8 Days

[jaymark108]

We bought Pokemon Black and White yesterday and so far, I'm really impressed with it. It seems a lot of the klunky things that annoyed me in earlier games have been improved. For instance:

• You can trade pokemon anywhere, not just at pokemon centers.
• You can trade pokemon from your PC Boxes, not just your party.
• You can register pokemon in a "Battle Box" for use in multiplayer battles, not just your party.
• The annoying YOUR HIT POINTS ARE LOW beeping is still here, but they integrated it into a completely different battle theme, which makes it less painful to listen to.
• Changes to the HP meter are easier to read.
• When you heal your pokemon outside of battle, you only have to choose potion ONCE, and then you can use it multiple times.
• TMs don't disappear after use.
• When an ability activates in battle, there's a slick pop-up message to make it more obvious that something unusual is happening.

Of course, a few things sadly haven't changed:

• They still ask you to verify three times, with increasingly confusing verbiage, if you REALLY don't want to learn a crappy new move, and they still don't ask for confirmation before letting you accidentally replace your strongest attack with that crappy new move. Seriously, a little consistency would go a long way.
• They still have deposit and withdraw pokemon in your PC above Move Pokemon, even though that option is, in all cases, at least as convenient.
• They still overlay your party pokemon on top of the box you are looking at, even though there would be plenty of space to have your party pokemon NEXT to the box at all times.
• Sprites still scale weirdly (ugly!) against the 3D environments.

And there are a few things I haven't been able to verify yet:

• Do high HP Pokemon still take forever to die in one hit?
• Do weather effects still only show between turns? (considering how much effort they've put in their new pretty battle screen, I hope not)
• Is the new item menu less painful to use when you have dozens of items in a bag?

As for the rest of the game... There are 156 pokemon in this region and NONE of them old, which means I don't have to run into a million Zubat. There are an unfortunate number of recycled species concepts... Pokemon that might as well be attached to the same evolutionary tree. Pokemon that could have evolved in the scientific sense of the word into two seperate species. We'll see how silly it becomes.