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Pokémon Blue: settling to a team

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I have a feeling I am now at the point where I lost interest in Pokémon Yellow, and I recall feeling a little uncertain when I reached this point in Pokémon LeafGreen. When I last wrote, Pikachu was several levels higher than my other pokémon due to him fighting and defeating every enemy in the caves; I now have a similar problem with Dugtrio whose Dig (and now Earthquake) moves proved invaluable when scaling Pokémon Tower, and fighting the electrical enemies. I have progressed through the underground passages, obtained a silph scope (which allowed me to identify the ghosts in Lavender Town), fought Giovanni – the boss of Team Rocket, routed the inept baddies from Silph Co, woken Snorlax1 with a poké flute and then captured him, and found a mansion containing the programmers of the game.

My team is all around the high 30s, other than Dugtrio who is at 47, and I am having to resist the urge to just use him over and over again. I am fairly settled with a team of Dugtrio, Charizard, Weepingbell, Vaporeon, Haunter and Pikachu – waiting for a couple of them to evolve – but I’m aware that others may come along to replace them at some point.

I am varying the colour scheme I play with to suit my location, the time of day, and the strain on my eyes.

Indeed, I’m not sure where I’m off to now. I have just obtained the SURF and FLY moves, but currently there’s no pokémon in my party who can learn FLY so I’m taking the opportunity to journey by foot and level up my companions some more. There are large areas to the south with oceans which were previously unreachable, so I’m heading home to see my mother and then onwards to the southern islands.

  1. My previous style guide continues. Since I don’t rename my pokémon, one that I have caught and am holding is capitalised as a proper noun. The generic name for that type of pokémon is not capitalised. I caught Snorlax when I woke him up, but then when I woke the second snorlax I was unable to catch it despite the fact I threw multiple balls at him when he was at virtually zero health and also asleep. ↩︎

Rain On Your Parade (Switch): COMPLETED!

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Rain On Your Parade is one of those silly arcade games that things like Donut County and Pool Panic. In this, you’re a sentient cloud who – initially – is mainly tasked with raining on things. After all, what else can a cloud do? You have to soak so many people or rust so many vehicles, that sort of thing.

Quickly things take a bit of a turn when you’re encouraged to cause chaos, set fire to stuff (you can hover over oil leaks and then rain oil), learn how to cause lightning, and so on. The game is framed within a Princess Bride style man telling a kid a bedtime story about this cloud, and he keeps adding to it to keep it interesting, so there’s the introduction of a baddie – Dr Dryspell – who wants nothing more than make everything dry.

Levels are varied, some short, some mere time or score attacks, and some pretty huge and complex. There’s quite some imagination going on (“rain” coffee into cups, get everyone covered in bird poo) but a special mention is needed to the first person shooter level, and the Legend of Zelda one for really stretching the formula. It’s also fun finding the references to other games, like Katamari, Metal Gear, and Power Wash Simulator.

Most of the levels have a number of “missions”, which usually require you to wet a certain number of things or complete the level without running out of water, and there are optional tasks, and even some optional hidden tasks, if you really want to go down the 100% complete route. There’s also a load of unlockable “costumes” for your cloud, like a frog hat and a chainsaw, and some minigames too.

Rain On Your Parade is quirky and funny, although a bit janky when it comes to things like collision detection and it even crashed on me a couple of times, but don’t let that put you off. A bit more polish would have been nice but it doesn’t detract from the ridiculous gameplay. Oh yes, and it has toilets. Five stars, would play again. Etc.

Club Drive: hardly drivin’

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For Christmas I received the Atari 50 compilation, which collects a large number of Atari’s most celebrated games together and presents them alongside a museum of stories, videos, and artwork spanning the fifty years of the company. It is a fabulous resource, including a lot of arcade and 2600 classics, which I will no doubt talk about in future posts.

As well as games from the early years, there are some titles from the Lynx and the Jaguar. There are some high profile games missing, I presume because of licensing issues or because they weren’t developed by Atari – Aliens v Predator on the Jaguar, and Blue Lightning on the Lynx, are two that stand out. The Jaguar titles therefore seem a little scattergun, but it’s a good opportunity to play some I don’t own the cartridges for.

If you have seen my my to do list over the last decade or so, you’ll have seen I aspired to own Club Drive for the Jaguar. That wish has finally come true, in an approximate way, and I’m glad I didn’t spend more time chasing it. Because Club Drive is pants.

The key problem is that it’s largely uncontrollable. You accelerate with the right trigger, and turn with the d-pad (or left analogue). But to turn more sharply if a corner requires it, you pull back on the d-pad (or stick) as well as holding the direction. No need to slow down, your car suddenly just develops a smaller turning circle.

Get too near to the side of a cliff and the car will often decide to jump off itself. If it does, the game rewinds itself to a point just before you fell, and then the car invariably falls off again. Often this is accompanied with an unexpected change in viewing angle, so you have little hope of recovery, unless you rewind a lot further.

There are three modes: collect ten sphere things dotted around the level; race from one end of the level to the other (and back again); and a tag game for two players only. The collection game is painfully slow and dull. Racing is against the clock only, and I was doing well at this on the Wild West stage until I hit a hidden flashing wall which bizarrely transported me to the front of the Atari office building. It’s just all really janky.

Imagine this moving at 2 frames per second and you’re pretty much there.

I have raced on all four of the levels, plus the super secret course (which isn’t so secret on Atari 50 since there’s a message to press X to select it, I presume because it previously required a combination on the Jaguar keypad) – the latter was absolutely no fun at all since I couldn’t see where to go or control the car on the ramps. I don’t think I’ll persist with it.

Paper Mario: endless wandering

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After beating the Koopa Brothers, there wasn’t an immediate clue where I should be going next. And so I didn’t really go anywhere. I spent half an hour retracing my steps to see what I was missing.

What I was missing, apparently, was that there was a new area opened up to the south of Toad Town. It wasn’t immediately obvious to me since I had been told about the port many days beforehand and I just forgot. I don’t like having to resort to a walkthrough, but unfortunately real life just means I can’t remember offhanded comments from random characters between play sessions.

So, off to the desert now.