Level Up: Pokemon Stadium

http://julieguy.net/levelup/PokemonStadium.mp3

When I was growing up, there was probably no bigger fad then Pokémon. It was a hit TV show, a great game and had tons of other merchandise. Everyone I knew had to have one of the first games, either Pokémon Blue or Red. So, when we learned there was going to be a Pokémon game in 3D, we lost it. Enter Pokémon Stadium.

Seeing all the Pokémon of the time in 3D was the big reason to get it. Personally, having watched the show before playing the game, there were certain Pokémon, like Koffing or Ghastly, that just made me go “what have they done to you?” or “no, that’s wrong” when I saw their first pixalized forms. When I saw them in Pokémon stadium I went “Yes! That’s right! That’s what a Pokémon should look like!”... Except for Pidgey, it took until the Game Boy Advanced games for him to look right...

Pokémon stadium was pretty basic; it just gave fans the ability to fight with their favourite Pokémon, but in 3D! It might not seem like much, but to 10 year old kids riding the current fad, this was awesome. There were many areas of the game to play in, such as the different cups and the Gym Leader castle, where you had to beat a bunch of trainers, and the Battle Now feature, where you were thrown into a fight with a pre-chosen team. There was also the Free Battle, a personal favourite of mine where you could just fight for fun and chose which rules you wanted t go by.

Another feature that made this a must have for anyone who had the Blue, Red or Yellow Pokémon games was this games use of the Transfer Pack Accessory (you even got one with each copy of this game). This was a device you could insert a Game Boy cartridge into and then plug it into you Nintendo 64 controller. With this game, you could put your Pokémon Blue, Red or Yellow game into the Transfer Pack, start playing Pokémon Stadium and use your Pokémon for some of the fights (if they meet the requirements). Otherwise, you had to “rent” Pokémon, which meant they weren’t always fitted with the moves you wanted. You could also visit the GB Tower and play the game in your Transfer Pack on your TV screen (which saved on having to buy countless batteries for your Game Boy). Also, you could visit Prof. Oak’s lab to view the stats of your Pokémon, keep some on your N64 instead of the Game Boy or trade them around with other games. These are only some of the many ways that Pokémon Stadium took advantage of this neat accessory.

But wait, what if, god forbid, you ever got tired of battling? Pokémon Stadium though of a solution for that: The Kids Club. This area of the game was a collection of 9 Pokémon themed mini games. Each one was fun and made use of different Pokémon: there were games where players had to make their Magikarps hop, race their Rattatas and throw hooped Ekans around Diglettes. These games were not only fun, but I can clearly recall some days where me and my friends popped in Stadium just to play these games for hours. As a matter of fact, I found that the music from one of these games, Thundering Dynamo, best suited the mood of this review. Listen… aren’t I right? It’s one of the first games I’ve played to feature optional mini-games completely separate from the main game, and one of the best.

Pokémon Stadium might not have seemed like much at first glance, but once you scratched its surface, you could spend a long time figuring everything out. There were many modes to play in and lots of stuff to unlock. It made excellent use of an otherwise little known accessory and made it so every Pokémon fan needed this and at least one of the Game Boy games. Upon thinking about it, Stadium seemed a little hollow with out owning Pokémon Blue, Red or Yellow, and there were a lot of reasons to get Pokémon Stadium if you already owned those games. It’s kind of like if you could buy shoes separately: they would still be comfortable on one foot, but to get the full feeling, you need both. None the less, this was a great contribution to a rising game series.