That guy's a Maniac...

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...

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 ...

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...