Glen-i

I will always maintain that the Roguelike genre is not for everyone. It's an unforgiving, slow paced game and it's never going to appeal to everyone. I wish I could say whether a person will enjoy it or not, but the only way to find out is to give it a good whack and just try one out. And that's all I can ask.

It's the correct phrase, but this is a Pokémon thread, so I'm gong to have to take away imaginary points for not saying "As the Murkrow flies"

I got that guide too! Mostly for the artwork, but it was legit useful for finding some of the harder to recruit Pokémon. When it comes to gameplay, I like Super Mystery Dungeon best. Although Explorers of Sky has it beat on story. Oh, and credit goes to @Dcubed for that last image. It cracks me up how well-integrated it is.

Please Note: This is the second part of my Mystery Dungeon write-up, the first part is on the previous page and I recommend you read that first. Pokémon Mystery Dungeon: Keep Going! Blazing Adventure Squad / Let's Go! Stormy Adventure Squad / Go For It! Light Adventure Squad are a set of Japan exclusive, digital-only games (Sorry, that image above is a fan translation mockup) released for the Wii in 2009. Each game features 15 dungeons and 9 Pokémon to start off with, as well as a whole bunch of version exclusive Pokémon. Compared to the other games, these ones are incredibly story lite. In fact the plot is pretty much non-existent. It also marks the first time models were used in this series. Unfortunately, it's a WiiWare title, which means there wasn't a lot of memory available, so Chunsoft had to resort to... *sigh*... the Pokémon toy models... The ugliest Kecleon... Aw! Gross! It didn't even have portrait art! That aspect is not for now, but I will talk about it in a future entry. I can't find out how much this game sold, what with it being a WiiWare title, but it's pretty forgettable in all honesty. I don't think I missed much, in retrospect. So let's just move on! 2023 EDIT: When replacing all the broken images, I discovered that one at the top of the post. Some people made a fan translation of these games. Pokémon fans be crazy! Might have to find a way to play that... Pokémon Mystery Dungeon: Gates to Infinity released for the 3DS in 2012. Using proper Pokémon models established from Pokédex 3D, this is the game that most people think of when it comes to the jump to 3D for the series. OK, guys. Say it with me. You play as a human who has been transported to the world of Pokémon and has turned into one of 5 possible Pokémon. You soon meet up with... wait, only 5? Yeeeahhh... More on that in a bit. Before you actually arrive there, you hear a voice asking for your help before quickly seeing some kind of vision of a Munna being chased by a Hydreigon. When you get to the Pokémon world, you meet another Pokémon that is surprisingly chill with the claim that you're a human in Pokémon form and quickly asks for your help in developing what they call a Pokémon Paradise. But something's off, the residents of nearby Post Town all share a trait in that they're intensely distrustful of everyone they meet. The Pokémon you met is trying to get to the bottom of this and hopefully, by building a Paradise everyone can enjoy, can get the Pokémon of the world to stop being such jerks. So it's up to you to help with this goal as well as finding this Munna that brought you here in the first place. While this plot was not as involved as the two previous ones, it certainly has it's moments. Out of all the PMD games, this is the one that is the darkest. There's no question. Honestly, I'm astonished this is rated PEGI 3. This game did have a really rocky development cycle though, and it kind of shows. This game features the lowest amount of Pokémon in a PMD title, this is probably due to the fact that most of the Pokémon models that Game Freak were making were just not done yet. The Gen 5 Pokémon were ready along with a handful of others and they're the ones that show up in this game. There's also all sorts of weird oversights that don't help the game really, lower difficulty, basic animations and some pretty budget cutscenes. This game uses the fade to black while dialogue goes on a bit too much. The text speed is also ungodly slow! It even got rid of the personality quiz at the beginning of the game! It probably also didn't help that there was a rush to get this game out before Pokémon X/Y was out. All this stuff adds together to place this game on the lower end of people's list of PMD games. I mean, I still liked it, but oof, it's rough. And to be honest, I thought that was it for the series. It sold 1.37 million copies, which is actually lower than Explorers of Sky somehow. It tried to get some cheeky purchasable DLC there as well and The Pokémon Company was killing off a lot of spin-off series in favour of chasing the mobile game dosh. For a while, I was really worried that the best I could hope for was a cheap mobile entry, but at E3 3 years ago... Screams of joy from me as soon as I heard that main theme remix. I'm such a little girl sometimes. That trailer has literally one message and it's "We know what we did wrong with Gates to Infinity, we're fixing everything. Illustrated box art, personality quiz, difficulty, hunger, every Pokémon to date, everything" Pokémon Super Mystery Dungeon released for the 3DS in 2015 for Japan. The latest release for the series, it really did set out to provide the biggest game to date. So yadda, yadda, yadda, human turns into Pokémon. There's 26 possibilities this time. You meet up with a Nuzleaf and then are quickly attacked by a group of Beheeyem. Legging it through a Mystery Dungeon, you arrive in a peaceful little place called Serene Village. You decide to go into hiding by attending the local school where you become friends with a Pokémon that struggles to get along with anyone, probably because they're a bit annoying. This Pokémon has lofty ambitions, it wants to join the famous Expedition Society and explore the entire world. Inevitably, you get dragged along for the ride. However, there's been a number of incidents with Legendary Pokémon getting petrified, so it's up to you to figure out who's doing this and find out why you're in the world of Pokémon to begin with. The plot is just as wonderfully complex with more than a few dark undertones as you'd come to expect from the series. Doesn't quite reach the lofty heights of Explorers of Sky, but it gets really close. A key difference is how you recruit Pokémon, in previous games, you had a chance of recruiting a Pokémon to your team whenever you beat it. In Super Mystery Dungeon, every Pokémon is recruited via some sort of side quest. You might have to rescue a Pokémon from a Mystery Dungeon or beat one up in a challenge battle, some will just be friends for taking the time to speak with them. Some will join you when they realise a friend of theirs has joined you. It's a welcome change to the admittedly random nature of collecting Pokémon in this series and it's satisfying watching that humongous screen of Pokémon get larger and larger as you progress. Don't worry though, Kecleon still takes an insane amount of time to get. While it doesn't explicity state it, this game is essentially a celebration of the 10th anniversary of Pokémon Mystery Dungeon. Eagle eye fans will spot the areas from previous PMD games on the world map, not to mention plenty of characters from the previous games making cameo appearences. This game is also by far, the hardest Pokémon Mystery Dungeon. It is not, in any way, for beginners. If Pokémon Mystery Dungeon is a series that curb stomps your face for making a mistake, than Super Mystery Dungeon is the one that shoots you from point-blank range for looking at it funny. It sold 1.6 million copies which is more than the previous entry, which is completely unheard of as far as Pokémon Spin-off's go. It's astonishing! And it makes me so happy that's the case. Then again, it does have a blatantly alcoholic Krookodile. (He says it's milk, he's clearly lying) Anyway, this is where I normally wonder whether this series can make a comeback, but that's the thing. It's not dead! Going for 12 years now, Pokémon Mystery Dungeon is more than half the age of the actual mainline series at this point. In a world where all the console Pokémon spin-off's have been killed off, PMD soldiers on, alone. Stoic in an almost hopeless situation, perhaps this is the game series that can bring all the other spin-off's back from the brink. Wait, why does that all seem so familiar? So yes, I love this series. It's mature, challenging and has made me fall in love with all sorts of Pokémon I would have normally dismissed in the mainline series (Come on, Bidoof!). If you jump into it, start with Explorers of Sky. It's available on the WiiU, just skip the intro for that, it spoils so much because they assume you finished one of the earlier Explorers games for some reason! I'll leave you with one more surprising thing about the PMD series. I won't say what particular entry this is referring to, but it's the only time in a Pokémon game that a Pokémon gets murdered, on-screen, by another Pokémon. And I still can't believe it happened. If you have to see that, I suppose I could send you the video via PM.

OK, it's time. You knew it was coming, I knew it was coming. Prepare for one hell of a long post and an unintentional amount of gushing, because it's time to look at... The Pokémon Mystery Dungeon series are a bunch of Roguelike dungeon crawling games developed by Spike Chunsoft. And before I get started on the first entry, there's a bit of background I need to establish first, because PMD isn't the first game of this kind, not by a long shot. A long time ago, Chunsoft were the developers of the Dragon Quest series, they worked on the first 5 entries. But we want to look specifically at the 4th. Around the development of this game, the co-creator of Dragon Quest, Koichi Nakamura, discovered a PC game called "Rogue", a difficult game that tasked the player with reaching the bottom of a randomly generated dungeon. He became quite enthralled by it and wanted to make a series of games with a similar kind of ethos. So in 1993, Chunsoft developed the game "Torneko no Daibōken: Fushigi no Dungeon" A Dragon Quest spin-off featuring one of the characters from the 4th entry, where the main character, Torneko, explored randomly generated Mystery Dungeons to find items to help make his shop famous. So in an amusing kind of way, Pokémon Mystery Dungeon is an inadvertant Dragon Quest spin-off. Wacky! The Mystery Dungeon series as a whole follows the same kind of layout, randomly generated dungeons that tend to punish failure harshly, some even had you start the entire game again from scratch! (Such as the Mystery Dungeon series with original characters, "Shiren the Wanderer") Thankfully, the Pokémon versions are not that brutal, but you do tend to lose all your money and items that you were carrying upon failure and then booted out of whatever dungeon you're in, forcing you to start that dungeon again. They also tend to work in a turn-based system, nothing moves until you perform an action, so thinking ahead and planning your actions is a key part of progress. Pokémon and Dragon Quest aren't the only franchises to get the Mystery Dungeon treatment. Final Fantasy, Etrian Odyssey and even TwinBee are just some of the IP's that have gotten entries. But that's enough about those other franchises, we're here for Pokémon. So let's get started. Pokémon Mystery Dungeon: Red Rescue Team / Blue Rescue Team are the first entries in this series and a front runner for cleverest box art ever (I positioned them like that on purpose, have a close look at them), Red being released on the GBA with Blue being a port for the DS. Both released in 2005. Much like the mainline Pokémon series, these two games have minor differences in what Pokémon appear, but Blue also takes advantage of the DS' capabilities for Quality of Life features as well. The game takes place in an alternate universe where the only inhabitants are Pokémon and humans are nothing more than a fairy tale to them. You play as a human who has somehow been transported to this world of Pokémon and subsequently turned into one with no clue as to why. Depending on the answers you give in a questionaire, you could be one of 16 different Pokémon, from fan-favourite Pikachu, to secret best choice, Cubone. You're discovered by a Pokémon (of your choosing) who talks to you in what appears to be perfect English, which while odd, is completely normal to this world, what with everyone being a Pokémon. After the two of you help a Butterfree, whose child is lost in a Mystery Dungeon, you explain your predicament to the Pokémon, who decides to help you figure out what the hell is going on. What follows is a story quite unlike anything the Pokémon video game series had ever seen, as you slowly discover the true purpose of being brought here and the implications and consequences it has brought to this world. I cannot stress this enough. I truly mean it when I say the Pokémon video games had never seen anything quite like this plot at the time. On the surface, it appears as a happy-go-lucky affair that is thick on "The Power of Friendship" and gets a bit cheesy at times. But the Pokémon themselves had never been characterised in quite this way. I'm sure some of you recall an episode of the anime that focused on the Pokémon that Ash and his friends were training getting seperated and having conversations with each other (in subtitles). It was a good episode that looked into how a Pokémon might end up feeling about the situation they're in. This game took that idea and dialled it up to 11, and sooner or later, you start to notice some surprisingly dark undertones. I'm not going to go into too much detail because spoilers, but this particular entry touches on the subject of death a couple of times. Mostly implied, of course. It is a Pokémon game, after all. Oh, and this was the first game to get me to actually tear up. It gets pretty rough and it was at that moment, I realised that this was something quite special. The game (and most of the spin-off series) is also notable for being legitmately hard. Now, it's no Dark Souls, but you're going to die quite a few times. It says a lot when the second boss is a bloody Zapdos! Get your 2 level 12 unevolved Pokémon through that! This entry sold a total of 5.85 million copies, making it the most sucessful Pokémon spin-off to date. I'm just as surprised as you are. I didn't realise it did that well! I guess I wasn't the only one who enjoyed the plot and challenge this game provided. It was so sucessful, it even got a special anime episode loosely based on the game. I also mentioned this in the Smash thread, but this game is the first time popular Pokémon Lucario showed up. It was a cameo appearence, mind you. But wait, there's more, it's time for some nerdy knowledge! Did you know that in South Korea, only Blue Rescue Team was released? It's because the GBA wasn't released over there. Not nerdy enough? Fine! Did you know there was also a substantial free demo of the game for Korea that consisted of the first third of the story? Pokémon Mystery Dungeon: Gold Rescue Team released exclusively in South Korea in 2007, I stated what it was above, but I feel like I'm forgetting something... Oh right! Duh! This wasn't a DS title, or a GBA one, for that matter. This was a PC title. Making this an offiical Pokémon game for the PC! I said wow when I discovered that little detail. Unfortunately, it required a connection to an online server that no longer exists, so it can't be played legitmately any more. Not that you'd need to. Anyway, I was naturally super hyped to get the sequel when it was announced. Pokémon Mystery Dungeon: Explorers of Time / Explorers of Darkness relased for the DS in 2007. These games are once again basically the same game with slight differences in the Pokémon available. It features similar gameplay to the first game, but, being built with the DS in mind, features lots of gameplay improvements, graphical enhancements and of course, more Pokémon to encounter. Not to mention a story that's about twice as long as the first game. This is one meaty game! You once again play as a human who has been transported to the world of Pokémon and has turned into one of 16 possible Pokémon. (Get used to that, it's a recurring theme) The game opens with you and an unknown character getting seperated in some kind of storm. You're discovered on a beach by another Pokémon (Of your choosing, also a recurring theme). Unfortunately, you have that pesky amnesia thing and can only remember your name and the fact you used to be a human. It's at that moment, the other Pokémon is mugged by a Koffing and a Zubat of a weird stone slab. After going through a Mystery Dungeon and convincing the two thiefs to give the slab back by beating them up, the other Pokémon asks you to join them in joining the local Explorer's guild because they're too timid to do it by themselves. And so you do so in the hope of finding out what exactly happened to you. Ask anyone who has played the PMD games which story they like the best and the chances are it'll be the one in these games. Not to go on about it, but the plot here is something you just won't see in other Pokémon games, including a twist that is so subtly well foreshadowed, it changes about half of the scenes that came before it. It's one of those twists you don't see coming and yet still feel like a complete dope for not seeing it coming. Not to mention this game is way darker than the first, which already touched on some surprisingly heavy subject matter considering. The game's also harder than the first, so get ready to hear that failure music a fair bit. I'm going to choose now to applaud the pixel art that these games sport. It's amazing just how much there is! For example, here's the Totodile family. Now imagine having to do that for 489 more Pokémon. Oh, and some are ambidextrous sprites to boot, so they differ depending on which way they face. Oh, and see those cool portrait squares in the top left? Every Pokémon has one and Pokémon that have dialogue tend to have more than one. Have a lookee! So yeah, whoever worked on those, well bloody done! Whatever you were paid was clearly not enough. They help add so much charm to the games and while I totally get why they moved to 3D models in the future, I do miss them a bit. These games sold 4.88 million copies, which is highly impressive for a sequel! Over 80% of the first game's already high sales numbers. And yes, I cried at this game as well. I know, I'm a wuss. But we're not quite done with the second game... Pokémon Mystery Dungeon: Explorers of Sky released for the DS in 2009. This served as a third version to the two Explorers games before it, much like Pokémon Yellow. It decided to do away with the version exclusive Pokémon thing and have all 492 Pokémon revealed at the time. (Although Arceus wasn't officially available at this point, it makes a cameo appearence that's almost impossible to find). As well as that, it offers a slightly harder difficulty mode, new dungeons to explore, 5 more Pokemon to play the role of the 2 main characters and most notably, 5 "Special Episodes" that consists of stories that follow the side characters. Two of which are pretty heartbreaking, especially the final one! Holy crap at the final Special Episode! *ahem* This one sold 1.49 million copies, not surprising, really. It is an awesome enhanced version of a previous game. I think I need to cut this post here. It's getting really long. But stay tuned, I'm gonna get right to work on the second half right now.

Then play online with the likes of @RedShell and me! We like all sorts of crazy setups! For Glory matches are pretty boring in comparison.

Oh god, the final version of the menu music has emerged! I think this might just have topped Brawl's menu music for me! It's so good! EDIT: BTW, late controversial opinion, I'm not keen on the vocalised version. Bit corny, lacks the gravitas of Brawl's amazing vocal song. Which is still my favourite actual theme.

For what it's worth. 4's online was an improvement over Brawl's. But a game like this is probably always gonna have some input lag, due to it's nature. It was pretty minor for our Tourneys on my end. We did have an Ethernet connection, which is pretty essential and most of the matches were between people from the UK. So it was pretty ideal. I doubt you'll get the smooth experience all the time if you fight random people. Especially considering that the Switch can be played portably. There are gonna be people using Wi-Fi for this.

March would be too late, unfortunately. Has to be done before Feburary.

So quite recently, Toby Fox released a demo for a game called Deltarune. He's the guy who made awesome Bullet hell/RPG Undertale. Anyway, I just played it. It's great, but I have so many questions! You can download it here.

Man, this is legit one of the nicest looking games on the PS4 for me. It's the artstyle, it's just so pleasing to look at.

Holy crap! I completely spaced on it! To be fair, I've been using @Serebii's site as a list of all the Pokémon games and I just double checked it and it's not there! I wonder why... Oh, BTW. The Pikachu N64 had nothing to do with Hey You, Pikachu! It was just a general Pokémon N64. Well then, I've got some free time. Guess we're getting a double feature today. Hey You, Pikachu! was released for the N64 in 1998. A Japan/North America only title made by Ambrella. I guess you can define this as a virtual pet kind of game. Using the included Voice Recognition Unit, this game's main selling point was that you could use the microphone to influence the game. Professor Oak tasks the player with using a device called a PokéHelper to communicate with Pokémon. Pretty quickly, you meet a Pikachu and accompany it through 18 stages of... talking action? Yeah, this game was pretty experimental for the time. Taken on it's own, it really doesn't amount to much. It's short, simple and pretty forgettable as a game. The voice recognition was the one interesting thing about it, but a common issue is that the microphone was only really calibrated for higher pitched voices. Fine for children, not so great for anyone else. Ah, 90's technology. Despite that, this game does have an ending, which you can only see after playing through 365 in-game days, and considering there's only 17 different types of days you can do, that's not something most people would trawl through. A common interesting tidbit you hear thrown about was that saying the word "Sony" or "Playstation" would cause Pikachu to get angry with you. I'm afraid I have to tell you guys that's an urban myth. A total Mew under the truck. The game doesn't recognise those words what-so-ever. This might have been a result of the game causing a random reaction when the game doesn't recognise what you said. One person probably got lucky with this and started the whole rumour. I recall the official UK Nintendo Magazine actually falling for this and stating it as an amusing feature in their preview of the game. Oops! It sold 1.83 million copies. Which is... something, it only released in 2 countries. I feel like I need to apologise to them all. If any of you are reading this, sorry about that. Anyway, this is another one-off spin-off in the Pokémon series. With it never coming out over in Europe, I never got to play it. I'm fine with that, 8 year old me might have been bummed out, but older, wiser, nerdier me doesn't care. I mean, it is made by Ambrella and I've learned my lesson with that company. But that's not for now. But could it come back? ...Nope. Got no reasoning for that, but no-one cares anymore.

Pokémon Colosseum is a turn-based RPG released for the Gamecube in 2003. Developed by Genius Sonority, it's the closest the Pokémon series has ever gotten to being a home console RPG before the upcoming Let's GO games. I'm gonna start this post by stating why this game counts as a spin-off, but Let's GO doesn't. The method of obtaining Pokémon differs. Instead of a world map, the game has areas interconnected to each other through a menu. Not every Pokémon encountered in the game can be caught without using a seperate GBA title. This also means that filling up a Pokédex isn't one of the objectives. The game isn't developed by Game Freak. Set in the region of Orre, you play as Wes, an ex-criminal who has recently betrayed the criminal organisation, Team Snagem, by blowing up their base and making off with a special device called the "Snag Machine" which allowed them to steal other people's Pokémon. It appears that Team Snagem are collaborating with another organisation to take these stolen Pokémon, corrupt their hearts in some way, and give them to trainers for some reason. Using the Snag Machine, Wes plans to steal back these "Shadow Pokémon", uncorrupt their hearts and stop Team Snagem and this mystery organisation from causing any more problems. For fans who had played the mainline series, Colosseum marked quite the exciting change. The plot played a central part of the game, in a series that normally has the plot be a side story in the ultimate quest to be the Pokémon champion. And while the plot isn't anything amazing, it made for an interesting take on a Pokémon RPG. All the battles in this game are in the recently introduced Double Battle format which has both trainers send out 2 Pokémon at once, forcing you to utilise new strategies to get ahead. I mentioned some of the changes above, but the biggest one is how you obtain Pokémon. You effectively steal them from other trainers. Not any old Pokémon, mind, Wes has standards. You can only steal Shadow Pokémon that have a weird purple aura around them. Once you do so, you have to uncorrupt it by spending time with it, winning battles and just generally being a nice dude. Once you do that, it can level up and learn moves like a normal Pokémon. Because of this, the Pokémon you can catch in this game are quite limited. 56 Pokémon are catchable. (7 more Pokémon were available through special events and e-reader cards) Once you finished the game, you could transfer Pokémon between this game and the GBA games Ruby/Sapphire and FireRed/LeafGreen using a GC/GBA Link cable. As well as the main RPG mode, there was a colosseum mode that played a lot like the Pokémon Stadium games mentioned earlier. Using your team from the RPG mode or the GBA games, there are 4 cups for you to test your skills in, as well as being able to battle your friends who have the GBA games. There was also a sort of gauntlet that has you fight 100 trainers in a row to reach the top of a mountain to win yourself a Ho-Oh that you could use in the main game. Pokémon Colosseum has sold 2.41 million copies, which is pretty impressive for a Gamecube spin-off title. The thought of a Pokémon RPG on a home console was the big selling point and I think the game deserves the success. It's a solid Pokémon game, if a little dated due to it being a Gen 3 game. Which brings me on to... Pokémon XD: Gale of Darkness is the sequel to Pokémon Colosseum. Once again developed by Genius Sonority, it was released for the Gamecube in 2005. Set 5 years after the events of Colosseum, you play as Michael, who finds himself embroiled in a plot of another organisation to use a special Lugia, known as XD001, to take over the world. They also reignited the previous Shadow Pokémon plot once again. Michael is given the Snag Machine that Wes once used and goes out to save all those Pokémon once again. As you could probably guess, this game plays pretty much exactly the same as Colosseum. There's different Pokémon for you to steal this time and the Colosseum mode has been dropped in favour of a meatier and longer RPG mode, although you can still communicate with the GBA games for trades and battles. This game sold 1.37 million copies, which is pretty standard for a sequel. And that's the last we heard of Genius Sonority's RPG side series, they later released Battle Revolution, which I think was a massive step in the wrong direction. There was potential here and it was squandered for whatever reason. It's hard for me to guage whether we could see another game like this. The Pokémon Company is pretty over protective these days and I can't see them letting a company that isn't Game Freak handle a Pokémon RPG. Still, what did you think of it? I replayed XD last year and I think it's still good. It fulfills it's role as a different take on the Pokémon RPG, even today. Don't get me wrong, they both have flaws and there are better Pokémon games out there. But if you want something different, this isn't a bad choice to look up.

You know, it's creepy. I recently restarted my 3DS Smash file a few weeks back. I'm on Challenge Board 3 with about 5 more tasks to do. But what I'm doing now is trying to beat All-Star on hard with every character. I've done everyone on the base roster and Mewtwo. Gotta do it with Lucas next. That'll be cake! I own with Lucas. EDIT: BTW, something I noticed recently with All-Star mode. You know how the characters fight you in order of when they first appeared? Well in the fourth stage, Ness is one of the fighters there, and after him the Gen 1 Pokémon start showing up. You'd think Pikachu would be the first of them lot, but nope. It's always Mewtwo. If you played through Earthbound Beginnings, that ordering suddenly makes a whole lot more sense in a very subtle way.

My selection was just that amazing. You're all welcome.

And here I was thinking I could ask you for advice whenever I decided to rule over an ancient civilization... You're a fraud!

12th sounds good. Let's go with that.

That would have given you a score of -17, so I don't think that would work. And that's precisely why I implemented the number of fighters penalty.

Ah, bugger. Sorry. Although leaving you out might have been a kindness. Will edit the post.

Before I get stuck into the Gen 3 spin-off's, I want to take an opportunity to take a detour through the strange and wonderful world of the tiny spin-off's that you've just gotta ask... Pokémon Channel was released for the Gamecube in 2003. Made by Ambrella, it's a... um... I'm not sure what it is. You and your Pikachu have to help Professor Oak by... watching Pokémon anime and other pointless things. This game was so unnecessary that they slapped in a Jirachi for the main Gen 3 games for anyone in Europe and Australia crazy enough to actually buy this. Something of note is that there's actually a few demos of Pokémon Mini games in here, including one that is exclusive to this game. ...Yay? Pokémon Box: Ruby & Sapphire is an application that gave players 25 extra boxes to store Pokemon in. Yes, it's Pokémon Bank but with none of the online features! It was released in 2003. Over here, it was only available in a Pokemon Colosseum bundle, or through the Nintendo VIP 24/7 service. I've pretty much covered all of it there. Although the game does allow you to play Ruby/Sapphire games on your TV. But that was rendered useless with the Game Boy Player coming out 2 months before hand. Interestingly enough, the emulator used here was used for a Mario Pinball Land demo on the Gamecube. So, not only is this pointless, it inflicted that particular abomination on people. It's probably in hell now. Next up is PokéPark Fishing Rally DS, a special download only game offered at the real life Poképark in Japan throughout 2005. It's a Pokémon fishing game, what else is there to say? Anyway, you can't mention small Gen 3 Spin-off's without mentioning the e-Reader. I have it on good authority that the cards actually blurred like that when scanned. Despite being pretty short-lived, Pokémon got a bit of mileage out of it. Some cards added trainers to fight in Ruby/Sapphire and Colosseum, some worked with Pokémon Channel and even Pinball R/S got in on the fun. And finally, there's... Woah, hold up... SQUARE-ENIX MADE A POKÉMON SPIN-OFF!? I genuinely didn't know about this before I looked it up! How exciting! Let's have a look-see... The hell is this? Well, this is Pokémate, a Japan-only messaging application that allowed people to message each other. Developed by Square-Enix, it also had a tiny catching mini-game as well. If you're thinking, "that's a bit of a waste of talent", you'd be right. Worth noting that this game had microtransactions, marking a dark first for the series... And that about does it for this small detour. Tomorrow, I'll be tackling bigger titles.

Alright, let's get it done! Ken correctly predicted by: No-one, if only we knew echo fighters were a thing. Incineroar correctly predicted by: No-one, if only I knew Ivysaur was a thing. Piranha Plant correctly predicted by: No-one, if only we knew drugs were a thing I want to formerly apologise to all the people who predicted Decidueye because of my reasoning. I chose that because the game needed a grass starter to round out the trio. But then Ivysaur. If I knew Ivysaur was coming back, I would have gone with Incineroar instead. So close! Unlike the Isabelle update, a whole bunch of Assist Trophies and costumes got announced. Which means it's time to take another journey down the path of sadness that is the Avenue of Crushed Dreams Isaac - @Ugh first aid Spring Man - @Glen-i @markderoos @GenericAperson @Nintendo Fan @Dcubed @Julius Caesar @Nicktendo @Vileplume2000 @S.C.G Rex - @Glen-i @markderoos @Ugh first aid @GenericAperson @Nintendo Fan @Dcubed @Julius Caesar @Nicktendo @Vileplume2000 @S.C.G Chain Chomp - @Mandalore Dillon - @Glen-i @Jonnas @Ugh first aid @Dcubed @Julius Caesar Chibi-Robo - @markderoos @Nicktendo Rex there with 10 predictions! I think he might have taken the title of Dream Smasher! Amazing! BTW, now that we know that there'll be 5 more DLC characters, there's 23 characters that weren't in Smash 4. (Not including Inkling) So that's the magic number. The further off you are, the more you lose. Who's ready for some negative scores!? And that leaves the scores at... @Fused King -5 points @Ugh first aid -6 points @Mandalore @Julius Caesar -11 points @Glen-i @RedShell -12 points @Nintendo Fan -13 points @markderoos @Jonnas -14 points @Vileplume2000 -15 points @S.C.G -16 points @Dcubed @Nicktendo -17 points @EEVILMURRAY -20 points @GenericAperson @Ashley -21 points @bob -23 points Now we're in QI territory! Negative points all round! Out of everyone @GenericAperson and @bob are the only people whose score is now finalized, all of their choices have been confirmed/deconfirmed. So their score will not change from now on.

Considering you only get 8 characters at the start, you might want to wait a bit.

Did somebody say N-E Tourney!? Because we actually did that on the WiiU one. 3 seperate ones for Fun, Glory and Crazy Smash (Stupid, hilarious, nonsense matches) It was great!

OK, y'all ready to vote? The console I'm basing my nominations is... That thing, I forget it's name. I think it's Ultra 64 or something... And it's gonna be based around Smash. Because if I can't shove Pokémon into it, I'm sure as hell gonna shove my 2nd favourite series into it. BTW, I vote for Game #1. How long should we give this? A week, 2 weeks?

Well then, I'll get my 3 games up later on today once I get on a device with good formatting.