#pokemeter

Every day I wake up and I check for Pokemon Every day I die a little inside. Love and Cofagrigus, Richie X

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Okay, so I know we've been a bit Pokemon heavy content-wise recently but tough. Deal with it. Today's topic is the Pokemon Global Link. For those of you who aren't Pokemon fans, the latest "proper" DS Pokemon games, Pokemon Black and Pokemon White, allow you to upload a pokemon to the Dream World. Then, via a PC you can go on shallow and limited adventures in the Dream World via the Global Link. The Dream World itself allows you to catch a bunch of Pokemon through playing mini games with them (fun but not very useful if you have a living dex like myself), grow some berries (sort of useful because there's very few other ways to get them in game) and make a bunch of virtual friends by visiting their houses in the Dream World. There are multiple areas of the Dream World to unlock by visiting it over and over again. On top of this there's a whole sims-esque aspect of upgrading your house and buying furniture with berries. Also, via the Global Link you can download some content to your game (customisable skins for the bottom screen), participate in global competitions and occasionally there's a pokemon giveaway. So the Dream World is fairly shallow but there is a lot to do and it is far from a facebook game. in my mind all this stuff is free! I would have bought the DS game anyway so it is nice to have all this extra stuff to go with my game even if it does only result in a few cosmetic improvements and items you can't get otherwise. My main problems are: 1) The Non-Japanese get stiffed. Check out this list and see how many of these promotions never made it to Europe. 2) Nintendo Are Pretty Fucking Cryptic About It. If I didn't visit serebii all the time more than half of these promotions would have passed me by. Hmmm if only there was some Nintendo network I was connected to all the fucking time that could send me messages about these sometimes time-sensitive promotions. Even worse is that its hard to work out what you should be doing. I didn't even know you could unlock new areas in the Dream World until the Spooky Manor was announced. I then had to look up how you find new areas and guess what the best guide sites were? Everyone but Nintendo themselves. 3) Shameless Promotions A lot of the time the DLC is accessed by a password. Often this password is hidden on another site somewhere. Today, a Halloween promotion was launched to download a Banette to your game. The details on the Global Link are pretty scant saying that the password is available "now" from some yahoo games page. I've already given the page more hits than I'd like looking for it. Suffice to say I don't think it has been made available yet. To me this is just a shallow attempt at getting the not insubstantial pokemon community to generate hits for other websites. UPDATE: UK password available now (BANETYahooGames apparently) All in all I would have thought that a game with quite big following (nearly 2 million people have synced their games with the Global Link) would these things a little more professionally and not rely on the player community to make it easier to know that this shit is happening in the first place and how to do it.

I thought I'd try some online battling. My god. Frustrating. We already complained about the lack of imagination that players have back in April. Well it turns out that since then, the nuances of the meta game, tested through millions of online battles have trimmed down the options for a competitive team to what seems like a handful of team combinations. Not only does this make for very boring games but the easiest counter-strategy is for players to join in with a me-too team. Currently, you can expect to see Hydregion, Amoongus, Reuniclus and Chandelure in 90% of double battle teams. SNOOZE.

Pokemon Soul Silver brought precisely zero new pokemon to the table. I have 490 pokemon on pokemon diamond. Pokemon diamond has 400 hours of playtime. I am worried about the cartridge dying. Pokemon can be very tediously and slowly traded from Diamond to Soulsilver. This is project Exodus. STAGE ONE COMPLETE>

As I mentioned previously, I was dead over Christmas and confined to games I could play without moving too much, specifically, I could only play games whilst only moving my index finger and thumb right hand. Aside from Final Fantasy III this also meant that it was time for me to face up to the Battle Tower in Pokemon SoulSilver. For those of you who ain't in the know, the Battle Tower is a very challenging tower of battles. Who'd have guessed? Basically you take some of your best dudes and try to beat as many CPU dudes in a row as possible. Challenges can be done with 3 pokemon in mano a mano type affair or with four pokemon in 2 mano a mano affairs or if you have a willing friend you can try and do the tower with a mate over wifi. If you beat 20 trainers in a row you get to fight the tower tycoon. If you beat the tower tycoon you get a schmancy ribbon for all the pokemon in your team. If you beat 48 trainers in a row you get to face off against the tycoon slightly pimped and if you win you get an ever so slightly nicer ribbon for your dudes. If you beat 100 in a row you join a list of five people in the world who have ever done it and you get a nice extra star on your trainer card. This extra star can bring you girls and fame and fortune and boys too. IRL! Sounds simple and it's a kids game right so it must be simple. Sadly, friend it ain't. The first seven rounds are a cake-walk. The next seven are an iddle bit tricky but then after that the computer cheats really, really badly like we always knew the computer would do, according to internet lore. It's hard to judge whether or not there are actually rum doings afoot but you will start to curse the video game gods when moves with 33% accuracy hit four times in a row or seemingly innocuous attacks critical three turns in a row OHKOing everyone on your team. Bish bash bosh. So, with nought but half an eye and limited motor function I took three of my hardest, grizzled, angry, take-no-prisoners pokemon and set about getting some pretty ribbons and a star. My previous record was 21 in a row before some cheating bastard cheaped my guys. The Battle Tower is a funny place. Battles are strung together in blocks of seven so you can rest, give up or change your team about every seven battles. Each of the trainers you face will greet you with a different saying and then taunt you if they win ending your current streak or offer a phrase of disappointment if you best them. Memorable combatants are a Japanese idol (see here) who was never loved by the public and wants to make it as a pokemon champ, a clown who compares arena fighting to "bachelorhood" and a trainer whose opening gambit is: "This is my story I cannot lose". These little snippets give your mind a nice little rest from what is essentially a grind. Because I'm a woman or something according to this book I tend to play with my favourites rather than a crack team of perfectly trained cheat heads. This means that because my team is composed of Omastar (the Omastar), Aerodactyl and a Mamoswine Octilleries and Kinglers cause me no end of problems with their cheaty fucking Crabhammers OHKOing all of them. Getting knocked out is heartbreaking as you have to start all over again and the battles get tenser and tenser as the streak increases and the pokemon you face start to get a bit tougher and a bit smarter. After a day of Towering I'd managed to get as far as 26 battles in a row but it looks like I'll remain a second-rate four star trainer for a while to come. yet. What did you play over Xmas reader?

Play a Guitar hero or Rock band game from start to finish (or endless setlist etc) with the pokewalker strapped to your strumming wrist. (I got 12,000 for Guitar hero: Greatest hits). Love and Hey! I wonder how many steps your average wank would produce with this set-up? Richie X

Every day I wake up and I check for Pokemon Every day I die a little inside. Love and Cofagrigus, Richie X