And since they put the people and places from the first game in this game, it just added icing to the cake. And the breeding thing? That was just weird, and you better believe that I spent hours upon hours mixing and matching Pokémon to create the ultimate team. Which I never was able to do, but I sure had fun trying.

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.

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.