Posts Tagged ‘silver’

9 Feb

Oops, I Finished Pokemon Crystal Again

Posted by vagrantesque in 3DS, Games, GB. Tagged: , , , , , , , , .

NOTE: This post is designed as a much shorter follow-on to last year’s revisitation of Pokémon Silver Version via the 3DS virtual console service, so I recommend you read that bit here first.

Nintendo are a bunch of crafty bastards. Releasing a game like Pokémon Crystal at the end of January 2018, without any big-name new release competition to speak of and a bunch of potential customers in holiday mode, was a bit of a guarantee to ensnare people like me. I picked up Crystal on the 3DS Virtual Console because it was cheap and I figured I’d get to it eventually. In actual fact, I smashed through its main content stream – all the way through Kanto and Red – inside two weeks from launch, almost exclusively in the down time between events over a coastal family holiday. This despite completing – in a manner of speaking – three Pokémon games on 3DS last year (Red, Silver and Ultra Sun) and having the gall to complain about all the great new games I wasn’t playing. This series is my kryptonite.

As luck – or something else – would have it, Crystal is a lot more divergent from Silver than I remember it being, making it just as worth writing about. Yes, it’s still largely the same story, but compared to its prototypical predecessor Yellow, the third Gen 2 game packs quite a bit of extra meat on the bone of Gold and Silver, in both obvious and under-the-hood ways. Also, unlike in my Silver run, I decided to go all the way through Kanto in Crystal this time around, because why not? I was in deep enough. All of this extra gameplay left me with the following quick thoughts.
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10 Oct

My Top 10 In-Game Pokemon Moments

Posted by vagrantesque in Games, Lists. Tagged: , , , , , , , , .

We are now mere hours away from the long-awaited (there’s an understatement) first ever 3D entries in the main Pokemon video game series, Pokemon X and Pokemon Y. To celebrate and, quite honestly, to kill some time while enduring the wait, I decided to have a look back at some of my favourite memories the series has given me in-game. I use the term “in-game” to mean anything taking place during the game’s story (that is, anything before and possibly immediately after the Elite Four), as opposed to, say, any awesome competitive battles I have had the pleasure of participating in using EV trained, IV bred fighting machines.

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10. Patrat, the Purpose-Built Annoyer – Pokemon White

Nearly every Pokemon release has been an inherently multiplayer experience for me, because in my book that’s the way it was designed to be played. There is a tradition among my close friends and family who play Pokemon that whenever a new game comes out, we try to get together and play the first few hours alongside one another, battling after the first gym and sometimes after the second as well. As a result I try to catch and train Pokemon that my fellow players aren’t likely to pay attention to, just to make the battles more interesting. Never has this been more true than at the start of the fifth generation of Pokemon, when I caught a super-common Patrat and trained it to the mid-teens solely because its movepool seemed deliberately stacked with the most annoying moves possible. Detect, Sand-Attack, Bite, Hypnosis… I mean, really, how could I not? In our first battle Patrat was my highest-level Pokemon and I used its full irritating potential against my brother, only to dump it in a box forever afterwards. If not for that tradition, I wouldn’t have looked twice at the caffeinated chipmunk for my in-game team.
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7 Feb

Movie Review: Silver Linings Playbook

Posted by vagrantesque in Movies. Tagged: , , , , , .

Saw this two nights ago. The Oscars are closing in!

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Starring: Bradley Cooper, Jennifer Lawrence, Robert de Niro
Director: David O. Russell (Three Kings, The Fighter)
Rating: M
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Duality

I’ve gone into Oscar season a little darker than usual this year. Perhaps due to the Academy’s rather off-putting snub of Skyfall, The Dark Knight Rises and even, where it matters, Django Unchained and Argo, I wasn’t in the mood to do the research. So I went into Silver Linings Playbook without the knowledge that it had a nominee in each of the major acting categories, with only half a trailer and the name of a rather skilled director to give me any idea what to expect. This happy combination set me up to be sucker punched by a film that may just have done to romantic comedy what the excellent The Cabin in the Woods did to horror: prove that daring to shake things up can really work as long as you have the talent to back up your bravado.

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