pokemon

i’m going to come right out and say it: i love pokemon. well, let me take that back a bit: i love a select portion of what pokemon is. i was raised on red and blue, i had red but played blue for my friend so that she could get all the pokemon. when gold and silver came out i was in seventh grade, and the craze was starting to die down, at least if you were an “older” kid. but i got silver, and love it, and still play it today. i also got gold, but silver was my favorite, and i ended up giving gold to my sister. i clocked in, no joke, 257 hours and 13 minutes on my original copy of pokemon silver. i had every single pokemon, many at level 100, and my favorite party to carry around were the 5 eevee evolutions (jolteon, flareon, vaporeon, umbreon, and espeon) and a lugia, who i used to fly me around. tragedy struck early this summer, however, when i discovered that my save file had gotten erased because my battery died. i don’t know if it was because of a faulty battery or i played the game too much, but my old versions of red and gold still work fine. eventually i found another copy of silver on ebay and started playing. i’m nowhere near where i was in my old game with the exception that i’ve gotten all the badges and have beaten the elite four several times.

when the pokemon games for the gba came out, ruby and sapphire, i decided i was too old for pokemon and didn’t get them for myself. of course, i’m still playing pokemon now, but there was something about those games and the ones that followed that i never quite liked. maybe it was all the new pokemon, whose names i didn’t know and faces i didn’t recognize, or the fact that about a quarter of the new ones just look like machines, but i just never got into it again. the same goes for cards: my friends who play the pokemon tcg and i have a rule that you can’t use cards from beyond the gold and silver sets, which are known as neo. this past april, when the new pokemon games for ds came out, i turned them down as well. but when i was building my christmas list, i began to reconsider. first off, i really like pokemon. second off, you can now trade and battle with people from all over the world thanks to the nintendo wifi connection. and third, there’s just something about starting off a new adventure with a pokemon at your side, ready to catch ‘em all. so i’m taking the plunge and getting diamond verison (pearl looks dumb, and yes i know they’re the same game). i expect great things, hopefully diamond won’t disappoint.