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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Looking Back At : Digimon World

Back in 2001 there was a war. One between two titans of children’s entertainment, both trying to outdo one another. This was, of course, the war between Digimon and Pokémon. Okay, let’s be honest, it was less of a war and more of Bandai desperately trying to keep up with Pokémon huge success. And right in the middle of this war was me, happily enjoying both franchises simultaneously, because even back then I knew that brand loyalty was dumb.

Spawned from the Tamagotchi-like virtual pets, Namco decided to make a game to compete with the likes of Pokémon Red/Blue/Green, which gave us a game I was both fascinated and flummoxed by; Digimon World. To this day, have such fond memories of the game, and going back to it always felt like something I needed to do sooner or later. Would it be something I’d end up regretting?

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My Ranking of Pokémon’s Villain Teams

I finally finished playing Pokémon Ultra Moon recently. As much as I like the changes that the Sun and Moon games brought to the series, I never found myself obsessing over them like I have with games of the past. Maybe the game’s repetitive nature is finally burning me out, or maybe I’m actually getting too old for the franchise finally, at the age of 29. The thing that drew me back into Ultra Moon after a break was the new post game story added: Episode Rainbow Rocket.

The story brings back not just Team Rocket, but the bosses from all the previous Pokémon games all thrown into the same spot thanks to the multidimensional ultra wormholes that are a focus of the game’s story. All these leaders, as they originally appeared in their debuts, come from alternate timelines where it seems like things went differently for them and in some cases a random pre-teen never came to put a stop to them.

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