Building the Best Pokémon Team (Part 8)
As we make more headway through the Gold and Silver part of our irreverent Pokémon review, we finish off some babies, which sadly isn’t as violent as I’ve made it sound; we take a nature-themed turn and see how a cotton plant, a sunflower and a fake tree hold up in battle; and finally, Pokémon gets an honest-to-God green frog as part of its lineup. Which is great and all, but when’s the quokka Pokémon due?
R-Type Final (2004)
A performer needs to know when to bow out. There’s nothing worse than seeing an aged, washed-up athlete who just won’t admit it to themselves that they have reached ‘The End’. Their legs have gone, mentally they’re no longer that vital step or two ahead, they can no longer last the distance. No matter how prime an athlete they once were, time eventually caught up to them, as it always does. They just haven’t accepted that cruel fact yet.
It’s not just the sportspeople either – it seems all of show business suffers from a reluctance to accept that their day in the sun is long over. This has to be true, otherwise the Rolling Stones wouldn’t have embarked on their sixth Worldwide Farewell Tour. They even came to Ireland, for God’s sake. And as my grandad always observed, they only come here when they’re finished.
Continue reading “R-Type is the series that says goodbye to everyone at a party twice”
Harvest Moon (SNES) (1998)
I’ve gone on before about how the farming life isn’t exactly one that appeals to me. You will have driven past fields full of cows and sheep, and smelt the fresh mess coming in through your closed car windows. Well, farmers are quite accustomed to that smell. Some of them even live for it, except they dress it up as “the fresh country air”. Can you believe that? I’d take carbon monoxide every time. Better than that, I’d rather stay as close to electricity as possible and keep my farming fantasies restricted to gaming-based pipe dreams. It’s in this way that I discovered Harvest Moon SNES, and I began tingling in my wellies.
Continue reading “Harvest Moon makes us all wish we could marry a hick girl”
Pokémon: Let’s Go, Pikachu! and Let’s Go, Eevee! (2018)
The year was 1999, and Pokémon did what the Catholic Church could no longer do – got an ecclesiastical grip on children up and down the country (wait a minute, let me edit that one). Even as toothless simpleton kids, we were able to get on with the fact that Pokémon weren’t real and they were never going to poof into existence. It was just a sad fact of life. Big shame though, not having Pokémon all around us. Didn’t matter that the world was already full of thousands of beautiful creatures of all kinds of different species, waiting for us to learn all about them, maybe even help save them from extinction. No no, we wanted them to breathe fire and shoot water cannons, and we each wanted six of our own.
Continue reading “Find Drowzee in the flats? You’ll get knocked drowsy instead”
Mad Max (2015)
A few years ago, I happened to see the new Tom Hardy flick, Mad Max: Fury Road in cinemas. It seemed to have drummed up a fairly substantial amount of hype, so on we plodded to see it. It had all kinds of rave reviews, looked destined for quite a few Oscar nominations, the lot.
Four hours later, having watched a man and a few hangers-on exchange dialogue that didn’t make any kind of sense, drive across a vast desert and keep teasing a big action sequence without ever delivering, the credits finally rolled. Myself and my pals were pretty much left speechless, wondering was this just a fake-out before the film actually began, before one flat Dublin accent behind me opined, “All that for a bit of water?!?”
Continue reading “For tedious desert jaunts, Lawrence of Arabia’s got nothing on Mad Max”
Building the Best Pokémon Team (Part 7)
Sometimes I get the feeling that the Marketing and Business Analyst chaps working for Nintendo and Game Freak graduated at the bottom of their class – a real ‘shame brought on the family’ effort. I suppose the zillions of yen acquired by Nintendo sort of makes that a nonsense statement, but they’re certainly prone to some crazy decisions. Still, even the most spoonfed, thicko graduate would have worked out that the Pokémon gravy train was becoming absolutely jammed with passengers.
After 3 mainline games in Red, Blue and Yellow plus spinoffs, a booming Trading Card Game and all kinds of merchandise, fans were still baying for more. Everyone and their grandmother had a Pokémon game (and if your grandmother didn’t, then have words). So what better way to exploit this market than with a whole new ‘Generation’ of Pokémon?
Burkey Gaming 