The Rocky Mountain Collegian

April 26th, 2007

Talkin’ ’bout Those Pokemans

My roommate is probably a little insane. The new versions of Pokemon for the Nintendo DS got released in the United States on Sunday, and he was waiting at the front gates of Gamestop at 10 in the morning in order to pick up copies of both versions. I’m not entirely sure why he decided to buy both versions of the game, but the fact remains that I now have a copy of Pokemon Pearl which… I should probably have more enthusiasm for! Most of the game’s rehashed features are only rehashed to people who have been paying attention to Pokemon for the past seven years.

 For someone who last played the game back in 1998 on a monochrome Gameboy that I accidentally left in the backseat pocket of a jet airliner, it’s all new. Unfortunately, the game is also kind of insanely time-consuming in a bad way, so I’m having a hard time getting into it, what with finals approaching. So what can I say about the game from the two hours of play that I’ve put into it so far?

-The graphics are simultaneously adorable and ridiculously antiquated. The buildings in towns are comprised of polygons, for example, but the in-battle graphics are nearly identical to those found in the Gameboy Advance iterations of the game. The overhead-view character sprites have a wonderfully squished and personable feel, despite being poorly animated. A plus in my book!

-My roommate got an oversized novelty Pokemon stylus for pre-ordering the game, yet the game makes remarkably little use of the DS touch-screen. You can select commands in battle with it, and some menus allow for easier navigation using big, colorful touch-buttons, but the brunt of the game is controlled with the d-pad. Couldn’t they have at least parlayed some of the battle display onto the bottom screen? It’s easy enough to say “if it ain’t broke don’t fix it,” but this just strikes me as laziness on the developer’s part.

-I played my first thirty minutes of the game with headphones on, and the music is lovely. Who’s the composer for these games, anyway? Junichi Masuda? And he was the lead director for Diamond and Pearl, as well? I’m going to have to write that one down. He does remarkably good work for games about virtual monster cockfights.

-The game seriously takes forever to play, in the sense that during battles, you frequently don’t even need to look at the screen. Instead, you can set your DS down, lay one finger on the A button, and press it repeatedly over a period of about 3 minutes until a victory fanfare plays. I finished half of a homework assignment while playing the game via this method. I’m confident from prior experience (circa 1998) that eventually the gameplay will become more compelling. I just don’t think I have the willpower these days to slog through the artificial gauntlet of laborious timesinks that the game presents in order to get that far. To the kids out there who have the stomach for this kind of thing, however, I say, “Have fun!” Hopefully you will not look back on the time you spent playing with regret

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 26th, 2007 at 6:29 pm and is filed under Game Guy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.

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