That guy's a Maniac...

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 Others were limited to one or two titles and then superseded by something else.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