Cute Chronicles – Gotta Play ‘Em All!

Su-per cutesy happy fun casual gaming time!

After thinking about Yoshi’s Story, this morning I broke out the old Pikachu Nintendo 64 with the intention of bouncing around with some dinosaurs. That changed quickly however, since it seemed a bit of a disservice to a Pikachu Nintendo 64 to not play a Pokémon game of some description.

I started off with Pokémon Stadium, which was entertaining enough and discovered an old Pokémon team on there transferred from… Blue, maybe? I think someone borrowed my copy of Pokémon Blue and never gave it back. Anyway, this was back when I had made the elementary mistake of giving Pokémon mostly moves which matched with their type, a massive disadvantage when it comes to battling as any Pokémon master-in-training will know.

After that, I moved to Pokémon Puzzle League, a frankly terrible match-3 style game which uses Pokémon battles as a theme for a versus mode. There’s probably a Flash equivalent floating around the internet somewhere. It’s the kind of game where making combos mean you inconvenience your opponent with massive blocks that take up the screen and push them towards the top, which means defeat in classic block-puzzle style. I found an old save file and wondered why the game hadn’t been completed, only to find that Ash was in a ‘special’ stage against Giovanni on a 3-D playing field at 46 speed with blocks starting over halfway up the stage.

The aim of this round is to clear a certain amount of rows, something near-impossible given that you have a four or five-second window to start a massive combo chain if you want to stand a chance. No wonder younger me put the game down… older me can’t handle that smarmy bastard’s face, either.

I had saved the best for last: Pokémon Snap. Without having played Pokémon Conquest, but being well-versed in various other Pokémon spinoffs (Ranger, Stadium, Poképark, Mystery Dungeon, Pinball, Channel, Dash, etc etc…) I think it’s fairly safe to say that Snap is the best.

You’re a photographer, tasked with going through various locations in an on-the-rails way to take pictures of Pokémon in their natural habitat. It’s a bizarre concept, but it somehow works really well with the Pokémon franchise, seeing as Pokémon are supposed to be creatures that live in the wild before trainers shove them in little balls.

You can interact in limited ways with the environment, like throwing food or pester balls to get the elusive Pokémon out of hiding. Professor Oak (who can be rather creepy in this game) then “scores” your shot, on the basis of how well you can see the Pokémon, if there are multiple Pokémon in the same photo, how centred your shot is, and whether the Pokémon is doing something interesting. Instagram things successfully and he’ll give you points that unlock those valuable items that mean you can annoy Pokémon and snap funny photos of them looking angry or confused.

The Pokémon are adorable in the environment, and you end up making a kind of David Attenborough commentary as you go through the stages. You also can’t help but go “ooh!” if you see something interesting, and if you do things right you’ll get to see some rare Pokémon. It’s a shame that the game is so short and that there was never a sequel because it’s a real gem of a Pokémon game. If you haven’t already played it (for shame!) it was released on the Virtual Console a few years back, and for those who own it, I thoroughly encourage you to dust off your N64 and have half an hour or so of snaptastic nostalgia, taking hipster photos of Pokémon.