Key

Go ahead, you can call me a nerd all you want. I'm not afraid to admit that one of the things that I kept an interest in from my childhood is Pokemon. I love the games, I love the TCG (although I don't collect the cards anymore) and I just love the memories that go along with the entire concept. But I want to talk more about the games here than anything else. This will be in separate parts and will include my opinions / experiences with games that I have played.

First off, let's talk about the first Pokemon game I ever played:


Pokemon: Special Pikachu Edition

When I was a kid, maybe around 9 years old, I can't quite remember exactly, myself and my two brothers were asking our parents day after day for the Pokemon games that everyone else was getting. At the time, I had only known that the Red and Blue version existed, and so my younger brother and I decided we'd get the same ones because it'd be cool. As our birthdays started to near, our parents had been giving us our gifts on our birthdays and my older brother got his first. He had gotten a purple see through GameBoy Color with Pokemon Red to go along with it. My younger brothers birthday had come a few weeks later and my parents had gotten him a yellow GameBoy Color with Pokemon Blue. As I saw that both my brothers had gotten their Pokemon games, I was pretty excited for my birthday to come up. Once it came around, I saw a box that was wrapped that was about the size of a GameBoy Color game box. I had opened it from the back and i'd seen a yellow box, so I was shortly disappointed until I turned it over and realized it had been a version of Pokemon I hadn't even realized existed yet. I could not have been more excited because now I knew that my brothers and I had all gotten Pokemon games for our birthdays and we were ready to play them right away.

Now moving on to my experience specifically. The minute I started playing Pokemon Yellow, I was instantly hooked. I had seen the show before so I kind of knew what to expect, but in this game specifically, I had no idea they'd be starting with Pikachu as opposed to the traditional 3 starters for the first generation Pokemon games. Plus, seeing this really made the game feel cool:



I was quickly getting my team together and before I knew it, I was taking out the Gym leaders with my Pikachu, Venusaur, Charizard, Blastoise, and Mewtwo (ended up getting him later on). To me, I felt like I had the perfect team, until of course I get to the Elite Four for the first time and realize that I was nowhere near as ready as I thought I would be. As time went on, I started to learn what move sets work for which Pokemon and which Pokemon are weak to what, and such and such. I've seen pictures that my mom has taken of me where I've got my GameBoy Color with Pokemon Yellow in it. I think there are even pictures spread across a couple years and same thing, still the GameBoy Color with Pokemon Yellow. I was addicted to it, and loved it to death and I never wanted to put it down. But hey, what kid would right? I mean, back then those games were the ****, and they still are.

Unfortunately to this day, I have no idea what has happened to my GameBoy Color or my version of Pokemon Yellow. I still remember the day I supposedly lost it, and I looked everywhere for it. Of course, this was years later, other version of Pokemon had come out, and my interest in the original started to fade. It's just weird to think about that it could have landed in someone elses hands and they've been playing the crap out of it. What I would give to have my first copy of that game back in my hands though.

Pokemon Yellow is certainly not my all time favorite Pokemon game, but it's definitely up there for nostalgia sake. It's still one of the more fun games to play based solely on how different it was from Red and Blue, but still managed to keep that traditional Pokemon game formula that Red and Blue did very well.