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MY POKEMONS: Let me show you them.
Jul. 30th, 2010 09:45 pm(I'm going to try to cut-tag segregate this into "things interesting to people who like hearing me ramble about games and social networks" and "no seriously only follow the cut if you really love you some pokemon," but I have to warn you, it's nerdery all the way down.)
So I picked up Pokemon SoulSilver. [0] In case you're totally unfamiliar with the core of the pokemon games, you're a ten-year-old who is sent out into the world of competitive animal exploitation --- weakening, catching, and training various wild creatures in order to pit them in battles against other trainers for money, with the eventual goal of being at the very top of a highly structured competitive ring of animal slavers. All of the animals are frickin' adorable. The core mechanics are half JRPG --- you've got your hit points and your fighting abilities and items and stats and leveling --- and half extended rock-paper-scissors, in the form of elemental affinities (every pokemon has one or two, every ability you can use has one), some of which are weak to or strong against each other in a mostly balanced way. With almost 500 individual pokemon, all with different stat balances and/or elemental combinations, there's actually a lot of strategy to get into if you are into that sort of thing. Don't believe me? Read the Introduction to Competitive Pokemon, which terrified me away from ever getting seriously into the combat mechanic.
I picked up SoulSilver and not HeartGold because Diane has HeartGold and there are some poor little critters you can only pick up in one game or the other and you have to trade with other people for them. Pokemon is one of the only games I've played that really does a good job at incentivizing both social things and things outside the game, and I like it. There are a number of different ways to trade or play against other people --- you can play with your actual friends, you can trade with strangers over their trading application, or you can meet people over the internet (I use livejournal communities like pokewifi and pokemon) to trade/battle with. It also comes with a pedometer that gives you more in-game items and pokemon for walking long distances in real life. The pedometer lets you level up one of your pokemon by exercising. HOW AWESOME IS THAT. [1]
The metagame goal that I care most about is catching them all, or "filling the Pokedex," basically the index of all Pokemon that you assemble over the course of the game when you meet or catch those Pokemon. If you've ever heard or seen the slogan "Gotta Catch 'Em All?" Yeah, that's this. It requires owning multiple games on multiple systems to do, spending hundreds of dollars... or trading with other people who have the games/systems you don't and assembling your collection that way. [2] This means that there's a lot of culture surrounding it, and first I joined the all-trading community, but then I joined the general community, and today I read Pokemon fan fiction and kinda liked it? I've been a fan of things before (anyone who's seen me interact with Read or Die knows this) but I've never participated in organized fandom, like, at all, and the fact that the natural path to trying to win this video game caused me to interact with fandom is both really neat and bizarre.
( Pokebabble. )
[0] It's SoulSilver, not just RegularSilver, because it's actually a re-release for the DS of Pokemon Silver for the... game boy color or something, and so most of the plot and characters and setting are all rehashes (although of games I've never played). It doesn't feel like a remake of an old game in ways that would annoy me, though, it just has that sort of pleasantly familiar feeling that I get out of replaying old Final Fantasy games at times. If I had played the original, apparently there's enough new stuff to make it worth it anyway probably?
[1] Sadly it doesn't make optimal player choices at level boundaries and so it's actually not as good a grinding tool as it could be otherwise. But I can still play pokemon on the treadmill and be GRINDING TWICE. Clearly I need to use my treadmill to power a coffee grinder. Or, you know, a millstone. "I will grind your levels to bake my bread!"
[2] Or various hackery including but not limited to tricking your DS into connecting to a Python web service hosted on your computer. <3 <3 <3 Although I'm being all anal about legit pokemon which may mean to get some of the really rare ones I have to do dumb things like play "My Pokemon Ranch" on the Wii. :/
[3] Same Type Attack Bonus --- I do care a little about winning, after all...
[4] Although part of the reason this has hooked me is that I keep having to spend time for real work in places like friggin' Dayton OH or air travel which involves mad sitting and waiting while being too groggy for real work but not too groggy to level up Pokemon.
So I picked up Pokemon SoulSilver. [0] In case you're totally unfamiliar with the core of the pokemon games, you're a ten-year-old who is sent out into the world of competitive animal exploitation --- weakening, catching, and training various wild creatures in order to pit them in battles against other trainers for money, with the eventual goal of being at the very top of a highly structured competitive ring of animal slavers. All of the animals are frickin' adorable. The core mechanics are half JRPG --- you've got your hit points and your fighting abilities and items and stats and leveling --- and half extended rock-paper-scissors, in the form of elemental affinities (every pokemon has one or two, every ability you can use has one), some of which are weak to or strong against each other in a mostly balanced way. With almost 500 individual pokemon, all with different stat balances and/or elemental combinations, there's actually a lot of strategy to get into if you are into that sort of thing. Don't believe me? Read the Introduction to Competitive Pokemon, which terrified me away from ever getting seriously into the combat mechanic.
I picked up SoulSilver and not HeartGold because Diane has HeartGold and there are some poor little critters you can only pick up in one game or the other and you have to trade with other people for them. Pokemon is one of the only games I've played that really does a good job at incentivizing both social things and things outside the game, and I like it. There are a number of different ways to trade or play against other people --- you can play with your actual friends, you can trade with strangers over their trading application, or you can meet people over the internet (I use livejournal communities like pokewifi and pokemon) to trade/battle with. It also comes with a pedometer that gives you more in-game items and pokemon for walking long distances in real life. The pedometer lets you level up one of your pokemon by exercising. HOW AWESOME IS THAT. [1]
The metagame goal that I care most about is catching them all, or "filling the Pokedex," basically the index of all Pokemon that you assemble over the course of the game when you meet or catch those Pokemon. If you've ever heard or seen the slogan "Gotta Catch 'Em All?" Yeah, that's this. It requires owning multiple games on multiple systems to do, spending hundreds of dollars... or trading with other people who have the games/systems you don't and assembling your collection that way. [2] This means that there's a lot of culture surrounding it, and first I joined the all-trading community, but then I joined the general community, and today I read Pokemon fan fiction and kinda liked it? I've been a fan of things before (anyone who's seen me interact with Read or Die knows this) but I've never participated in organized fandom, like, at all, and the fact that the natural path to trying to win this video game caused me to interact with fandom is both really neat and bizarre.
( Pokebabble. )
[0] It's SoulSilver, not just RegularSilver, because it's actually a re-release for the DS of Pokemon Silver for the... game boy color or something, and so most of the plot and characters and setting are all rehashes (although of games I've never played). It doesn't feel like a remake of an old game in ways that would annoy me, though, it just has that sort of pleasantly familiar feeling that I get out of replaying old Final Fantasy games at times. If I had played the original, apparently there's enough new stuff to make it worth it anyway probably?
[1] Sadly it doesn't make optimal player choices at level boundaries and so it's actually not as good a grinding tool as it could be otherwise. But I can still play pokemon on the treadmill and be GRINDING TWICE. Clearly I need to use my treadmill to power a coffee grinder. Or, you know, a millstone. "I will grind your levels to bake my bread!"
[2] Or various hackery including but not limited to tricking your DS into connecting to a Python web service hosted on your computer. <3 <3 <3 Although I'm being all anal about legit pokemon which may mean to get some of the really rare ones I have to do dumb things like play "My Pokemon Ranch" on the Wii. :/
[3] Same Type Attack Bonus --- I do care a little about winning, after all...
[4] Although part of the reason this has hooked me is that I keep having to spend time for real work in places like friggin' Dayton OH or air travel which involves mad sitting and waiting while being too groggy for real work but not too groggy to level up Pokemon.