f13.net

So...

(http://img297.imageshack.us/img297/5351/pdiamondwb1.jpg) (http://img156.imageshack.us/img156/7960/ppearlas7.jpg)

Started playing Pearl the other night. Running shoes are like manna from heaven. Who else is on the Poketrain?

Loved these games on the GBA.  How much is a DS running for these days?

I have a couple of the older ones, but I only play(ed) them while travelling. Never got very far in, really.

DS is $80-$120, depending on if you get the old phatty or a hot lite one.

The last Pokemon game I played was Red/Blue and I wrecked it. I plan on wrecking Pearl/Diamond as well. :D

I got Pearl. I bought Emerald t pass time on a very bad job last summer, didn't get too far, then recently got back into it and curb stomped it.


The only thing that annoys me so far is the animations seems a bit...slow, when compared to the newer 2D versions.


Also, the having the male character wear that lame beret sucks.

I ended up making a girl named Relm. /meh, the guy looked too stupid. Also, I named my "friend" 'Lolhair.' He's a douchey looking mofo.

I'm a little hesitant to get them because of all the time-of-day based stuff. I hate that sort of stuff.

At least in Emerald, it wasn't tied to anything critical.

I got Diamond.  It's a little sad that despite the DS's power they still aren't bothering to render the battles; they could do it on the N64, so it should be doable for the DS, too.  Gripe aside the game is easily the ultimate Pokemon to date, graphics and sound and gameplay all far improved over the GBA versions.  All of the nice things that Gold and Silver had that were yanked from the GBA games for lack of a clock, the berries, the day/night cycle, the TV station, all back now.  The day/night cycle has an impact on which pokemon you find in which areas, but it doesn't affect the core gameplay at all.  The main storyline isn't hampered by the time of day.  I haven't gotten anything resembling a competitive team yet for trying out the wi-fi, but I'm perfectly willing to give it a whirl solely to fuck around.

My friend code is: 0774 0726 8284, or if you're into the phone pad mnemonics, 0 psi 0 rant bug.

What do you actually do in these games exactly?

Your basic RPG fare of running around to save the world.  The difference is that you have to beat the crap out of your potential party members, enslave them in little plastic balls, and train them to serve you.

At first I thought this was some kind of weird sarcasm until I saw that you'd only played the original games and therefore hadn't been able to run before.  You are going to flip out when you get the bike, then.

So Despite having both games, all those styluses and shit that came with them, I still wanna play the core game on my R4/M3 simply. Does anyone else play backups of their game? Do they still work with the netplay/headset shit? :P Yea, I went there, DEAL.

Sorry, don't own any of those RAM carts, can't say whether it'll work worth a damn or not.  But if you own the games, why go to the extra effort of messing around with backups?

Because I can carry around 1 memory card with 50 games on it?

Well, I don't see any reason why the wifi wouldn't work on a backup game, but DS cards are so teensy that I don't see it as being an inconvenience to carry them around.  I just buy a couple of these (http://www.bestbuy.com/site/olspage.jsp?skuId=7695078&type=product&productCategoryId=pcmcat45400050010&id=1138084373410) and can fit plenty of games in the case with my DS.

You've seen the picture of Schild's DS collection, right?

Those little cases won't cut it in this case. While I am usually against this kind of backup stuff (because it can easily lead to piracy, which I think sucks), I can surely see the point here.

All your DS games on a single cart? Deal.

I should probably point out that I have not actually put my copy into my DS yet.

Son of a bitch. I keep killing Pokebastards in one hit.

Those motherfuckers need to STOP dying before I catch them.

Dude, finesse.  If you're trying to catch them, use a weaker pokemon, or a weaker attack, or an attack that your target is resistant towards.  Anything that will reduce the damage being dealt.  If you're using a level 20 water pokemon with SUPER AQUA DEATH against a level 5 fire pokemon, no wonder it's dropping in one hit.

(Super duper sekret: The attack False Swipe will never kill the target, it will bring them down only so far as 1 HP.  Getting a pokemon with False Swipe makes capturing sooooooo much easier.)

I need a new pokedex. Also, it was just shit luck, I kept getting criticals when I was fighting pokemon I wanted. :P

One of the best guys for False Swipe is Scyther, a big insane praying mantis thing.  They aren't in Pearl, but can be found in Diamond; I'll send you one once I catch it.  The joy of wi-fi trading, hoo-ya.

Pingu learned Water Sport!


ewwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww

You are all women.

I'm amazed it took this long for this post.  I didn't know who would make it, but that it would be made is inevitable.

WoW.

Dude, Pokemon.

It's a solid RPG that'll take less than a month or two to complete since I don't gotta CATCH 'EM ALL.

Also, dude, chasing purples, raids, and elves.

Hasn't the gameplay itself not changed since uh...nearly a decade ago? This series and its never-ending popularity are very high on my "Don't Get It" list.

Also: Friend Codes.

I haven't played a Pokemon since the original. I've played hundreds of FPS titles that all played the same in that time.


Hey, neat, you just described Blizzard too.

Hey, you liked Diablo 1/2 as well.

Anyway, have they made any significant changes to the gameplay in this edition or what? Also, is there a reason that Nintendo hasn't made an actual Pokemon MMORPG and built Scrooge McDuck's money vault with it?

If you've played the card game, combat in the handheld games is kind of like that -- you have the same sorts of powers and they work in similar ways. So basically it's an RPG-lite where you wander around following a simple story while battling Pokemon-style.

Nintendo did the game a disservice by marketing it so heavily to the kids.  They made the right business decision and are rich as hell, but still, didn't do the game itself any favors.

Despite the paper-thin plot and all of the cheaply made, overpriced toys and bad cartoons, Pokemon is a very strategically deep game.  Not against the NPCs, who just pick moves randomly, but against other players it becomes positively labyrinthine.

Take Pikachu, everyone knows Pikachu.  As an electric pokemon, he takes half damage from electrical, flying, and steel attacks, and double damage from ground attacks.  You can teach him an electrical attack, which does bonus damage for being used by an electrical pokemon, and fucks up flying and water pokemon.  But then if someone tosses a ground pokemon out, he's fucked.  So it could be a good idea to teach him a grass element attack to fuck over any ground pokemon that the other person brings out.  Or a move to protect him from ground attacks.

Every tactic has a counter-tactic, and trying to assemble a collection of pokemon that can cover all of your bases is quite the endeavor.  Much more challenging than most turn-based strategy games get.

Pokemon is marketed to kids, but the people who can get the most out of it are the adults.

The DS is their first handheld that has built-in Internet connectivity so it wouldn't have been possible before that. Also I'm not sure how much extra data you can fit on one of the game cards. You would probably need to use the GBA slot as a memory card reader to handle the downloadable content.

Edit: typos

Picked one of each up today for each kid.  They've been buried in it all day. 

Er, I mean on console/PC.

I'm sure if you flipped through a guide you'd find differences. I'll just take them as they come.

The core mechanics of turn-based RPG are untouched, so differences are a matter of opinion.  The major differences are in the new pokemon and moves, and the ability to play and trade over the net, those are the things that will have the most impact on your average player.  The minor differences are numerous and pleasing, and are somewhat compiled on this page (http://www.serebii.net/diamondpearl/), just click the links on the right side.

They're making games based on Pokemon now?

I'd slap you if you didn't have Chickimon as an avatar.

So... basically the complete opposite of Shin Megami Tensei.

So against my better judgement I picked this up last night on my way home from work.  I was up until 2am leaving me 3 hours of sleep for today.  Needless to say I'm pleased with the game.

I'll figure out this friends code stuff later on and maybe throw down with some of you freaks.

So far, most new towns I've entered have introduced a new gameplay mechanic.  Thoughtful design, spacing out the game features for easier digestion by younger players.  I also really like that the background music changes with the time.  Two badges down.

I forgot to save the game the other night. I need to do about 3 hours again. I'm a donk.

I am having such a hard time holding back on taking command of my 6-year old's play that I'm thinking we need two DS in the house. You know, so I can be the kind of bad father who CREAMS THE SHIT out of their kid. Only now I'm not so sure that would be the case: she kind of knows what she's doing. Which could turn into "pussy dad who gets the crap beaten out of him by a 6-year old".

Quite incidentally, we watched the film "Pokemon 3" today and I was gobsmacked that the whole thing is about an absent professor dad and a little girl's desperate need to have daddy (and maybe, from what I could infer, divorced mommy) back in her life, and then when daddy comes back with either ex-mommy or replacement mommy, IT HAPPENS DURING THE END CREDITS. WTF?

Trial by fire, that'll teach...well, it'll teach one of you how to play well.

Plus, your kid would probably get a kick out of having a cool dad who will play Pokeman with/against them.

I hate mimes.

Slap...................Slap........................Slap...............................Slap

Khaldun, get the extra DS now or pay the therapist later.

I am deeply, deeply traumatized by the appearance of the new pokemaniac NPCs, who are on all fours and, I am not making this up, have a monkey humping their ass.

On the upside, whoever did the english localization did a great job of it, managing to insert 'a winner is you', 'for massive damage', and generally more grown-up, snarky dialogue that bitter gamers will appreciate.

Questions ahoy.

Any difference between the two versions beyond the 20 unique monsters? 
For those saying "deep game" I assume you mean tactically?  How deep compared to Advanced Wars or Fire Emblem (or insert tactical game here)?
Will my balls ever grow back if I buy this?  I really must say the name alone REALLY prevented me from even considering purchasing any of the previous versions.

1. Nah, same game.
2. Like I said, against the NPCs it's really not deep.  Against other humans it can get pretty insane, with all kinds of tactics and countermeasures.  It's somewhat like Magic in that there's often a popular tactic on top at any given time, you'll see the pokemon equivalent of net decks where people copy a popular team and other people try to build teams specifically to defeat the popular team.  Pokemon should be held up more against a game like Magic than Advance Wars; it's closer to a card game than a board game.
3. Probably not.

Supposedly certain Pokemons appear at different times on the different games.

Hence the reason why there is a CCG version of the game.

Gotcha.  Thanks to you both.

I have broken down and purchased not only some pokemans (Diamond), but a device to play the game on (DS Lite, white).  The DS is still kinda clunky, but the Lite is certainly less cheesy than the original.  This is my first-ever pokemans game, so it is all new to me.

EDIT: My friend code is 5111-9953-4491

- Q

Have any of you ran into location where you needed to have the ability to remove trees or rocks that were far way from a PC?

I'm carrying 2 relatively low pokemons just for this reason but finding I need all six slots for fighting as I progress.

Received Diamond in the mail today.  This is my first Pokemon game and it's awesome.  Here's my friend code.  Add me!  Let's battle, bitches!

Pokemon Diamond FC: 3608-7565-6090

Yeah, you need to teach the HM Cut to one of your Pokeman. You WILL get this move; they force it upon you, and you need it to beat the game (along with a few other moves)


And yes, you'll probably need 6 Pokeman. You can teach each one lots of different moves, even those outside of the Pokeman's type.

Schild, did you get your psyduck from quinton? Inquiring minds want to know?

Also, it appears the nintendo wi-fi is absoloute shit. Why can't companies get it in gear? Christ....

We wasted an hour or two fucking around with firewall issues (pretty sure it was mostly on my side), but were unable to transfer the psyduck I had capture to schild. 

Things I have learned:
- it is possible to *really* confuse m0n0wall, requiring a full reboot to fix the firewall/NAT config
- pokemon:diamond does something with UDP that m0n0wall *hates* (whereas every other online game has worked with no tinkering)
- most unfortunately I discover that I only have one static IP (I was confusing my current DSL service with my old SBC DSL), so I can't hack around this with 1:1 NAT as I was hoping.
- with an "accept UDP from * to 10.0.0.42" rule I don't see the reject messages in the firewall logs, but still no worky ('42 is the IP for the dslite on my internal network)
- you have to power down the ds and power it back on, then go to the game, then choose wifi setup if you want to change your wifi settings.  The "test connection" thing only tests if the basic connection to the nintendo server deal works, so you then have to reboot
the ds again, enter the game, go to the wifi comms place, etc

I cannot imagine why for a game so completely turn based and uncaring about latency they didn't just stick with TCP through a central service so things would tend to "just work".  As far as I can tell the problems start after you connect to the Nintendo WiFi service, when you try to trade/chat/etc with another player -- at that point the two dslites seem to try to talk directly back and forth via UDP, which is going to cause most firewalls headaches.

- Q

EDIT: supposedly forwarding all UDP on 52000-60000 (I'm going for 50000-65535 for shits and grins) to the IP the DSlite is on will resolve it.  I tried some stuff like this last night, but was running into other firewall issues due to the amount of dumb things I was trying.  Now I just need to find schild or someone to test this crap with.

Finally got schild his psyduck.

So here's the firewall deal:  I have UDP 50000-65535 NAT'd directly to the DS (should try 52000-60000 and see if it works with the reduced range some time).  In addition, I had to reconfigure the firewall to not renumber the outbound UDP packets, which it does by default.

- Q

I got ahold of a free Ninty Wifi dongle, but I unfortunately could not get the thing working for the life of me.

I connected the thing, installed the latest software, and tried to link up. My DS can connect to the access point just fine, but it's unable to connect to whatever server it's trying to get to. I did everything I could think of to open up my connection to this thing. I set my firewall permissions to allow the dongle full acces, pretty much opened it up as much as I could, short of turning my actual firewall off.

(If it helps, I use Zonealarm's Security Suite)

Any idea? My PC detects the unit with no problems, and lets me integrate it into a network.

DSes and Wiis are both fucked pretty hard by firewalls that don't auto-configure for outbound connections.  All you have to do is establish the connection to Nintendo's server; you shouldn't have to open an inbound port, as nobody should be calling your DS.  This of course assumes a wireless router with port triggering, manual configuration may be a bitch depending on what you use for the firewall.

For software firewalls, when all else fails, shut them off and attempt the connection.  If the connection starts working, you missed a setting on the firewall.  If the software still doesn't work, it's not the firewall's fault.  Turn the firewall back on at that point and proceed from there.  I've never used one of those dongle wifi things, though, and can't think of anything more brilliant to say than to be aware that both the computer's firewall and any external firewalls could be conspiring against it.

And if all else fails after that, many McDonalds have free wi-fi going inside, billed specifically as being for DSes.  You can do a search for the closest free DS hotspot through Nintendo's website here. (http://www.nintendowifi.com/hotspots/searchHotSpot.do)

Bought myself a DS and the game today, played a few hours, haven't been blown away.  That might have something to do with the ridiculous amount of hours I put in on the previous versions, though.

Might return both tomorrow if something doesn't click tonight - I was never all that big on handheld game systems.

*Edited for comprehension. 

I didn't get a full packet trace of this, but based on the logs from the firewall before I got stuff straightened out, the issue seems to be that the DS connects to a central lobby server to find your friends, etc, but then once you initiate a battle/trade/voicechat the two ds devices just start spewing UDP packets at each other, peer-to-peer.  My firewall hates this (but gets along fine with client-server UDP style stuff with no special extra settings).

-Q

O RLY?  I had no idea that they went P2P at any time, I'd been under the misapprehension that all of their communications went through the server.  Well that'd explain how people managed to chat so easily in Metroid.

My kid tells me that you can hatch new pokemon out of eggs.  He has a couple of chimchars now I think.

I only have the first gym badge (I took over my daughter's abandoned game; I started over, because she had traded all of her pokemon and not one of them would obey me).

Yes, you can make pokemon do the Mommy and Daddy Dance to get eggs and new pokemon.  And there's a limit on the level of traded pokemon that will obey you, hinging on the number of badges you have.  I think it's 0=10 , 2=30. 4=50. 6=70, all=any.  So if your kid gave you some level 50s and you only had two badges, they wouldn't obey you for crap.

Where's the picture of schild's Pokemons that the thread's title promises?

You don't want no drama.

That's a double negative.

Also, I want to see the pokemon. I have 3-5 carts in the series, so I'm not exactly trolling schild for funnies.

He had his Pokemon pic up for a bit but then changed it to the Odin Sphere one.

Did he collect them all?

The title of this thread creeps me out.

This post makes me think of Steely Dan.

Pull up the lyrics for Kid Charlemagne for those who are confused.

"Turn up the Eagles, the neighbors are listening" - Steely Dan

"They stab you with their Steely Knives, but you just can't kill the beast..." -The Eagles

And I thought you were referring to Bad Sneakers at first.

My daughter reclaimed her copy of Pearl, so I picked up Diamond just for me.

I discovered digging in the underground.  LOOT!

I grow and water berries obsessively.

2 gym badges.  Busy growing berries and digging up treasures.

Anyone else still playing this?

Anyone played Pokemon Battle Revolution?
http://wii.nintendo.com/software_pbr.jsp
http://wii.nintendo.com/software_pbr.jsp

I don't trust console Pokemon Games. Nintendo always manages to fuck them up royally.

(http://www.roflcat.com/images/cats/270909744_cd078aad8f.jpg)

Battle Revolution is kind of disappointing, on the whole, even within the limited expectations I had for it. The graphics aren't nearly as good as I would have thought--I mean, ok, I know they've got to have visuals for 500 of the little fuckers, but still, a lot of the Pokemon don't look terribly impressive in 3d and they *could*. Most of the animations for attacks are also uninspiring, which becomes all the more clear when you get one that's really fun, like Seismic Toss (the target of the attack gets thrown clear out into space). Considering that the entire *point* of Battle Revolution is basically just a graphics showcase for Diamond and Pearl, this is pretty lame. My daughter and I are having a certain amount of fun just seeing what various Pokemon look like on the screen--it does make head-to-head DS battles a bit more enjoyable--but it could have been way, way better.

Schlid, you know you played Pokeman Snap for n64. There's no two ways about it, it was one of the greatest titles for 64. Taking pictures of pokemans, what's not to love?

http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2007/07/25  :-D

Stop watching pokemon! (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7pZ25tYky9k&eurl=http%3A%2F%2Fcomedy%2Evideosift%2Ecom%2F%3Fdomains%3Dwww%2Evideosift%2Ecom%26search%3Dpokemon)