Pokémon White

Yesterday morning I went with Bay to the local Walmart to pick up Pokémon Black/White for the DS. Both Bay and Koa wanted to get the English version of the game (the opposite color than their Japanese version) and I wanted to pick up a copy for myself since I’ve been enviously watching them enjoy the game ever since they got them in Japan last Xmas.

The game has similar gameplay to all the previous Pokémon games, but it’s a lot slicker and the environments are pretty nicely rendered. It even looks great on my DS Phat circa 2005. The dialog in the game is actually quite funny, and some of the TV shows I’ve watched in the houses you can visit are really interesting. One of them has a lot of romaji in it. Not sure if the translation team was taking a day off, but it was really funny.

I was reading the instruction manual last night and some of the things you can do via wi-fi seem pretty cool. It’s pretty confusing reading without actually having the chance to go through it in the actual game, but the wi-fi trading and battling look fun. One frustrating thing I encountered is that our new router is not compatible with the DS. In previous firmware versions, there is a simple setting to change to enable the DS to connect but in the firmware I have, there is no option, and I don’t want to downgrade the firmware for fear of screwing up the rest of our setup. But luckily, the DS’s can access wi-fi via my G2 phone and it’s awesome wi-fi tethering. Which is great, because there is a special Pokémon named Victini that you can download right now.

I haven’t played a game on my DS in a while now, but Pokémon Black/White are a perfect excuse to dust off the old console. Lots of fun!