Sweet Childhood O’ Mine

It’s taken me a while to finally admit it, but Pokémon kicks arse. Pokémon defined entire years of my childhood, yet I pretty much turned my back on them as soon as I entered high school. I mean, come on! They were far too childish, right?

Wrong. It’s only now, after the release of Pokémon Black and White that I realise that I’m missing out on what is an exceptionally fun game. Not only a game in fact, it’s an entire series of games I’ve missed out on! In fairness, I’ve never owned a Gameboy or indeed any Nintendo console to have had a Pokémon game released on it besides the N64, but I only bought that last year. It hasn’t been until now that I’ve seen what I’ve missed.

Sorry, ran out of tissues.
Guess what came in the mail?!

It’s in light of this that I’ve taken it upon myself to go and rediscover my childhood. Just the other week, I found a lovely chap on eBay selling a Gameboy Advance SP in good condition for a fair amount (not just any Gameboy either, it’s the Zelda limited edition!) and a wholesaler in Hong Kong selling Pokémon FireRed for dirt cheap! Jump forward a week from then and it had finally arrived.

All it took for me to become instantly hooked on Pokémon, was to pick the gingerest starting creature I could: Charmander! I named him Arthur, after my favourite character from Marvel vs. Capcom 3 (as you do) and set off into the long grass – ready to dish out street Poké-justice to anything that squared up to me. After much levelling and stealing money from children much smaller than myself, I was finally getting to enjoy being a Pokémon trainer – the childhood I never had.

This isn’t to say that I felt my childhood was lacking in any way – I still had great fun with the friends I had, and technically I still “played” Pokémon (even if literally every aspect of it, besides our own corporeality, was imaginary) – it’s just that I didn’t have a Gameboy and hence never played any of the Pokémon titles. At least, I never played them beyond the fleeting minutes that my friends were prepared to let me spend with their copy. What I’m trying to say is that I would have liked a Gameboy, but I think I got by well enough without one.

"I'll just catch a few Pokémon before bed."

Do you ever get that “great game feeling”? It’s like this weird sensation you can feel right down to your bones – you get it when you realise that, even when you’re away from this one game, you can’t stop thinking about everything to do with it. It’s been a while since I’ve felt it, but I currently have it with Pokémon FireRed. The strange thing is, I’d really only done this so that I could get a cut of the Pokémon action with my friends at Uni, in Ready Up and on Twitter and to be in the know about it. I had expected it to be fun to some degree or other, but not to the level that it actually is. No way was I expecting to get as hooked as I did.

So here I am. 20 years of age and I’m 9 years old again. I’ve got algorithms and data structures to be reading up on, but instead I’m stuck wondering if I’ve got the balls to catch a Scyther.

The Pokéballs, that is!


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