Who could have known that a gaggle of miniature monsters with silly names could conquer the world? As it turns out, Pikachu, Tentacool, Charmander and the Pokemon (short for “pocket monster”) gang have mustered more power than their diminutive name would denote. Nintendo’s Pokemon, which first appeared as two Game Boy cartridges last fall, is more than a video game, it is a mini-universe.
The Game Boy game from which the craze sprang is a role-playing adventure where players find, train and collect pocket monsters that they then pit against other trainers’ monsters in battles. Think of it as sanitized cockfighting in which players use cuddly monsters with magic powers.
Pokemon might have passed under the world’s radar had it just been a successful game cartridge. But it also is a hit television show. Done in anime, a popular Japanese style of cartoon art, the Pokemon TV show was a major hit in Japan and has topped the American children’s entertainment hit parade since its debut last September.
Then there are the game cards. Packaged like baseball cards, Pokemon cards have been selling out and appearing in schoolyards everywhere. Oh, and Pokemon also is coming to a theater near you! Nintendo and Warner Brothers have teamed up to release “Pokemon The Movie: Mewtwo Strikes Back” in November. If you’re expecting Pokemon’s big screen debut to go the way of “The Barney Movie,” think again. This is the first of three movies released in Japan, and the second biggest box office hit in Japan in 1998.
Add up all of the revenues from the cards, the toys, the cartridges, the television shows, the licensed products and the movies and you come up with a $5 billion bonanza. Nintendo is not the kind of company that rests on its laurels when the market is this hot-four new Pokemon games are set for U.S. release between now and next spring.
Pokemon Pinball
Pokemon Pinball came out at the end of June for $35. Addictive and deceptively intricate, this is a game in which players collect 150 Pokemon by scoring big on a pinball table. An integral part of the Pokemon universe is the pokeball, a baseball-sized, red-and-white ball that is used for catching and storing Pokemon. In Pinball, players use flipper bats to knock a pokeball into bumpers and along ramps. The size and weight of the pokeball impacts the game’s dynamics.
Pokeballs are bigger and lighter than the bearings used on real tables. This makes for a slower game, giving players the chance to aim their shots and contemplate ball trajectories. This is important because Pinball is filled with trick shots and timed goals.
To catch Pokemon, for instance, you have to hit the ball into the mouths of little monsters that have been placed on the tables in hard-to-reach areas (Pinball has two tables). Once you hit that target, you have two minutes to strike five bumpers to make a monster appear. In the remaining time, you have to bean that monster with your pokeball several times to trap it.
Nintendo has upped the ante on this game by building a rumble pak into the cartridge. Hit a bumper or trap a monster, and your Game Boy shakes in your hand. The tables are playable, but the goal is to collect monsters, not score points. You might feel elation when you reach the high-score screen, but let a previously uncaptured monster appear in your sights, and the game comes alive.
Pinball is not a game for pinball purists. (As the home of Williams, Gottlieb and every other major U.S. pinball manufacturer over the last century, Chicago is the epicenter of America’s most puritanical pinball enthusiasts.) As a pinball game, the Pokemon version’s dynamics are completely wrong and some of its targets would be impossible to hit in the real world. Fortunately, the game was not designed for fans of the silver ball but for Pokemon fans, a young and enthusiastic audience that cares as little about real-world physics as it does about Jungian psychology. For this crowd, Pokemon Pinball will be downright miraculous.
Overall: 3.5, game play: 4, graphics: 3 (Game Boy standards), sound: 3
Pokemon Snap
Pokemon Snap, ($60, released July 26) is not so much a game as it is a guided tour of a virtual safari park. Players are taken through the various 3-D worlds that the Pokemon call home. There is a fiery world, a mountainous world, a pastoral world, all of which are inhabited by dozens of monsters.
The big difference between this mildly interactive game and the role-playing games in the series is that instead of trying to “catch ’em all” as you do in other Pokemon games, Snap is about creating a photo album, i.e., “gotta SNAP ’em all.”
The tours of these Pokemon environments are on rails, meaning the game takes you where it will. The only way you interact with the game is to throw apples at the monsters to attract or repel them, and by taking photographs.
Frankly, the game feels a lot like riding on Disneyland’s Pirates of the Caribbean. You sit back as you go by exhibit after exhibit thinking, “This is all very interesting, but where’s the action?” Snap was scientifically designed to bore older players to tears, and specifically designed to thrill younger players. It might not have the longevity of other Pokemon games, but the 7- to- 10-year-old crowd will enjoy the tours and the tasks of finding and shooting all 150 Pokemon-several of which are hidden and can be photographed only by playing and replaying the game.
The thing Snap brings to the series is full-bodied, 3-D artwork and a dynamic world. Playing this game you get the feeling you have stumbled onto “Monster Island,” the home of Godzilla and many other gigantic Japanese movie stars.
Snap is the least impressive game in the series as far as game play is concerned, but that is according to plan. What this cartridge does is bring the characters to life and let players have a chance to explore their worlds.
In an interesting move, Nintendo has arranged with Blockbuster for Snap players to bring their virtual pictures into the real world. Bring your Snap cartridge to Blockbuster next time you go for a video, and you can print a sheet with 16 pictures for $3. The new kiosks that Nintendo is setting up in Blockbuster will let customers print copies of their favorite shots on their cartridges or choose stock pictures to place on stickers.
Imagine that, now you have something new to spend money on at your local Blockbuster.
Overall: 3, game play: 2, graphics: 4, sound: 2.
Pokemon Yellow
On Sept. 6, Pokemon ($35) will return to Game Boy in a new game that looks and feels like an incremental improvement over the previous Game Boy titles. When Nintendo first unveiled Pokemon in the United States, it was in the form of red and blue cartridges, each of which contained shared and unique Pokemon.
To catch all 151 monsters (there is one hidden monster not listed in the common 150), you need both cartridges. The new yellow cartridge contains most of the monsters found on the original cartridges plus slightly improved graphics.
If Pokemon Yellow is meant to satisfy the unfulfilled lusts that millions of American kids currently feel for more Pokemon while leaving room for future games and bigger innovations, it fulfills its purpose beautifully. With the introduction of Yellow, all past Pokemon games will become passe, yet the litany of Pokemon experiences will expand a tiny bit. (The Yellow cartridge can interact with the Red and Blue cartridges via game link cable.)
The release of Yellow is best defined in car retailing terms. This is not a new car, simply a newer model. Red and Blue were ’98s, Yellow is the new and improved model for 1999.
Overall: 3.5, game play: 3.5, graphics: 3.5 (Game Boy standards), sound: 2.
Pokemon Stadium
The most exciting of the new Pokemon titles is Pokemon Stadium, a game that will not reach stores until March. Stadium (price TBA) is a game that combines the turn-based battles of the Game Boy cartridges with the deluxe 3-D graphics of the Nintendo 64 game console. You can plug your Game Boy cartridges into the Stadium cartridge and it downloads the critters you have caught and trained.
So what? For all of its strength and charm, Game Boy has an eight-bit processor capable of running games that look like sophisticated doodles. Nintendo 64 has a 64-bit processor and plays games that look like Disney movies. Stadium gives you the interactivity of the Game Boy Cartridges with all the visual pizazz of Snap!
It also brings new life to the turn-based battles of the Game Boy games. In their original form, Pokemon battles were largely unanimated. You told your Pokemon to perform an attack, you might hear a sound effect or see a slight representation of that attack, then a text window told you how you did.
Tell Squirtle to splash an opponent in Stadium, and you see floods wash across the screen in a dramatic N64-powered dramatic animation. In past games, which have only run on Game Boy, the most you got was a flash on the screen.
The battles in Stadium are still turn-based, but these vivid graphics breathe new life into the matches. In fact, my only complaint is that Stadium brings the first real violence to the Pokemon universe, a gaming universe that used to hint to violence but never delivered.
Overall: 3.5, game play: 3.5, graphics: 3.5, sound: 3.5
