Gotta Catch 'em All

We all know the Wii U isn't doing so well at the moment. Something which is mainly down to Nintendo launching its latest hardware without an entry of any of their major franchises. There have already been a lot of column inches dedicated to that issue, so I'm not going to add to them. What the Wii U needs is a killer app. Something that couldn't be done on any other console. So why not give the fans what they want and start work on the much requested Pokémon MMO? It would be a guaranteed system seller, especially if a copy was bundled in at the point of sale.

The Wii U is uniquely suited as a platform to a console MMO, with the GamePad adding DS functionality to the living room, the touch screen makes not just juggling menus, but in game communication much simpler than it would be on the PS3 for instance. Nintendo are also blessed with ownership of the Pokémon franchise, one of the most successful names in the business, and a set of games whose single player mechanics would translate very easily into an MMO. Combining the two would effectively be a licence to print money. So without further ado, I present my own hypothetical Pokémon Universe design document.

At its most basic level, the Pokémon MMO should contain every one of the regions that have appeared across the series' history, and all 649 Pokémon that would appear in those regions. Some Pokémon would have specific habitats just like real world animals, to encourage worldwide travel to Catch 'em All.

Getting into the game starts with character creation. Pick your gender and assemble your avatar from a variety of options to create a character that looks like you would if you'd stepped through the screen into the Pokémon anime. Obviously there should be a wealth of basic options, with new outfits unlockable as you work through the game as a mark of progression.

Now, we can't all come from Pallet Town because it would cause horrible congestion in the early stages of the game. So while creating a character, one of the options that needs to be picked is that of your hometown. You could choose any town from any region, from Cinnabar Island to Cerulean City in Kanto for instance. Whatever takes your fancy. Once the game begins, you find yourself in your hometown with instructions to get to the nearest post office to collect your Pokédex, freshly delivered from Prof. Oak's Mail Order Pokédex Co.

With your Pokédex in your backpack, the next task would be to take your pick of one of three starters from the local Pokémon centre. Starters depend on the region of the world your hometown is in. Hoenn starters would be different from Johto starters for instance. Once you have your first Pokémon, and a stash of pokeballs helpfully given to you by Nurse Joy to help get you started, you can venture out into the wide world and begin your journey to become a Pokémon master.

Wild Pokémon levels would not be able to steadily climb upwards as you get further away from your hometown like they do in the portable games because of the fact that every town in Pokémon Universe can be somebody's hometown. As a result, out on the field there would be no random battles. Wild Pokémon levels would be widely variable to account for trainers of greatly different strengths being in the area, having travelled from all over the world. You can pick your battles as levels will be shown hovering above any wild Pokémon you see.

Of course, the real meat of any Pokémon game is battling other trainers, and again, this being an MMO, trainer strengths would not be able to steadily increase as the player progresses like they do in the core titles. To help level the playing field, every trainer is assigned to a division based upon the average level of the Pokémon in your squad by the Pokémon League. New trainers start in the lowest division and climb to a higher one each time they defeat a gym leader from the division that they are ranked in. Out in the field, you can offer to battle anybody, but the trainer in the lower division can chose to decline a battle if he or she wants. This should help avoid the new trainers being constantly demolished by old hands.

The aim of the game is still to beat each region's gym leaders and take on the regional elite four, with the goal of defeating each region's elite four to become a world Pokémon champion. Each gym will have a leader for each division, and players can join a monthly divisional tournament to reign as gym leader for a certain division. Since gym leaders only use one type of Pokémon, tournaments will also have a type restriction. Once you have been a gym leader for the lv50+ division, you can enter a monthly elite four tournament. The winner of that tournament is the elite four champion, with the four runners up assigned as the regional elite four. A tournament of elite four champions could be open to determine the champion of champions.

Elsewhere there should be plenty of side quests. You could go fossil hunting and try to resurrect yourself an Aerodactyl. You could choose to join Team Rocket. NPCs in towns would offer story based quests, often based around stories from the Pokémon anime. There would, of course, be trading, breeding, and versions of the many mini games that have appeared throughout the franchise history. There would be a stadium for those players who just wanted to battle or for those who just fancy spectating on a huge rumble. You could go hunting for legendary Pokémon. There would obviously be more than one of each, this being an MMO, but would still be super rare. Perhaps you need a special pokeball to be able to catch them, only available after defeating a regional elite four. A major sidequest would be photography, using the GamePad as a camera a la Pokémon snap, creating pictures that could be shared in a gallery or in the MiiVerse. You could even ride larger Pokémon as mounts, like a less conventional version of the famous Pokémon bicycle. The possibilities are wide and varied.

Obviously there are one or two hurdles that would need to be overcome. Voice chat and moderation would be the biggest of these, especially with Nintendo's obvious need to keep things safe for the kids. Although it's not insurmountable. Perhaps Nintendo could lock voice chat to people who have shared friend codes, with communication with others in the vein of Phantasy Star Online on the Dreamcast, through certain text phrases and a set of symbols.

A Pokémon MMO would work, and most importantly, would sell a boatload of Wii Us. We'd all like to see one, and perhaps, if we're lucky, we might even get one. Do it for the fans Nintendo. We'd play the hell out of it. Bring us the Pokémon MMO and wipe away the debt.

PS. Mr Iwata, if you see this and would like to use it. I'd like 1% commission on the profits please!

Blasphemy!

If saying you dislike Mario Kart 64 is some kind of gaming blasphemy then I'm going straight to hell. I won't pass go, and I won't collect £200, because it's something I say almost as soon as it's name is mentioned within my earshot, which happens surprisingly often. Mario Kart 64 is just one of those games I never gelled with. I never got used to the handling and I find its selection of tracks frustrating. Consequently, I'm so rarely any good at it that when I miraculously make it to the front of the race only to be blue shelled into last, it makes me think that the game is designed to punish you for being any good at it. It's not of course, and this is the point where the people who love Mario Kart 64, i.e, everyone in the world but me, start shouting that my criticisms are dumb, and that it's one of the best multiplayer racers ever made. Those people are right of course, and I agree with them. What makes my dislike of Mario Kart 64 so weird is that I'll quite happily play, and have fun with every other Mario Kart game ever made, particularly the Wii and GBA versions.

It's probably the most significant example I can find of my seemingly irrational ambivalence towards some titles that many gamers feel are sacred. It crops up so often that sometimes I start worrying that I might be going off the concept of fun. I'm not (hopefully), but it feels that way. There are others too. Concerningly, two of the other series I just cannot get on with feature also Mario in one way or another. Let's start with the Mario Party series, which for me is a collection of genuinely fun mini games that are utterly ruined by both the boardgame segment that needlessly drags the length of the game out, and possibly the worst way of deciding a game's winner ever devised. Of course, I'm referring to the detestable star system that means no matter how many of the damn things you've collected, you're almost guaranteed to be knocked off the top spot when the game arbitrarily awards stars on the results screen to other players for seemingly no other reason than that they've participated. Just thinking about it gets me riled up.

Mario's core platformers also do absolutely nothing for me. I've tried so hard to love him, I really have, but I just can't bring myself to care that I haven't beaten a single Super Mario game. Not one. Not even Super Mario Bros on the NES. In fact I haven't touched a Mario game since Sunshine, and it doesn't bother me in the slightest. I've decided to just stop trying now, even though I know I'm denying myself the opportunity to play Super Mario Galaxies 1 and 2, which are renowned as two of the best and most innovative platformers of recent times. Worst of all, unlike Mario Kart 64 and Mario Party, I'm completely at a loss for a way to explain why I don't 'get' Mario's platformers. The control is always tight, the level design is always clever, the worlds are full of personality and the game mechanics are almost always innovative in one way or another. These are all things that we all look for in a good game, and Mario games are never hailed as merely 'good' games. In fact, the only legitimate criticism I can level at his games is this; the story is a bit naff, and since when has story ever really mattered in a Super Mario game?

The cynics amongst you will dismiss this as just another round of Nintendo bashing, but the thing is, I think most of the stuff they put out is fantastic. I've played every Zelda game since A Link to the Past and I've loved them. I rate the Metroid Prime series as one of the best console FPSs ever made. I've racked up months of play in the three Smash Bros games. I played F-Zeroes X and GX until the cows came home. I caught all 251 Pokemon in Gold and Silver and battled them in Stadium 2 on the N64. While my town thrived in Animal Crossing, I've commanded Pikmin, adventured with Kirby, got hooked on WarioWare. And despite everything I said about Mario above, I've visited and liked Super Mario World 2, with it's cute crayon aesthetic and it's cuddly Yoshis.

So it's not just simple Nintendo Bashing. Besides, I have trouble with some of gaming's other sacred cows too.

Sacred cattle like Metal Gear Solid 4. The more I play it, the more it makes me rant about it. I'm trying so hard to persevere with it because I know about Shadow Moses and I want to wrap up the story I started in the first Metal Gear Solid all those years ago. I know what it is about Metal Gear 4 that turns me off it and I'm trying to work around it. I've loved every other Metal Gear I've ever played, and I'm used to pointlessly long cutscenes and campy plot nonsense. It's part of the fun after all, but I just can't get on with the fourth instalment's wonky pacing. It seems you can't take more than a dozen steps without getting a discourse on PMCs, proxy wars or how war has changed. Then there are the half hour movies between missions aboard the aeroplane. I just want to sneak past soldiers and take down giant robots Hideo-san, why won't you let me? I will finish Metal Gear 4 before this generation is out. I need to find out what happens to Old Snake. I might eventually enjoy it too, but I'm not getting the feeling that I'll find that an easy thing to do.

Then there is the whole Call of Duty/Battlefield/Halo thing. I love first person shooters. I've spent hours gushing about Bioshock, Half Life, Metro and Unreal Tournament but I just can't bring myself to play any of the triumvirate of shooters that dominate the current console landscape. I've played a bit of Halo 3, but not since Bungie took Rocket Race out of it's online mode. I played the first Call of Duty not long after I completed Medal of Honour: Allied Assault on the PC. Call it war game fatigue perhaps, but CoD did nothing for me, and I've ignored them ever since. I know the Modern Warfare series is a thrillride, but most of what I've seen of the single player modes seems to involve holding down the fire button while you strut down a corridor to the next explosive setpiece. Frankly it looks dumb, and it doesn't get any better in multiplayer. I saw ten seconds of the now infamous CoD Rage Montage on youtube and decided that I'd been avoiding these games for a good reason. I don't want to be associated in any way with that kind of gamer. I'm a peaceable kind of guy. This mainly results in me being looked at like I've got some kind of horrible facial disfigurement whenever it comes up in conversation.

Where Halo is concerned, I just find it really reductive, with it's recharging health and two guns only multiplayer. After spending my formative years with Unreal Tournament and Quake III the slower pace and slimmer weapon choice of Halo sucks all the fun away for me. Some of the best moments in UT came from surviving an encounter by the skin of your teeth, then scoring a double kill with a lucky shock combo while you were hanging desperately on to that last sliver of health. Recharging shields have put an end to that. Also, I liked being able to grab the rocket launcher and not have to worry about whether to drop the flak cannon or the shock rifle, because you could carry all the guns. Older multiplayer shooters made me feel like a hero, Halo doesn't. On the single player front, Halo frustrates me because Bungie has created some really, really rich lore for their sci-fi universe, as evidenced in the enjoyable (and much better than they have any right to be) Halo novels. But all that story seems to get pushed into the background when you play it. I can remember a whole lot about the story of Half Life 2, yet I honestly can't remember a single plot detail of Halo 3, such is the poor quality of Halo's storytelling.

All of this makes me sound like some kind of mop topped holier than thou indie gaming hipster, punching this out on my laptop from behind a set of thick rimmed lensless NHS glasses, and I'm really not. I mean, I like Fez as much as the next person, but there's nothing out there that scratches the itch like a really great triple A blockbuster. Indie might be where all the imagination is, but triple A boxed games are where the big thrills lie. I like to think there's room in my life for both. Maybe it's age, my tastes growing more fickle as I edge nearer to thirty. Perhaps there are others out there who have the weird gaming pet hates of their own but all I know is this. I seem to have an irrational disconnect with some of gaming's most respected names, and you can try as hard as you like to convince me to give them a chance, but you probably won't change my mind. If you can't understand why I have these problems with certain games that are supposed to be beyond criticism, don't worry about it, because I'm not so sure of the reasons either.

If I ever work it out, I'll be sure to let you know.