The Pokemon Trading Card Game Video Game

Once upon a time, when I was growing up, I was a huge nerd. 

This will probably not come as a surprise to most. But I still wanted to preface this post because we're about to go pretty deep into my geekhood. And it's not even cute or awesome like my Starcraft History post. 

So yeah, I was in middle school and a huge nerd. This was during the period of time where Nintendo was basically printing its own money in the form of Pokemon cards for the trading card game. it's embarrassing to think about just how much money I spent on those cards. I'm pretty sure they're still in my parents' basement too. But before I had any money at all to burn on Pokemon cards, I discovered that there was such a thing as the Pokemon Trading Card Video Game for the Gameboy Color. Yes, it was a game where you would collect digital versions of the cards, build decks, and play the card game against NPC's. In Japanese. Only obtainable (as far as I was concerned) through the wilds of the internets. So I got an emulator and downloaded that sucker so I could play the TCG w/o having to buy the cards.

This worked for about as long as it took for me to get through the intro video when you turned the game on. Turns out not knowing any Japanese will make playing a text-heavy game pretty difficult. I was eventually able to remedy this with a fan-made translation patch to edit most of the text into English. Or at least something that resembled English. 

I played the crap out of this game. Then I showed it to a friend of mine and he also began to play it a ton. Then, after a couple weeks, we started having problems progressing as the translator hadn't really finished his project and we were having problems understanding what was going on in the game. So we gave it up in favor of becoming completely addicted to the actual cards and dropping pretty much every cent we could get our hands on to buy more cards. 

I had three of these. It was a big deal.

That, too, eventually died out. The English version of the gameboy game was eventually released (I just checked wikipedia, it was almost a two-year gap between the release of the Japanese and English versions of the game) but I never bothered with it.

Fast forward to this past Monday. I was listening to some Familyjules7x (as should you!) and came across the boss music from the Pokemon TCG video game! A couple hours later, I started to get "the itch." So I again turned to the wilds of the internets, found myself a copy of the game in English, and fired it up. 

The game HOLDS UP! Granted, the official translation actually isn't much better than the fan-made one I found forever ago, but I'm willing to bet it's at least complete. I played during my lunch hour and I had a blast! Each match seemed way shorter than I remembered too. I doubt this game will entertain me quite as much as it did before. But hey, maybe this will finally be the motivation I need to jailbreak my iPod.