as the eve of the potential podcast recording looms upon us, I want to get in one more big post; one that works as one final opinion piece that chunks can be pulled from for the show. I realize I've dominated this thread, but a lot of what I've had to say has been moreso tips for folks whom the game might have clicked with than an actual opinion (do note I did have a post about the game engine itself earlier, though.)
Digitized versions of TCG are a tricky subject to be certain. it's almost never possible to code in all existing cards unless a game is in it's infancy. Opponent AI can be exploited, sometimes cards don't work as intended, etc. I happen to love single player TCG games, with the MTG game for PC that came out in 1997 probably being the best example of the genre, and YuGiOh! The Eternal Duelist Soul for the GBA being the game I've put the most time in, and the game I would catagorize as the best "Toilet" game.
Pokemon TCG certainly doesn't move at the pace you'd need to play a game in 2 minutes, especially if you have battle animations on and you don't have the swiftest of decks, which you will not in the beginning. at the same time, it doesn't do the "This is a JRPG but played with cards!" thing quite as well as MTG 1997, which made it easy to sit down for a while simply because a lot of the time you'd run into a random battle with a goblin that had 2 life points in a red deck who's mission was to drop as many lightning bolts on your face as possible before dying out and leaving you in need of some stay at an inn or something. I digress, though.
Pokemon TCG, developed by Hudson Soft under license from Gamefreak, Creatures Inc., and Nintendo, is still a competent game that makes for what Johnny Metts would refer to as a multitasker. Much of my time playing this game for this retroactive was spent catching up on Box Office Poison and Discover Music Project, or watching youtube stuff. A lot of this game's difficulty comes from grinding out cards to make a deck with some level of consistency, and it's good to find an opponent you can consistently beat that gives the collesium pack, as that's the one that things like Bill, Oak, Switch, Energy Removal, Gust of Wind, and Computer Search comes in, as well as a lot of those solid basic pokemon I mentioned as well as some decent stage 1 evolutions come in!
When you can put together something that has some flow to it (and maybe even a backup deck), the opponents at the clubs kinda become chumps who only win if they get incredibly lucky. I do like that not every club's ritual isn't quite the same, such as having to find all the fighting club members on their sojourn to the other clubs, or trying to find the grass club leader. I do have to admit that they had to kinda stretch things thin on the clubs, especially considering the Science Club and the Rock Club (where the club leader is literally country bumpkin Prof. Oak!)
Some things that doesn't work are the auto-deck machines and having multiple decks. there's one auto-deck machine that can save your deck lists, and then several more that unlock that basically will let you make duplicates of all the CPU opponents' decks. the issue here is that these auto-deck machines require you to have all the cards in said decks. even worse, if you have cards that are already wrapped up in a deck, you cannot use that card between both decks. I get that that's a bit hard to do IRL, but like... man, if I have a card I'm using in more than 1 deck in real life, I make a proxy (a turned over card back in a sleeve with the text of the card written on it to stand in for the real thing) and if I have to play in some sort of tourney with that secondary deck, I move my copy between decks! The difference here is that this is a digital game with digital cards, and it should fucking assume that if I own a card and want to incorperate it into multiple decks that I can have it automatically moved between decks, instead of manually having to plug a bunch of garbage into my deck to make it exactly 60 because maybe I want to try a second deck with a playset of Prof. Oak and Bill?!?
The Music gets a special mention, as I feel the soundtrack has some of the catchiest stuff that's ever been in a pokemon game, especially the theme for Ronald and the Grandmasters. I still hum the standard opponent theme every now and then, and Imakuni's theme does a good job of being comical and tipsy, which perfectly frames the strange cameo of the japanese electronic artist. (Hey, maybe you guys should do an episode of Discover Music Project on Imakuni?)
Regardless, as a fun quick diversion, I used to own a copy of
http://cdn.bulbagarden.net/upload/8/8e/ImakuniDoduoChallengeDarkness.jpg back in the day. I think it's Pokemon Power is that you have to do the hokey Pokey when it hits the active pokemon slot or it confuses itself... and then it has 2 colorless for 30, but you have to like... thow the card at your opponent or something. it's a weird joke card, just like every other Imakuni card.
Regardless, even after you get all the cards you could want, there's still plenty of fun to be had in the challenge hall and the challenge machine. playing against 5 opponents with a single deck is no easy task, because there is no one single deck that can handle anything and everything you could encounter, and your ability to adapt to this is paramount to success!
Overall, I like this game. the sequel, The Invasion of Team GR! is much better, although that game recycles a lot of content form this one, so I wouldn't play them back to back. What I feel this game does show is the strength of the Pokemon TCG in it's early days. it's a great tool for teaching your friends how to play, as several times I lent this game out ot get my friends to try the TCG out so I could actually have people IRL to play against. that's also how I ended up losing this game since someone decided to keep my copy when I let them borrow it and move away. I still have my original rain deck sitting in my drawer that I keep my TCG stuff. I've bounced in and out of the game a few times, but never got quite as serious with the game as I was during that initial Base/Jungle/Fossil/Rocket/Gym Leader era. Neo Genesis came out, and then
Slowking borked the game and things became very unfun and I dropped it for Yugioh and didn't really look back.
http://cdn.bulbagarden.net/upload/0/00/SlowkingNeoGenesis14.jpg Bonus points to whoever can figure out why this card is a problem. (except for Yoshi1001 and halbred, because they probably already know why.)