That guy's a Maniac...

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. 

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...