Please Make Another Pokemon TCG Video Game!

Just like any other Japanese franchise that finds fiscal success, Pokemon has a ton of shitty spinoff games. Pokemon Mystery Dungeon, Coliseum, Ranger, Rumble, and of course Hey You Pikachu! are all giant piles of fresh baked shit. Nintendo seemed to excel at getting us pokemaniacs excited about a new game direction, only to leave us feeling like broke frustrated Cubans under a brutal dictatorship. Bleak as GameFreak's spinoffs have been, they got one right. Just one. The Pokemon Trading Card Game for the Gameboy Color.

Just like your regulars old red and blue, the Gameboy Pokemon TCG has you building a deck that you take around to the 8 card gyms, to earn badges and battle the elite four. The card game itself is very challenging in this medium, and I always found it way more fun than playing it for real. This was also a great way to pound the rules of the game into our young brains, something desperately needed at a time when all real life duels dissolved into arguments about cheating. The Gameboy color version of our favorite card game was really well-executed, putting an emphasis on type strategy instead of stacking your deck with legendaries. Nine times out of ten the deck with the Starmies and Seakings would beat the deck with the Mewtwos and Mews. Balance and strategy make this the best card video game of the 90's, and I can't think of any other franchise that could be legitimately argued into that distinction. 

Do yourself a favor and find the ROM for this game. If I post a link to a ROM site, I would probably get a very angry email, so find it on your own with the power of google. If you love card games and are sick of Magic The Gathering, then learn a little about our roots and seek out this retro-treasure. And if anyone reading this has any info whatsoever on a new version, or plans for one, please let me know. My search has dug up nothing.

Japan Has Owl Cafes!

My son loves owls, and Japan has once again proved itself to be the mythical fantasyland that caters to every single human interest. Are you into animated rape porn? Tokyo has an entire district of shops just for you. Want some poisonous sushi? Dozens of restaurants serve that crazy deadly puffer fish. You can get some sleep in a nap store, buy used panties in vending machines, or be a contestant on a game show that physically harms your family members whenever you get a question wrong. Japan has absolutely everything, and now, for people like my son who can't stop talking about owls, they have owl cafes.

Here's how it works. While you wait in line, you are served with soup and a coke. You pay your ten bucks and then walk around the cafe for a set amount of time, petting owls and letting them stand on your head while you take pictures. Cafe owls are not afraid of humans, and all desperately want to you to pet them. The only rules? Turn the flash on your camera off you asshole and no blaming the staff when the owl shits all over your arm. Apparently, that happens frequently. 

I love this idea, and I admire Japan's commitment to supplying what people demand, regardless of it's weirdness. However, I will admit that I am slightly biased here. An owl cafe in Japan? I think that is an awesome idea. But if I saw an owl cafe in Chicago? I'd probably walk past it muttering something about hipsters and their ironic bullshit. 

Hey Team, Shut The Fuck Up

Why is it that every time I make a decision in Dragon Age 2 one of my party members has to chime in with their personal take on the move I just made? In Mass Effect, Shep was rarely questioned, and if a party member disagreed, it was understood that there was no reversing the choice. Shep was commander, completely in charge, and it was wonderful. However, in Kirkwall, my FemHawke has to constantly deal with background noise from the melancholy divas in her party. Your mages chastise you for agreeing with any templars about any topic. Aveline doesn't like it when you make a little coin on the side through illegal means, regardless of how harmless, and you will hear about it. Often. If you try to play with honesty and virtue to appease your mages and Aveline, then Varric will sound in with his disapproval. You can't win.

In Mass Effect, I put pistols to police officers' heads on the daily, and my team knew to shut the fuck up about it. What these simpletons in Dragon Age need to realize is that just because I say something, doesn't necessarily mean that its true. Yes, Anders, I did just tell the Chantry priest that I think all mages should be imprisoned forever, but thats a lie to further our goals. We operate in a dangerous city overrun with corruption and thieves, and I feel no moral guilt for lying to bad people in order to make some cash or complete a mission. I'm not murdering elven babies here, I'm having discussions with strangers on the streets of Kirkwall, and lying to some of them so that they will give me what I want. I just wish my party would shut the fuck up while I work my grift, and here's a concept; if these issues are too controversial for you to sit quietly through, feel free to pack your shit and go. 

Sorry! I Was On Vacation

I've been down the shore all week with the kids, so sorry for the 7 day abandonment. However, just because I was in New Jersey, (a state that spends all of it's money making Italians happy) doesn't mean that I wasn't doing nerd stuff too. I'll be posting about the new stuff I'm becoming addicted to like Infinity Wars, Hearthstone, and Stickman Soccer. I've been replaying Dragon Age 2, Dark Souls and of course, my big Final Fantasy project. 

I found an awesome Simpsons pinball machine at the arcade near our hotel, which I proceeded to set the 5th highest score on. Oliver seemed much more interested in the slot machines.

Star Trek: The Review Of The Game About The Movie

I could never write a review of anything Star Trek objectively. The Enterprise and it's crew are too important to me, in addition to watching every series and every movie multiple times, I've spent countless hours sitting in silence just thinking about Trek. So when Star Trek for the 360 loads up, and I see how funny the graphics look, I don't really care. I'm standing on the bridge, yelling at Bones and asking Chekov questions that I already know the answer to so that he feels included. When I get in my first shootout, and I receive word that I have to put my laser cannon away and only stun my enemies, it doesn't really phase me, because the Spock/Kirk banter is making me giggle too much. The game keeps throwing problems at me, problems that I would hate other games for, but I barely noticed, because I'm playing in a universe I adore. I didn't notice for the first couple hours at least.

The problems turned out to be never-ending. So, the graphics are laughable sometimes, and having to only stun enemies for entire levels is infuriating. I grit my teeth and try to drown out the negative. "Look, it's Commodore Daniels! What a cameo!", I'll scream in my head as the game introduces it's joke of a stealth system. I tried so hard to appreciate the detail they put into the Enterprise while the satanic narrator explains to me that I have to scan everything in every room Metroid Prime style. This game really sucks, and not just because of it's mediocre copycatting of numerous other (superior) games, but because I think it sucks. If a guy like me, who would happily watch the pile of boring poop that was the tv show Boston Legal just because Shatner is in it hates your Star Trek game, then you've really accomplished something dreadful. I will finish it though, probably twice. It is a Trek game after all. 

Promo Cards Are Still Awesome

Oliver eats healthy most of the time, not because I'm a great dad who cares deeply about what my son puts into his body, but because McDonald's still makes Pokemon promo cards. A 3 year old wanting a happy meal is the perfect excuse to keep my collection forever growing, always expanding.

It's Pikachu this time, and now he joins my other two McD promo foils, evidence of the previous times I exploited my children. More to come!

A Stupid Name For A Ship

I was reading the amazing Dan Dare this morning, and noticed that the spaceship he was stationed at was called the HMS Achilles. I didn't think much of it at first, I was much more interested in Dan generously giving aliens idealistic asskickings, but as I closed the comic, it popped into my head, why the fuck would anyone name a major ship the Achilles? Achilles, as we all know, is a metaphor for a specific weakness. Confident that this was just a little joke confined to comic books, I spent minimal effort in checking if anyone would ever actually be stupid enough to name their ship after a name that means weakness, and guess what? The ship actually existed, its real, its British, and it sank. Wow.

Can anyone tell me why "spreads" is in quotations? Gross.

Dan Dare also famously flies his badass spaceship, the Anastasia, named after the young Russian princess who was brutally murdered along with her entire family in a political coup, only to be revived a century later in a campy Disney movie. What is it with Brits and horrible ship names?