That guy's a Maniac...

It's been... how shall we say? A hot minute since I last gave an update on my mission to empty out all of the legendary pokémon, special pokémon available from in game trades from NPCs and events and get all these guys with as many ribbons as possible from the Pokémon games going all the way back to 2002's Pokémon Sapphire all the way through to Pokémon Violet. The rules of the challenge are here  and progress to date from Pokémon Fire Red , Pokémon Colosseum , Pokémon XD Gale of Darkness , Third generation spinoffs and lastly Pokémon Sapphire can be found in the respective hyperlinks. Or for convenience you can find the whole series here . Corners have been cut. Sanity has been tested. I've spent the last eight months sort of and sort of not trying to evacuate the hell out of my copy of Pokémon Diamond , the first mainline pokémon game on the Nintendo DS. Why has it taken so long? What's the hold up? What state did I leave the game in first time around? Listen on to ...

  This week the maniacs continue their tirade of coming up with foolproof ways to remember all the type match ups from Pokémon. This weeks contenders are Ice, Fighting and Poison types… and these ones have a lot of unpacking to do.

We're hoovering up all the unique pokémon in the main series games going all the way back to Pokémon Sapphire . Here's the introduction to the series , clearing out Pokémon Fire Red , Pokémon Colosseum , Pokémon XD Gale of Darkness and most recently a quick pit stop review of the Ruby, Sapphire, Emerald grab-bag spinoff games with pokémon unlockable for the main games. 

It's been a hot minute! Once again we continue our journey to save 'em all. We're hoovering up all the unique pokémon in the main series games going all the way back to Pokémon Sapphire . Here's the introduction to the series , clearing out Fire Red ,  Pokémon Colosseum  and 'most recently' Pokémon XD Gale of Darkness . Whenever a new pokémon game comes out these days, there's always an incredibly boring contingent of the community that complains about change. More often than not, such whingers are unhappy about how the game has been made easier or doesn't live up to the standard of [insert that person's first and formative pokémon game]. Having had to spend a lot of time in  Pokémon Sapphire trying to 'ribbon up' a motley crew of special pokémon from in game trades and purified pokémon I can emphatically state that previous games were such. a. slog. It was easy to run out of money. Effort value (EV) training was painstaking and even with ite...

Once again we continue our journey to save 'em all. We're hoovering up all the unique pokémon in the main series games going all the way back to Pokémon Sapphire. Here's the introduction to the series , clearing out Fire Red and last time Pokémon Colosseum .  Although initially billed as a completely different game to Pokémon Colosseum , Pokémon XD: Gale of Darkness is essentially Colosseum with a series of, for the most part, improvements and a wealth of extras. In addition to the new story focussed around the game's cover star, a Lugia called XD001, XD featured nearly twice the number of pokémon to snag than Colosseum, filling many of the pokédex gaps across the other third generation games. The game is set five years after Colosseum and edgelord Wes who bombed about the Orre Region in a post apocalyptic metalAF hover bike is replaced by Michael who bombs about in a much less edgy hover-moped. You'll revisit a lot of the locations of Colosseum albeit with new cha...

We continue our mission to save'em all, that is hoover up all the unique pokémon from the third generation games onwards. You can read about Operation Last Bus Home here and the first instalment, clearing out Pokémon Fire Red , here.  One of the things I've always loved about the pokémon series is the evolution of the games building on and tweaking the fundamentals set down in the earliest Game Boy games. For those who aren't fans of the series or those only looking back over the series from today's viewpoint it can be difficult to appreciate these tweaks to the formula. Superficially, you catch, train, battle and trade pokémon in all of them but each game added something new. Some of these tweaks became permanent features. Others were limited to one or two titles and then superseded by something else. Pokémon Colosseum and Pokémon XD: Gale of Darkness, released for the GameCube in 2003 and 2005 respectively, have a cult following but were far from perfect games. Bot...

Welcome to the first game in our self-appointed mission to save them all in Operation Last Bus Home (OLBH), the briefing for which you can read here .  2004's Game Boy Advance games  Pokémon Fire Red and Pokémon Leaf Green are an interesting pair of games in the series. Although in the series chronology they came out after Pokémon Ruby and Pokémon Sapphire, or to use the community taxonomy, the first mainline third generation pokémon games, I've decided to start OLBH here because there's much less to do in Fire Red, so I thought I'd give myself a bit of an easy start. Mark those words.  Looking back at the series, I can understand complaints that those first three Pokémon generations were a little bit derivative. Pokemon Green, Red, Blue and Yellow were all slightly different versions of the same game set in the Kanto region which brought us the first 151 pocket monsters. Pokémon Gold , Silver and Crystal introduced 100 more pokemon to the world and the first half o...

How do you get a Pikachu on a bus? Well, if it doesn't involve several generations of link cables, Nintendo consoles and laborious busywork arranging pokémon in a database I'm probably not interested. Last week,  Nintendo announced that it was closing down the Wii U and 3DS eShops  surprising nobody perhaps but the announcement did set a number of pokémon-loving hearts a-palpitating as it raised the question, what does this mean for Pokémon Bank ? Bank Job For those who don’t know, Pokémon Bank is a paid for application for the Nintendo 3DS, a spiritual successor to other pokémon hoarding software; Pokemon Box Ruby & Sapphire for the Nintendo Gamecube and My Pokémon Ranch for the Nintendo Wii. Not only did it allow you to store and move Pokémon between the 3DS Pokémon games but crucially a special app that would download with Pokémon Bank , Poké Transporter acted as a bridge between the Nintendo DS pokémon games and the 3DS ones. So, if you had all the prerequisite h...

If you're one of the three bots that occasionally crawls past this website, you'll know that Team TGAM are huge Pokémon fans and this half of Team TGAM is a self styled rock type connoisseur. Now the dust has settled, well barely , following  Pokémon Sword and Pokémon Shield 's (SW/SH) launch it's a good time to look at what this game has done for rock type pokémon. Sir Not Appearing In This Game Well, making no bones about it, the decision to not include all of the known pokémon species from previous games in SW/SH  has been pretty rough for the rocky bastards. Of the 62 rock type pokémon available in  Pokémon Ultra Sun and  Pokémon Ultra Moon, as measly 22 made it through the Thanos snap. That means, at the time of writing, there's no Geodude line, none of the 'true' fossils, Magcargo, Nosepass line, Aggron line, Relicanth, Regirock, Carbink, Diancie, Rockruff line, Minior or the two ultra beasts. Soooo not a great start. Teaser/trailer stuff for t...

Acid rounds  is a semi regular, irregular spot on TGAM for games we have beasted from start to finish. Cunzy : Theme to this week then is there? Richie : Yeah, I am old and I have been getting some SMW nostalgic feelz recently. It happens every so often, this game is so heavily inscribed in my DNA.  Occasionally it works it way up through social responsibility, financial woes and my crippling suicidal depression, and I get prangs to play this chirpy early 90's platformer again. To my mind I have beaten this game at LEAST 5 times, and by beaten I mean doing every level getting the alternate colour "96" Cunzy : It is a great game and to my mind Super Mario World really mixed it up. It's the technical Super Mario game as evidenced by the Super Mario Maker  SMW levels I have no idea how to beat with spin, run and toss tech. Richie : SMW itself touches only very lightly on tech the tech you mention and is more forgiving than its predecessors on heart breaking f...

Introducing a little micro feature on the the buttons we press and joysticks we waggle! Recently I was rummaging around in my computer detritus box. A box which contains, SD card adaptors, proprietary USB cables for devices I have long since lost, devices which have long lost proprietary usb cables, external dvd drives, scratched DVDs with ancient Linux distros  etc etc and Controllers, I have collected quite a few, and I'd like to share a few of may Favourites. First up is this bad boy! The expertly knocked off SNES Controller, the 8bitdo SF30: Oh man there is so much to love about this controller. First up, just look at it! Its a fucking upgraded SNES controller. It is a thing of beauty, and honestly I had my doubts and reservations before I took the plunge and bought it. Given how good it looked, it was a bit concerning: what were the sacrifices here? Is it going to feel cheap, is it going to me heavy cuz its wireless etc. Most specifically I was concerned about tho...

Wayne's World for the SNES is probably the worst game I have ever played. It is the fucking epitome of the senseless unnecessary movie cash-in games that gave movie tie-in games the awful reputation and stigma they endured for so many years. Countless swathes of 90's blockbusters which were quickly ported into generic shit-platformers* and this one just sticks out in my mind as one of the worst. A melange of lo-fi sound clips straight from the show/movie and even worse 16-bit pixel images. It offers sickeningly predictable sound effects, repeatedly using a crackly "excellent" ad nauseam, interspersed with "Schwing", and the occasional "Not Worthy" chant. The game has no story, it isn't even sure if it is the move tie-in or the TV show tie in. The 1st level above seems to depict the store where Wayne finds the guitar he wants (oh yes, she will be mine) attempts to play it and is "denied" to play Stairway to Heaven. Except ...