Pokémon General

[Chocofreak13]

tbh i wish they'd just let it die with dignity. Mario is Nintendo's baby, thus he will NEVER die (unless the company dies, and even in the unlikely event it does he probably STILL wouldn't die), but pokemon has been dragged out long enough. let's think of a new idea for the kids.

@nej: one of my major issues with the new series (besides the mountians of crap pokemon) is ALL THE DAMN LEGENDARIES. i mean, seriously, how many can we really have. back in gen1 we had the legendary trio and mew/mewtwo, though those were semi-uncatchable in the US releases. gen 2 had a new legendary trio and then the moon/sun birds (i'm counting lugia as a bird here because s/he's not dragon-type), etc etc. gen 3 was where it started to get excessive, since in all there were 13 possible legendaries to catch (i'm counting all 4 forms of Deoxys in that count, 9 if he's only counted once). and it's only gone up from there. hence the arguement, "When Everyone is Super, No One Will Be" (thanks Syndrome for that quote).

Muk was kind of a stupid pokemon design. cute, but i mean, a puddle of ooze...? (porygon was pretty weird, too)

[stewartsage]

Shut your mouth about Porygon, Porygon is the best Pokemon.  At least that's what I thought circa whenever it was I got my GBC.

Still love that polygonal little shit though.  I also can't say I've ever bothered to catch a legendary except for Zapdos... I was sitting in my dad's jeep out front of the Presbytery office while he returned a projector and I nailed the sum'bitch.

[Nichi]

Nice -w-
Also, agreed. Porygon is cool

As for the whole "too many legendary Pokémon" thing, I have noticed a few that are labeled as legendary, yet I honestly don't see why. Shamin, for instance; which design wise is rather forgettable, and feels like it could have just been a rarer normal Pokémon instead of being put under the same label as titans like Mewtwo or Giratina, or "cute legendaries" like Mew or Celebi

[Chocofreak13]

i'm gonna get flamed for this but Lucario falls into that catagory for me. as do the Unova trio, whatever the fuck their names are. and that shamin bitch/bastard/whatever. even celebi was a bit much, since that means that gen 2 technically had 6 (11 if you count the gen 1 legendaries too).

i'm not saying porygon was BAD per se, just weird. i mean, think of the concept behind it: a virtual pokemon? what use is that in a REAL battle? everything would phase right through. :\
porygon2's design sucked too, and i'm not ashamed to say that.

@stew: actually, zapdos was the only gen 1 legendary i captured, too. the other two were just insanely hard to get to and i had no idea where they were till i put two and two together just now. =__=;;

[Nichi]

Wait...Lucario is legendary? Never knew that, and yet I have one ._____.;;

[Chocofreak13]

it was treated as such since it got its own pokemon movie. i always assumed it was. w/e, i still don't like it. never have. in fact, this sums up my feelings.

[Nichi]

It probably is, but I never really acknowledged it as such :\

Also, while I am enjoying Black from a story perspective, the monster designs have yet to really jump out at me

[NejinOniwa]

Kids these days...no, just no.

1: Lucario isn't even a semi-legendary like the Dragon trees or Tyranitar. He's just another rare pokémon, like Lapras or Eevee. You get a Riolu egg from this one chap in DPPt, which evolves into Lucario at max happiness. B2W2 is the first time you've been able to get Riolu in the wild, much like Eevee (and he's similarly rare, only available in one location and at very low catch rate/encounter rate). Besides, throw shit on Lucario and his movie and I'll beat your ass - the Lucario movie is the best Pokémon movie there ever was, and that's that.
2: Shaymin got his movie with Giratina, which made him pretty nice in my book. He was one of the first to really utilize Forme changes in any big way, too, and his Sky Forme makes him well strong enough to handle himself in Ubers. There are plenty of worse random legendaries to go around, like Manaphy and shit like that.
3: Speaking of Ubers, "Mew-who" is quite an overstatement. Mewtwo is the original Uber pokémon, and he has always been (and will likely always remain) one of the premier sweepers in existence. The only pokémon who beat his Sp. Atk. stat are Deoxys-A and Kyurem-W - the former being the epitome of offense and the frailest Uber in existence, and the latter being significantly slower and only somewhat bulkier, with a pretty large typing problem.

Of course pokémon are going to introduce new species as the series continue. It's in its nature. I don't mind, because even though we may get our fair share of Garbodors (A GARBAGE POKÉMON? REALLY?) and obligatory dog/cat/rodents, we also get plenty of good stuff as well. G5 gave us bug-types that are actually good (Volcarona, Swadloon), cool Ghost-types (CHANDELURE MOTHERFUCKER), a really nice take on expanded storylines in general, as well as our first true sequel. G4 gave us GIRATINA MOTHERFUCKER, DO YOU SPEAK IT, Lucario, an enormous helping of new evolutions of old pokémon - many of which were well needed and equally well received - as well as some of the coolest cutscenes/graphics I've seen on the DS to date (Distortion World/Giratina general on Platinum, Ho-oh/Lugia's entrances in HGSS, and more). Sure, we got Bibarel in there, but you don't need to catch one. The freedom of pokémon is that you can completely ignore the parts you don't want, and feast your eyes upon what you like. The more we get, the more there will be that's ultimately going to be good; add to that a steadily improving game engine and plot general, and you have a game that's evolving quickly from mere nostalgia trips to a masterpiece of a modern game.

Personally, I'm excited for the possibilities of G6 for two reasons. One, it's a new system with lots of new power, and plenty of new cool features have been confirmed already. Two, out of the 7 pokémon (starters, version mascots, sylveon, m3) that have been revealed so far, 2 are derived or related to old generations. That's more than 25%, man. On average, every generation has added about 150 pokémon or so. If I get 40 new evolutions of old pokémon and stuff like that with X&Y, it's going to be fucking awesome.

If they give us a Mawile evo...

Fuck my wallet.

[Chocofreak13]

i am now tempted to make mawile fanart

AS A TRIBUTE TO MASTER

(oh, and i still need to scan that "science of parties" pic i drew years ago.)

[NejinOniwa]

Mawile is fucking awesomedorable. If only she had better stats, I'd be crying tears of joy...

[Bella]

Thinking about getting in on the Pokemon fun (because I will be damned if people are having fun and I'm not in on it), what do you guys recommend for an emulator (preferably OS X 10.6 compatible, but I have a Windows 7 rig to so that doesn't really matter) and game ROM?

[Nichi]

If you want to play one of the games from the first 2 generations (Red \ Blue \ Yellow, and Gold \ Silver \ Crystal), my emulator of choice is BGB. However, it's Windows only; so you'd have to do it on Windows 7 or setup Wine on your Mac (Which, it works great through Wine on Linux Mint).

[LeaflameSD]

VisualBoyAdvance

[Chocofreak13]

is what i use. have yet to find one for DS and up.

[NejinOniwa]

DeSMumE or Nocash work about equally fine for DS games. Googling and torrent sites for the roms, as usual. DS emulation is pretty resource-intensive, though; it works well enough on OMEGA, but I don't know about lesser systems.