The rise and fall of Pokemon...and some other trash games which is doomed to fail.

I was surfing the net a few days back, when I encountered a forum thread going "How did Pokemon End?"

Amused, I clicked on the thread, hoping to find out how the TV show ended.

To my disappointment, it has not ended yet.

Incredible...

Pokemon, as everyone should know, first came out in the GameBoy system, is a game where you have to go all over the world, capturing pokemon of all kinds, defeating Gym leaders to earn badges, before stepping all over the Elite Four, after which, you can claim the title of "Pokemon Master".

Initially, I was totally hooked to the game, the idea was so simple, yet so effective. There is this random battle thingy, and you get to capture pokemons to do your bidding for kicks, however sick you are. As a guy without a PlayStation, this RPG idea was totally new and fantastic to me. I remember playing the game on my PC for hours at one end.

When I got a Gameboy Pocket as a present on my 13th birthday, I immediately went to buy Pokemon Yellow, playing the game one more time (I completed Blue and Red before that). However, with a Gameboy, I was able to challenge friends, trade pokemon, hence opening up a new door to the game. With that, I actually went to capture all 151 pokemon, most of them officially, where you toss a ball at the half dead pokemon, or you lure the poor sucker out with a super rod, before tossing more balls.

When Pokemon Gold and Silver was released, once again, I was very excited. New adventures, new pokemon to do my perverted bidding (I loved to send level 2 pidgeys to fight against Mewtwo. Rofl.).

However, as the game progressed, I was rather disappointed. I realised that the new pokemon was roughly the same as the older ones. All the weird names, and all the whatever rubbish was too alien to me. Although I did complete the game by trashing ketchup, or Red as he's called in the Japanese version, it did get boring. Even so, I completed the game 4 times (Japanese, translated, English, GameBoy version), each time choosing different teams to go against the Elite Four.

However, by the time I've completed the game the forth time, the fire is gone. This can be easily seen by me not even bothering to obtain Ruby and Sapphire. Even when Fire Red and Leaf Green appeared, I merely played the game once (Emulator had some problem, and hence I did not bother to force feed my charlizard rare candy any more), and it was by rushing though the entire game, which means gamesharking it.

Besides the game, there's also the famous Television show, which had about as many fillers as Detective Conan's shows. Initially, when I heard of the show, I was rather excited, as I was still in the "poke-craze". In fact, the first...7 episodes were excellent, with the Gym battle with Brock being fantastic.

Sadly, the show went down hill after that.

Every week, I Switch on the TV, hoping that it will be a gym battle, instead of some trash filler where Ash (Satoshi, in Japanese) visits a new town, gets into some trouble.

And Team Rocket appears.

Jessie and James are probably the worst things which could happen to the series. Sure, there's a need for a villian in cartoons, but having them appear every week, attempting to steal that yellow rat (pikachu) in almost the same fashion every week gets boring after...oh, 1 episode or so. And every week, that yellow rodent will simply thundershock those poor team rocket retards, and they will blast off.

So, one huge problem with the show was Team Rocket appearing every week.

What's another?

Simple, the motto where you "Gotta Catch them all".

We don't see Ash flinging out pokeballs every time he sees a new pokemon. Heck, he just pokes that Pokedex more then he does tossing those balls. In fact, Ketchup even lets pokemon go, after they become good (Charlizard, Butterfree, Primeape, to name some). Sure friendship is a great thing, but it's funny when you are in a show where you should not be letting Pokemon go. Butterfree, I can understand, but Charlizard..?

>_>

Oh well.

The downfall can be seen easily. 3 years ago, that yellow rat is everywhere, now, there's barely a sign of that electric thing. The crappiness of the television show, on top of the game makers being unable to input new ideas into the game (It's the same walk around, catch some l337 pokemon, then trash gym leaders. Repeat.), was what caused Pokemon to fall from it's once mighty status.

Sad though. I used to love it.
--

My mom decided to buy a Teenage Magazine in order to inject some new life into a guy who never reads any type of magazines, except for Time or Reader Digest (Lime when there's a good poster, and that's rare as hell these days).

In it, was a CD to install Ice World, created by Eden II, who made other..."notable" games such as "World of Qin".

After tossing the CD onto my disc drive, it came out almost immediately, as if my CD drive is puking it out, telling me that I should not install the game. Undaunted, I forced my CD drive to swallow it.

Immediately, I know something isn't good.

The installer is done on a Macromedia flash.

Everyone uses Installation wizard these days.

On top of it, it does not give me an option as to where I want to install the game. It only goes straight into C:/Program files folder. So, if I had like 7gigs of porn, hentai, music, ISOs, leaving no space whatsoever on my drive, I won't be able to install it.

Thankfully, they are all on my secondary drive.

After installation, I was directed to the EdenII portal, where I have to register an account to play. Since this is the norm for most games, I did so.

When I am finally allowed to start the game (by double clicking the icons they forcefully tossed onto my desktop, and everyone knows that I like to keep my desktop clean), I am, once again, directed to the edenII website. After Navigating through a series of links, I waited in anticipation as I clicked the "Play Now!" button of Hyperrelay.

A small window bounced up instead, telling me to install ActiveX. Since it was on Internet Explorer, a browser with more loopholes than a swiss cheese poked with a million toothpicks, I switched to my trusted Firefox browser and attempted to visit the site.

To my amazement, they told me to use IE to visit the site instead.

Strike One.

Bloody hell, IE is one of the easiest ways for Spywares/Ad-wares to be installed in your computer. The reason why I switched to Firefox was because my computer had a spyware/ad-ware invasion due to years of surfing through the net. I could not surf for 5 minutes, before some pop-up appeared. I got so pissed, because I was playing net-tetris one day, and some pop-up appeared, ending a game which I was on the verge of beating my own high score.

That was why I use only firefox these days.

Anyway, I searched the site for some sort of a FAQ as to playing the game when it ****ed up on you.

There was none.

Strike 2.

I had to check their forum, where there's a thread telling you how to fix the problem, which involved uninstalling the game, and installing it one more time by download the client from their site.

Which makes me wonder what the hell the CD is for.

It gets better.

After following the instructions on the screen, I finally got the game started.



So, you give people a CD, tell them to go to ICE World, but don't tell them that you need some sort of subscription before you play the games?

Strike 3.

Fantastic.

Anyway, after testing them all out, I finally got 1 game working: Hyper Relay. Basically, it's like a Bishi Bashi style of game, where you use your arrow keysand the space bar to play, for example, a game where you drop the food by looking at the outline. In fact, there are quite a lot of games which are almost the same, if not the same, as Bishi Bashi, except there isn't button meshing games, which was the trade mark of Bishi Bashi. There's this practise area, where you can practise...like 9 out of the 20 games, and of the 9, you don't need to practise 6 of them.

To make matters worse, there isn't the instructions page like the one you see in Bishi Bashi. So, me, being a total newbie, have no idea what to do in any of the games when I first started. The "instructions" page merely tell you what buttons to use, but not a single word is said as to what to do at what time. To top it off, nothing is said on the webpage as well.

Of course, there's also a team game, where you work with 1 or 2 other people (6 per room, how gunbound like...), to defeat your opponent by doing better then him. So, expect stacked teams, and the like.

All in all, it bored me in like...an hour or so. This is because the games were the same, even though you play 10 rounds before you determine the winner, and there's 20 games for the system to choose from. Heck, the system usually chooses the same games again and again. The learning curve was not steep, but mastering some games required quite a bit of time, and even after an hour, I still suck in some games.

If you are looking for something to pass time, grab it. If not, head to the arcade and play the real thing.

-90/100