One lunatic's love-hate relationship with the Pokémon franchise, and his addled musings on its rights, wrongs, ins and outs. Come one, come all, and indulge my delusions of grandeur as I inflict my opinions on anyone within shouting distance.
Rules here.
When we last left off, I was taking a quick training break. The team now stands thus:
I wanted to train the boys a little bit higher, but with limited Pokémon Centre visits, there’s only so much potions can do; they don’t restore PP (and I’m even running out of money for potions).
The last card I drew was the Ten of Cups, meaning someone else gets to make a new rule for me, and today’s lucky winner is Matt, who offers the following:
Rules here.
When we left off, I had just drawn the 10 of Swords, necessitating a pause so a commenter could give their own suggestions for changing the rules of this game. The first commenter on the scene was Pedro Luiz Cunha Marchi, who made these requests:
So, the simple consequence first: the Six of Cups is off the board; I can use male Pokémon again. The boys, as they say, are back in town.
A little bit more complicated: my Geodude, Andi Site, will no longer face the Knight’s Challenge on route 207, but on the next route with trainers. The next place we’re going is the Ravaged Path, the small cave area that divides the southern and northern parts of route 204, but there are no trainers there. After that, there’s the upland half of route 204, which leads north to Floaroma Town. We’ve already drawn a card when we entered the lowland half of route 204, and fought the trainers there, but the northern part has more trainers and higher-level wild Pokémon, and they’re divided by story progression. I think there’s a reasonable argument for treating it as a new area, same as the lower level of Oreburgh Gate.
Continue reading “Pearl Kingslocke: Episode 4”okay
so
last night, I was listening to the latest episode of I Chews You, the podcast about cooking and eating Pokémon (…just go with it), as I do of a Wednesday evening.
One of the hosts, Ian, made reference to Augustus, the first emperor of Rome, saying that he was very fond of asparagus. Augustus, it is said, used to tell people when he wanted something done fast that it should be “quicker than cooking asparagus,” and was so enamoured with the vegetable that he commissioned an entire fleet of ships to seek out the best sources of asparagus in the world for supplying the city of Rome. My eyebrows, dear reader, assumed a posture of heightened readiness.
I will stress, before going on, that I intend here to cast no shade on Ian, who is lovely and has even helped me with research on a previous occasion. If you google “asparagus fleet” there are so many websites that mention it – dozens, certainly; it even made it onto the official QI Twitter account – that if that’s all you’re going on, it looks pretty legit. Unfortunately for me, it’s not all I’m going on, thanks to my secret double life as a PhD student in classical studies.
Continue reading “I HAVE NEVER BEEN SO MAD ABOUT A VEGETABLE IN MY ENTIRE LIFE”Rules here.
We’ve drawn several cards now – a 5, a 2, a Page and a 6 – but the 2 and the Page both tell you to do things immediately, so we don’t have to keep thinking about them after drawing them. The 5 applies an ongoing restriction, but it’s the opposite of the restriction applied by the 6, which overwrites it. That means the 6 is the only card we have to keep track of at the moment.
I think Tippi’s ready for her big solo debut.
Continue reading “Pearl Kingslocke: Episode 2”As we all know, Timey Diamond and Spacey Pearl are coming out in a little over a month, with Legends: Arceus following early next year. I feel like revisiting Sinnoh, so I want to do a playthrough of the original Pearl version – but not just any playthrough. I think it’s time to revisit the dumbest Pokémon challenge run ever devised: the Kingslocke.
This is a challenge run I created with basically two aims in mind:
In pursuit of these goals, Jim the Editor and I developed a challenge ruleset where the player would regularly draw from a normal deck of playing cards, with each card changing the rules. The effects of the different cards are very loosely based on a popular drinking game that we call “Circle of Death” in New Zealand (because, at least in our version, the cards are arranged in a big circle around a vessel in the middle of the table), but which is more commonly known in America as “Kings” or “King’s Cup,” hence the name “Kingslocke.” You don’t have to drink to play with these rules, but to be honest you probably should.
Continue reading “Revisiting Pokémon Pearl: The Kingslocke”
[Catch up on the story so far here!]
Last time, on A Pokémon Trainer Is You:
Return to camp?
You’re still feeling understandably salty over a bunch of wild Pokémon ambushing you, knocking you out and taking your stuff, so you decide to blow off some steam by wandering back down the mountain in the opposite direction to the way you came, looping back around by a longer path to return to your camp site from below. You still have your notebook; you don’t need a Pokédex to do some solid field research, and you can send Aura up to fly overhead and let you know if she spots anything interesting. You meander downward, stopping now and again to idly draw some of the plants or take a leaf rubbing; it’s all lichens, hardy mountain grasses and unpleasant thorny shrubs up here, only a couple of twisted, put-upon trees. It makes a lot of sense that you’ve only seen cave Pokémon like Zubat and Sandshrew. If you had all the time in the world to map the place out, you’d be interested to find all the springs and streams to see whether any cool Pokémon live there, although to be honest you doubt it.
Continue reading “A Pokémon Trainer is You! XLII: A Shortcut to Mushrooms”
[Catch up on the story so far here!]
Last time, on A Pokémon Trainer Is You:
What do you dream about?
As the mountain cave fades away and the Clefairy’s strange song fills your head with fog, you come to realise, all of a sudden, that you’re back home, in Pallet Town. You’re at school, on your lunch break – and so is Blue, who is mid-sentence saying something about why studying Pokémon scientifically is dumb.
You were never close with Blue, back in Pallet Town. Obviously you knew him – you were at school together and he’s related to the Professor, so it would have been hard not to – you just didn’t feel like he had the qualities you wanted in a friendship. And, I mean, fair play to you; he’s a piece of $#!t. But you remember this day. Your Pokémon Studies teacher had asked the class why people become trainers, and you and Blue had gotten into a fairly spirited argument about how much trainers should value strength and power, which spilled over into lunchtime. You think it was about six months before you both left home.
Continue reading “A Pokémon Trainer is You! XLI: Perchance to Dream”Just a quick note to say that I have been sick for over a week and also simultaneously dealing with remote teaching as New Zealand entered a lockdown in response to the arrival of COVID Delta. Those two things are not related – I had a COVID test on the first day of lockdown and it came back negative; I think it’s a nasty strep infection (which… would not normally be cause for celebration, but I guess under the circumstances kind of is? Hooray for strep infections!). It’s a really fun level of sick, where I’m not so unwell that I can’t actually do anything, but I do definitely feel like $#!t most of the time. So anyway that’s why there hasn’t been a new “A Pokémon Trainer Is You” episode or much other stuff lately. Don’t worry about me; I think I’m getting better and should be functioning properly again in a few days.
Pokémaniacal 