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

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. 

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 ha

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

Pokémon Sword and Pokémon Shield are out, and have been for a while and although the Official That Guy's A Maniac Review(tm) has yet to come out, suffice to say we've both ploughed a heckuva lot of hours into it, especially the online components and it's good. It's very good. However, before we take a deeper dive in a review let's look at who made the final cut. We wrote about ' Dexit ' in the run up to release but now the games are out let's take a look at who is in and who is out. A bit of SPOILERS housekeeping first, we won't be talking about any of the new pokémon just which ones of the first 809 made the cut but there are some minor spoilers about pokémon with new forms so if you're still keeping yourself clean, look away now. Here's a handy chart of who is in and who is out at the time of writing. Look at it in amazement/despair. If you've ever played and liked a previous pokémon game, there's bound to be at least one or t