Month: October 2018

Building the Best Pokémon Team (Part 2)

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Building the Best Pokémon Team (Part 2)

In building the best Pokémon, several factors have to be considered. Actually, ‘several’ is a strong word. And so too is ‘practical’, or ‘sensible’. What really matters is if they can fly, if they can breathe fire, and if they look like they mean business. Obviously Charizard fits this mould beautifully, which is why everyone in the schoolyard would have packed 6 Charizards on their team if only they could get the Pokémon Cloning glitch right. Of course, Venusaur and Blastoise had plenty of merit as well – strong, hulking, elemental creatures, they speak for themselves. Unfortunately, we have gotten past these famous starter Pokémon and quickly gotten to the realm of diva foxes, goofy moths and three little turds sticking up out of the ground. Will any of the below list of recruits make a candidate for a strong Pokémon team? Read on…

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I was taking black-and-white selfies before it was cool

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Game Boy Camera (1998)

Although my Instagram is by now world-famous (no less than 300 followers, and a Verified blue tick surely in the post), I’m no photographer. If I’m vomiting a picture of my collection all over ‘the Gram’, or worse still, if I’m plastering my mug up there, I don’t even take the time to take the perfect shot. Much better, I feel, to take a scattergun approach, clog up my phone with four thousand images of my gurning mug, put the heaviest, most flattering filter I can find over the best of that poor bunch of 4,000, and put together some witty caption. Hashtag it into oblivion, and there you go – another slice of fried gold.

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The Russian World Cup wasn’t such a disgrace after all

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Soccer (1987)

The 2018 World Cup is long over now, and it was really a terrific tournament, despite all of my initial fears and misgivings. Firstly, it was hosted in Russia, which always quickens the old pulse and gets the fear receptors running red-hot, and secondly FIFA decided to roll out the Video Assistant Referee or VAR for a major tournament.

Both the Soviet hosting and the video doo-hickery worked out great even though football is long dead and has had its soul unceremoniously stripped. In the aftermath of this hugely successful competition, in which the limited Ireland team were probably lucky not to feature, I had football withdrawals to deal with. That all changed when I discovered the bluntly titled Soccer for NES.

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Q’s invented me a gun that fires jelly

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James Bond 007: Agent Under Fire (2001)

Where have all the Bond games gone? Where indeed. Twenty years after Goldeneye 007 for N64, we’re still waiting on some developer out there to recapture lightning in a bottle and come out with the ultimate system-selling, multiplayer extravaganza, with a beautiful Single Player campaign and replay value from unlockable cheat codes to boot. Of course, to do this, they’d have to root the Bond game license out from underneath a load of cobweb-ridden boxes.

Then they’ll need to find a way that they could make the multiplayer a loot-box ridden nightmare, where it’s either 900 hours or $4.99 to unlock some Bond no-mark like the baddie from For Your Eyes Only, and if you don’t like it then Goldfinger will come round your house and laser your ghoulies off. And finally, they’ll have to give the whole game the same old moribund Call of Duty gameplay that plagued Goldeneye Wii.

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Building the Best Pokémon Team (Part 1)

~ Burkey Gaming ~ 1 Comment

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Building the Best Pokémon Team (Part 1)

Nintendo are one fierce, unrelenting juggernaut of a corporation. And like all fierce unrelenting juggernauts that I know and have sometimes gotten romantically involved with, they love coin. And lots of it. Pokémon has been such a remarkable money-spinner for them, which may be the distressing reason why there are a gillion Pokémon games and only about 3 F-Zero games. Still, hardly fair is it?

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Space travel? No thanks, it’s a bit too chilly for me

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star ocean

Star Ocean (1996)

Look, I can understand it, but it still really astounds me just how many children want to become astronauts and go into space when they grow up. They don’t know anything about what that entails, of course. They just want to wear a cool suit and they think space is cool and they think rocket ships and meteors and lasers are cool as well.

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If you’re going to start watching anime, you should know that there’s no coming back

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Xenoblade Chronicles 2 (2017)

At some stage in a young nerd’s life, they’ll have to decide just how far down the geek wormhole they are willing to go. Think of it as the iconic red pill vs. blue pill scene from The Matrix, except here there’s a whole host of wee capsules in Laurence Fishburne’s hands. In one of his hands you’ve got mild nerd pills like mobile games, The Sims and being into wrestling. But then in the other, it’s the social-suicide pills – Warhammer, trainspotting and My Little Pony. And striking some sort of indeterminable sweet spot in between these two extremes is anime.

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