Tag: QandA

Anonymous asks:

It’s coming into winter time so I thought I’d ask, can you ice-skate? What is your favourite winter-time activity?

Something I’ve realised since moving to America is that, in the part of New Zealand I come from, we don’t really have winter.  We have more of a long, wet autumn that sort of shades back into spring at the other end (more tropical parts of the world have a rainy season and a dry season; Auckland has a rainy season and a rainier season).  The notion of specifically wintertime activities isn’t all that important to you when you’re from a place where it never snows, I think (and I definitely cannot ice-skate).  Although I suppose if I had to say, I’m very fond of winter desserts.  There’s no reason you can’t make apple pie or rice pudding at any time of the year, but those hot desserts are so much better when it’s cold outside.  I should really go and find my mother’s recipe for chocolate self-saucing pudding one of these days…

Anonymous asks:

What do you think of Allerglen, the fanmade game Pokemon Ethereal Gates take on Darmanitan’s zen form. I think it’s much more useful, since it has high speed so it can actually get attacks in (And a staff member has promised future updates will buff its special attack)

I’m not familiar with Ethereal Gates, but just looking it up quickly now…

Doing Zen Mode this way does make a lot more sense – part of the reason it just doesn’t work for Darmanitan is because Zen Darmanitan is trying to be a tank when it inherently starts with less than 50% HP, which is something of a recipe for failure.  Allerglen can take hits with its fairly solid initial defences and then strike back hard in Zen Mode.  The trouble is that you still have only one moveset that you have to use to fill two different roles.  Allerglen’s initial attack and special attack are sufficiently awful that it wants support moves like Stun Spore so it isn’t just wasting its time before Zen Mode activates, whereas once it’s in Zen Mode it wants Quiver Dance and as many special attacks as it can think of.  It’s definitely more flexible, and Zen Mode sucks a lot less for this Pokémon than it does for Darmanitan (who is so much better off without this unique and interesting ability that it’s just not funny anymore) but I suspect the problems with the ability are a little more systemic than that…

Anonymous asks:

Would you rather be a Pokemon trainer or a Pokemon ranger?

Well, to be perfectly honest I don’t think I have the constitution or physical stamina for the kind of $#!t Pokémon rangers get up to.  Trainer can be a hobby, while ranger is a job, and an extremely demanding one at that.  In terms of the relationship the two groups have with their Pokémon, though, there’s actually a lot about the rangers’ way of doing things that appeals to me – like the stress on the more temporary, favour-for-a-favour nature of their relationships with most Pokémon, and the resulting emphasis on the more personal ties they have with just one partner.  I think the rangers’ training style gets around a lot of the more ethically blurry stuff about living with Pokémon, which is probably a good thing.  It also helps that they have a formalised code of ethics about how to treat Pokémon, but that’s more to do with them being all members of a centralised organisation with a definite purpose.

brick3621 asks:

Are there any particular features from previous Pokémon games (like walking Pokémon or mid-battle dialogue) that aren’t in Gen VI that you miss?

Well, to be perfectly honest, I have trouble thinking of any features like that at all – which I suppose means that I don’t miss them, whatever they are.  It would be nice to bring back the walking Pokémon from Heart Gold and Soul Silver, now that you mention it; they were a nice touch.  I can imagine it being a bit of a drain on the graphic designers’ time and energy in the 3D world of generation VI, though.  The hilarious glitches from Red and Blue give the games a certain je ne sais quoi…

brick3621 asks:

I just got a shamelessly hacked Eevee (shiny with perfect IVs; hatched on Kalos Route 7 but has a Sinnoh Champion Ribbon) via Wonder Trade and face either the prospect of breeding it for semi-legit Pokémon or just releasing it and never looking back. Either way, I feel like my very game cartridge has been irreversibly tainted by some plague, because I’m of the opinion that the ability to simply obtain whatever Pokémon you want on a whim spoils a significant part of the game and mocks the efforts of honest breeders and trainers who spend hours achieving objectively less impressive results using only the in-game methods that Game Freak provide them, methods that have been made easier over the generations in part, I believe, to discourage would-be hackers.

Do you think that Game Freak should spend more effort cracking down on illegitimate Pokémon and penalize players for using and distributing them? Do you have any idea if they even have the means to do this?


Well, in answer to the last question, no, I haven’t the faintest idea.

I don’t have particularly strong opinions on this, maybe because I’ve never been willing to devote the necessary time to the kind of repetitive tasks involved in breeding for perfect IVs.  I suppose my default would be a sort of laissez faire attitude, though I suspect my reasons for that will provoke… disagreement.

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Anonymous asks:

What happens if a pokeball is destroyed having a pokemon inside?

I imagine the Pokémon would simply pop out.  There is one episode, Pokémon Food Fight, in which Ash breaks his Snorlax’s Pokéball by dropping it on a rock – the ball isn’t destroyed, but it does stop working.  Snorlax immediately comes out.  In general Pokémon seem to maintain some degree of awareness while inside a Pokéball and can emerge on their own if they particularly want to, so I suspect that, whatever weird energy state they’re in while inside a ball, it’s not particularly stable, and has to be maintained by the ball’s mechanisms to keep them from just immediately returning to physical form.

Anonymous asks:

Of all the fossil pokemon, not including the kabutops and aurorus lines, which do you think would be the most intimidating to encounter? What about the least intimidating? I did away with those two because they’re obvious answers to the respective categories, since kabutops has the whole slashing thing going on and aurorus is a gentle, color changing giant.

You know, I’m not sure I agree with you on either of those!  Like, Kabutops has the slashy thing, sure, but he’s also about four feet tall, which is a big strike against him as far as intimidation goes.  Aerodactyl is larger, can fly, and will eat your face off, while Tyrantrum is just unfairly massive.  As for least intimidating, well, Aurorus is beautiful and gentle, sure, but still big and bulky enough that she could hurt you pretty badly just by failing to notice you.  Lileep, on the other hand, is made of seaweed and literally cannot move.

vikingboybilly asks:

Will kricketune get banned to ubers?

Kricketune will get banned to Anything Goes (the Mega Rayquaza tier).  Its incredible tanking ability with Bide leaves your opponent paralysed with laugher, so that they’re helpless to do anything against Kricketune’s devastating Perish Song.  Let’s not even talk about how overpowered its Technician-boosted Aerial Ace is.