Pokemon, grown man, yes I know.
Pokemon hit the US twelve years ago and has undergone significant changes from the old Game Boy days. Gold and Silver were the first significant generation upgrades for the game by going full color (Pokemon Yellow was a hybrid GB/GBC game but had a fairly dismal color palette as a result), introducing a new batch of monsters, breeding your own, and most significantly adding a battery-powered clock/calendar into the game to have daily events that varied by the day of the week. As a result, Gold and Silver held a place of high esteem in the hearts of many pokemon players by taking a good formula and improving it in every way.
In some ways, Gold and Silver were better than Ruby and Sapphire for the GBA. The newer games lost the calendar and the game world was made godawful huge, with a degree of wandering around that was flatly annoying, and several of Ruby and Sapphire's new monsters were 'meh' at best.
Cue the DS, and Diamond and Pearl blew the hell out of everything that came before. Better sound, better graphics, internet multiplayer, a return of the day and night cycle; everywhere that generation 3 dropped the ball, generation 4 knocked it out the park.
And now it's remake time. The original GB games were remade in GBA as Fire Red and Leaf Green, and now the GBC games are remade on the DS. It's obvious that they're running low on name ideas at this point.
So what've we got? The new features of generation 4 added into the very solid foundation of Gold and Silver. The graphics, the sound, the internet connection, all stacked neatly upon the originals. It's pure gravy. A lot of thought has clearly gone into how to integrate newer game features into the old game without rocking the boat, while some annoying cock-blocks are gone. For instance, to be able to trade pokemon from other generations, the earlier generation 4 games required the player to beat the game first. You want to play with squirtle, kid? Well fuck you, you can't. Win the game, then you can have him back. That bit of dumbassery is thankfully gone in the newest releases, and a player can trade without restrictions in what kinds of pokemon they're getting from the other player.
The original Gold and Silver could connect to a little handheld Pikachu game that was basically a cross between a pedometer and a tamagotchi. You'd walk around and the pikachu would get happy, and you could beam the points from the handheld game to your Game Boy to exchange for stuff in the real game. The only catch was, you had to buy the handheld game separately, so I never once saw or heard of anyone getting it.
In Heart Gold and Soul Silver, a similar little pedometer accessory is included for free. It lacks the color screen of the earlier version, but as mentioned, free. Plus, instead of being stuck with a pikachu, the player sends any pokemon from his game into the pedometer, where it gains experience for every step. The new pokewalker also has two minigames for catching more pokemon and for finding items, both of which will be beamed into the game when you next sync the two together. You can also wirelessly sync two pokewalkers together to get free items for both players, as well as exchange player info in the actual games; you can encounter and fight the other player's team in your game after connecting to their pokewalker.
That's a little bit of genius on Nintendo's part. It's free, it rewards the player for being off their ass and moving around, and it lets people still be involved with the game even in places where having a DS isn't appropriate (kids at school, adults at work). A lot of people will probably throw theirs in a drawer and forget about it, but doing so is missing out on a very handy feature. I suspect you'll see a lot of these little toys floating around in playgrounds for the next year or two. I just hope that Nintendo doesn't drop support for them in future games; the accessory could have a lot of life to it if they continue to support it.
So that's largely that. The new features brought to the table for the remake add a lot of polish to an already very solid game. Gold and Silver also have the advantage of being fairly quick to 'complete', letting a player take down the eight gyms and become the national champion in short order. Once they're the hometown champ, they can go over to the game world of the original game and beat up the people there for more fun, but all of the limits in the game that hinge on winning gym badges are removed when you take down those first eight gyms, leaving the player free to wander the entire world without restrictions that are frankly a bit tedious after the fifth or sixth time you've played through.
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