That guy's a Maniac...

Our first impressions of the New Pokemon games Love and Aural-Hugs, Richie + Farley!

Trainer, you need to help us! Team Galactic have succeeded in creating the red chain and have summoned the legendary temporal pokemon. Its power over time is tearing Sinnoh apart! Can anyone stop the... oh. You have... wow, okay you have team of Dialga. Huh. Maybe the legends were wrong. What! You also have Arceus, the alpha pokemon and god of all creation! Three of them! Wait. Is that six Celebi? Oh okay. Well Team Galactic's pretty fucked in that case. And err, yeah, that um, that um kinda puts paid to all of our myths and legends in our cultural history. Didn't you start your pokemon journey like, last week or something? And you've beaten the Elite Four? You've beaten every Elite Four? Listen, kid, I mean, with that power... I meant no disrespect... your Highness. Please, I have a family. Just, forget I ever said anything. You like this watch, here, take it. And my house. Just please don't destroy existence. LATER We've convened this once in a generation All

It seemed like there was a return of the late 1990's Pokémon card fad as bored rich Youtubers, blew the scene up again, the scalpers went a-scalping and professional card graders couldn't even keep up with the demand with the volume of cards being sent in for grading by locked down boredos desperate to cash in on the hype. Ultimately it lead to card shortages, as the millionaire youtubers and scalpers bought boxes by the hundreds and for a hot minute there it felt like everyone was cracking packs on their channel on the hunt for the illustrious chase card (one of the 4 million charizard cards most likely) and likes, follows and subscribes. Much like the NFT craze but slightly less pointless, it seemed like the cards themselves sort of got lost amongst the hype. But we've been long term fans of the game and even have the promo cards and PTCGO beta rewards to show it but today I'd like to look at an often overlooked aspects of the cards, the card art.  In the only readil

It feels like it's been a lifetime folks, and in the games industry it is, but  Pokémon Sword & Pokémon Shield have been out for just under four months and it's time for us to put this review out there. In case you've missed the last ten years of TGAM, we're big pokémon fans so on the one hand we're heavily invested in this ship. On the other hand we're in the guts of this series so we're bringing our big guns to bear in this review. Fuck All That Bullshit It might be poison in the lucky charms or Minamata disease but these games have been particularly surrounded by an especially stinky wall of bullshit this time by the loose collection of flotsam and jetsam that's the pokémon community online and the solids floating on the top of the septic tank that's the wider gaming community online. The recent announcement of the expansion, an astonishing helping of STFU to entitled fans, which by any normal standard would silence would-be whingers

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

Despite Pokémon Home 's rough launch and mixed feature set, the launch of the app for mobile and game(?) for the Nintendo Switch now means we can view the fruits of our decades of monster collecting with the greates of ease and abandon. As soon as was feasible, launch week bugs be damned (don't save in Lumiose City), we shifted everything over to Home and basked in the glory of our work. It was complete. Or was it? Nestled within the innocuous pokédex feature on  Pokémon Home is a search filter for 'unregistered'. Out of curiosity we ran a few searches on pokémon, moves and abilities to see BLANK ENTRIES. On top of that, the mobile app has a s eries of challenges that award next to pointless stickers for your profile for completion. The challenges range from making specific 'theme' trades but also for registering pokémon from different games, from different regions and forms etc. To our further shock and horror. We didn't have them all(tm). The Chal

The World is an incredibly scary and unjust place at the minute and we've certainly found ourselves squandering our privilege by running to pastures digital to escape it all. Pokémon has been a staple franchise for us and arguably at the heart of the relationship of team TGAM and now feels like one of the best times to be a Pokémon player/fan. We're truly spoiled, despite what the very vocal minority has to say about the direction of the franchise. Here's a run down of just the last few months! Pokémon Sword & Pokémon Shield Despite being less than four months old it's been a whirlwind of events and activities that even daily checking of serebii.net  has meant it's been difficult to keep up. Since launch we've been treated to a whole series of raid den events, we got shiny Magikarp galore to celebrate the new year, a trickle of new gigantamax forms in Snorlax and Toxtricity, crazy weather for the leap day, a steady flow of mystery gifts, two online int