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.

This week the maniacs have a hot shot Character, Item, Level and then revel, in coming up with fool proof ways to remember all the type match ups from Pokémon. Is your Dad normal type? Familiarise yourself with the elemental triangle (and grass). And does thinking about bugs filled with dry grass really help? Listen to find out all this and morelull.

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. 

With the dust all but settled on Pokémon Scarlet and Pokémon Violet (just SV from here on) now that the second part of the DLC has come out and been thoroughly explored we'd thought we'd take the time before the epilogue drops to see how rock types were served in the latest mainline Pokémon video games. We've already reviewed how rock types, the greatest pokémon typing, were added to in Pokémon Legends: Arceus and Pokémon Sword and Pokémon Shield  so let's see what's new and what's returning for rock types in the newest pair of games and the DLC.  SPOILER WARNING: If, unlike us, you're not several hundred hours into these relatively new games and their expanded content then there may be a few spoilers within.

A while back now, I took a look at the rock type pokémon that were brought to the table in Pokémon Sword and Pokémon Shield and it's about time to update this series by looking at what Pokémon Legends: Arceus (PLA) has contributed to the best pokémon type there ever was. Despite PLA only adding a handful of brand new pokémon to the 'dex and a few new regional forms, rock types have been surprisingly well served. PLA brings three new rock type forms and one brand new rock type pokémon to the world and what's more, three of these rock types take quite a prominent role in the story of PLA. What ever did we do to deserve such attention? Without further ado, let's take a look at how these new rock type pokémon shape up. 

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...

 We've mentioned before our love of the effort that goes into the artwork of Pokémon trading card game umm trading cards. Last time around we had a look at Chilling Reign but we're back for a spot of art judging for the whopping set Fusion Strike. As the name of the set hints to, Fusion Strike adds to the rapid and single strike gimmick introduced in the Battle Styles set by adding a third 'battle style' attribute that some cards have as well as adding more rapid strike and single strike pokémon cards and trainer cards. But we ain't interested in that are we? We're here for the pretty pictures.  Slugma  Unlike the video games, in the TCG, all pokémon are equal. That is, if they have a card, someone's got to go to the effort of making some card art for it. Sadly the Slugma-Magcargo line had to sit on the sidelines for Pokémon Sword and Pokémon Shield but makes a joyful return in Pokémon Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl. We love this card art by artist olum...

In a return to our old format we chat what we have been playing, which is pretty much limited to WoW and Pokemon! Enjoy! We are available on Google: https://podcasts.google.com/?feed=aHR0cHM6Ly9hbmNob3IuZm0vcy84ZjYyYzM0L3BvZGNhc3QvcnNz Breaker: https://www.breaker.audio/that-guys-a-maniac-dot-dot-dot Castbox: https://castbox.fm/ch/2836225 Pocket Casts: https://pca.st/briawruf Radio Public: https://radiopublic.com/that-guys-a-maniac-WaOw0M Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/0o9OXgrEHvlEUJXRdN4D6F Apple: By searching for us on iTunes Love and Aural-Hugs, Richie and Cunzy Xx

Younger gamers today don't know how good they've got it when it comes to taking screenshots, watching cutscenes, making videos or even just streaming a playthrough live at the touch of a button. On top of that it's possible to find centuries worth of clips, analysis videos and let's play to quickly grab that screenie or scrutinise every frame of a trailer or cutscene. With photo modes, share buttons and title screen galleries of movies it's never been easier to see Chun Li's knickers   capture your favourite bits from games from boring headshot compilation vids to those "you'd never believe it if you didn't see it" moments.  We've written a bit about share buttons before and a quick peek at the gigabytes of stored videos and images is testament to how frequently we use ours. Back in the day we'd have memory cards with various save games just before cool cutscenes and I remember resetting FFVII and FFIX games after a cool cutscene for t...