"You can't do this. I won't let you."

Today is a lovely sunny day outside, and any right-minded person would be out there enjoying it. Lucky for you, by which I mean maybe four people if I'm lucky, I don't fit the aforementioned categories and as such am scrabbling around for a blog topic. I'd review my Pandora but I'm saving THAT low-hanging fruit for when my back is to the wall, metaphorically speaking. That said, I'm moving onto the slightly higher fruit of talking about games I've played recently. Generally I'm a gamer by heart, unfortunately not by wallet, so I don't often have the most recent gaming news, but maybe something I'm into will grab your attention that you'd missed.

To contradict that last sentence, lets talk about Pokemon Black.

First and foremost: I like the Pokemon game series. I never really followed the anime terribly intently. I'd go back and look at it, but I did the maths and it'd take me the better part of a week with very little sleep to catch up, and I could be using that time to make snarky comments on the internet and read message boards. The games however, I've been playing since Silver, and have had a go of at least one game of each generation since, usually by another source due to my lack of funds... I think at this point I'm the designated completer of Pokemon games for my cousin. I wonder if he has White... ANYWAY to get back on topic I played Black to story's end in about three days, because it is Kryptonite for my attention span.

First and foremost, this is the Pokemon game with the strongest story so far, possibly excluding things not in the main series like Mystery Dungeon or Colosseum, and by the end I was actually quite sad to know the main plot was finished, even though there's a lot of afterplot content too. I can't elaborate much for obvious spoiler-flavoured reasons, but needless to say several insurmountable waist high fences are removed once you've completed the Pokemon League once, as well as the predictable moment when all the Pokemon from every other generation MYSTERIOUSLY APPEAR, as if people have been hiding them under a rug when your non-league-winning ass went past.

In terms of gameplay, the ingame battles have been smartened up quite nicely, with the first league battle being of opposite type to whatever your starter was, forcing you to find a decent countering type, and the intelligent choices go on from there. Of course by the 4th Gym or so my levels ended up in front of the level curve, which meant I could largely steamroller over whatever the leaders threw at me, but this generation has definitely resulted in the most even level distribution over my party pokemon of any generation so far, in my experience. You also have three people whom you might consider rivals this time, all of whom are rather well developed, though I am left wanting more information... hopefully I'll find that in the post-league content. Also changed from prior generations is how experience points are distributed, now beating a high-leveled pokemon with a low levelled pokemon yields more experience, and the amount of experience a given pokemon may yield has changed massively. I've gotta admit though, I was pretty disappointed to notice that your starter Pokemon all have a lower exp yield than Magikarp.

Yes, Magikarp.




I guess Splash > Water Gun.

The other upshot of all this is that grinding is now more profitable by finding areas with high-yield pokemon, and beating them until your own level becomes too high for it to be profitable. If there's any EV/IV trainers out there whining now, bite me. And some berries. Jeez, it's not like it's HARD to do EV training, just time-consuming.

The music is as always, excellent. There's not much I can say really, anyone that knows about Pokemon already knew that, and anyone that didn't know about Pokemon either doesn't have ears or can't feel happiness, so further elaboration is not needed. However, I will share this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r-B2cnSqPy8 This isn't in the game, YET. I'm guessing it'll be an event at some point, at which point the whole world will know about it. Still, should be cool!

I was gonna talk about Rune Factory 3 here, but I've just realised how long I've went on about Pokemon for, so I'll leave that for another blog post. Until then, Brits: You have until April 27 to claim your Ticket to catch Victini. Hurry up and buy this before then.