100 Things Challenge - 002
Video Game Memory 002 - Realising Pokémon Stadium was STILL turn-based
Pokémon Stadium (N64, 2000)
I was a real Poké-maniac when I was younger. I must have put at least 200 hours into Pokémon Red, replaying it dozens of times until I raised about 15 Lv.100s. But let's be honest - back in the day, Game Boys weren't very pretty to look at. Red did a pretty good job of bringing my favourite critters to life, but when battles were turn-based and lacked all the excitement seen in the anime, I was still left waiting for my Pokémon dreams to be fulfilled. I wanted to become the Pokémon, running and dashing around the battlefield and kicking ass like Ash and Pikachu. Then Pokémon Stadium was announced, and I thought my prayers had been answered.
How wrong I was. What I thought was a real "let's battle Pokémon in a giant stadium" simply boiled down to a graphical update of the Game Boy games. It was still turn-based, and it was still painfully static. Sure the Pokémon themselves looked awesome and the moves looked even better than I could have imagined, but I remember being severely disappointed that Pikachu and his fellow monsters were stuck rooted to the floor instead of being free to move around.
Still, that didn't stop me from enjoying some of the toughest battles I'd ever faced, and it certainly didn't stop my school friend and I having insane fun with the mini-games. It's a shame that even the most recent iteration of the Stadium idea - Pokémon Battle Revolution - is still based off this same old template, but hopefully one day they'll finally make a proper Pokémon game that breaks out of its turn-based monotony and injects a much-needed dose of action into the mix - because that would probably be enough to actually make me start caring about Pokémon again (but I'll talk more about that another time). Until then, I'll just have to content myself with politely taking it in turns to beat the living daylights out of my opponents.