Looking back at: Pokémon Trading Card Game (Gameboy)

The Pokémon Trading Card Game is huge. It might be the biggest physical card game around right now, selling around 2 billion cards a year on average. Not to mention the major tournaments held on an annual basis that the Pokémon Company stream on their Youtube channel.

It’s also nigh unrecognisable from how it looked back when it first popped up in the early 2000s. Back then, most kids I knew just collected the cards, but very few of them actually played the game. I was one of the losers with an actual interest in playing the game properly, an opportunity that never really presented itself to me outside of a game on the Gameboy Color.

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Pokemon Sun & Moon just changed everything

In a time where the rest of the world is very excited about Pokemon Go, Nintendo went ahead and dropped a new trailer for their upcoming seventh Pokemon Generation with Sun and Moon. And it just blew my mind. I have written on more than one occasion about my hopes and expectations for upcoming Pokemon games. I have always been pretty reasonable in these articles when it came to what I reasonably thought Game Freak would actually do with the franchise. I never reached too far from Pokemon’s established formula and kept things within reason, because after Six games that shared a lot of the same beats they weren’t going to go crazy now. I thought that Game Freak were very much in the “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it camp”, Once again I have been proven utterly wrong by this series and how they can keep surprising me.

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My Experience with Pokemon Go

I’ll admit that when Pokemon Go first started to emerge, I was very much a naysayer. I was one of the pissy “real fans” that thought a bunch of nostalgia sheep were encroaching on my turf. Everyone started talking about it and I got up on my high horse. But then everyone started talking about it, and my opinions on the game changed. Don’t get me wrong they’re still very mixed opinions, but I’m not being a douche about it anymore.

I appreciate Pokemon Go a lot for the cultural phenomena it has become. Bringing the most unlikely of people together in the most mundane of places. I apprechiate the crazy stories that have come out of it and the fact that it had just got more people outside. But all that aside, Pokemon Go is still a crappy game with a whole slew of problems. Continue reading “My Experience with Pokemon Go” →