Pinco, You Cheap Little...

This is just a quick update on my last post about Mr. Pineco and how the Japanese need to start working harder on new Pokemon.

If you're following along with the narrative of my PokeQuest, after I met that little guy in the woods I went about through the game still mad about his very existence, but eventually my curiosity got the better of me and I decided to go catch one just to see what the little bugger could do. So I hiked my butt back over to the woods (no bike yet, it was a slow walk) and I wandered in the grass for a while. I had to fight a couple hundred useless little worm things, conveniently names Wurmple--lame, until I eventually found another Pineco. Apparently although pine cones are fairly common, their eye-sporting poke-counterparts are not. Nevertheless I wore him down, paralysed his little cone head and caught the thing.

Know what powers Pineco has. Go ahead. Guess. I'll give you a minute.

You think about it a little? I'm willing to bet whatever you thought of isn't this lame. The pine cone Pokemon has this power line up.

1. Seed

2. Sap

Yup. That's it. The pine cone can only use seed and sap, two things that natural pine cones have in abundance. Real creative guys.

Seriously Guys?

Hello world! Sorry for that 4 week hiatus you just had to suffer through without a single word from the man with the baby foot. Life gets pretty busy every now and then, ideas run dry and an odd galactic occurrence happens--I have nothing to talk about. This will happen folks, a brilliant new thought every day is a hard standard to keep up, but that long break was just to much for all of us. So here I am, back again, chock full of deep introspective thoughts about the world around us.

In a week from tomorrow, I will be embarking on an epic journey. Yes my friends, I, Doug Dame, am going to Disney World. To be perfectly honest with you, I'm pumped. I haven't been since 5th grade and I can already feel the magic. But every rose does indeed have its thorn. You see, Disney is not just a leisurely stroll away from here in Fitchburg. Its on the opposite end of the east coast. And so I used my brilliant deductive prowess to arrive at the conclusion that it would be a long ride getting down there. And so I headed out to the local GameStop to pick something up for myself to ease the breadth of this long trek southward.

After only a few hours with my new Pokemon game I was hooked. No matter how old the craze gets, and no matter how obsessed the elementary school crowd may or may not be, the Pokemon franchise makes some quality games. Something about watching cute little animal things beat the living daylights out of each other just pulls on some natural guttural part of every living soul, drawing you into the game. One more battle, you say, just one more, not fully realizing the sweet nirvana contained in this tiny virtual world. The music is damn catchy too. But after a little while longer with the game, I started to think less about the game itself and more about the actual Pokemon. I had started to see the lack of creativity in the new species, but I was putting it all behind me until one fateful moment.

Walking in some tall grass in the woods, I encountered Pineco. Any guess what Pineco is? Yup, its a pine cone. Not even a pine cone with a face, mind you, the thing barely has a pair of eyes peeking out from between the seeds. This isn't like Taurus the bull, at least that was clever, even if the Pokemon was really just a three tailed bronco. This is a pine cone, names Pineco. They didn't even add letters! The took them away! I paid 30 dollars for a simplified pine cone on a pedestal!

Soon it all became abundantly clear. Luvdisk the heart-shaped disk fish, Girafarig, the giraffe with a ball tail, Skitty the kitty, all of these Pokemon were just basic things in the world, give or take a few letters! Know what Seviper is? A snake. How about Slugma? You guessed it! A slug!

I'm aware that when we were kids, Pokemon were still stupid puns made on things in the real world, but I felt like

there was more effort applied back then. I mean maybe Geodude was just a rock man, but at least there was a

real pun there, he wasn't just called Stonewitharms. And so what if Likitung was just a monster with a long tongue, at least it was creative.

Don't get me wrong, I'm loving my game, but I'm just worried that with the way things are going, our children might very well be playing Pokemon Off-White with creatures like Desko and SeeChair. I just don't want to see the happen. Let's fight for the children.

Japanese on Acid?

As a disclaimer, let me first say that I have absolutely nothing against the Japanese people that invented Mario. Quite the contrary, I love Mario, as my Power-Up tattoo should prove. That being said...

How much acid were they taking when they created the original Mario game? I'm not talking Super Mario, or even the one with the pipes and the crabs and the turtles and whatnot. I'm talking about the first time we ever saw Mario, the old arcade game with Donkey Kong up on the rafters of that building. I mean nothing in any video game needs to be realistic, and maybe I have a hard time looking at a fictional piece of game design creatively and not literally, but seriously. Take a second to analyze that game.

1) You are a plumber. Plumbers on the job tend to get pretty dirty, but somehow your shirt is impeccably clean. So either Mario goes to the dry cleaners after every single job or the game designers have a very skewed vision about the cleanliness of plumbery.

2) You are chasing after a princess. Look, I totally agree that love can conquer all and that everyone has a soul mate. But something in me highly doubts the possibility of the princess of an entire kingdom falling madly, head over heels in love with a small, Italian plumber that can barely say his own name clearly. Maybe in some kind of tripped out plumber dream, but never in the real world.

3) The princess has been kidnapped by a giant monkey and it's your job to save her. I'm willing to ignore that there's a such thing as a giant monkey. That aside, what the hell kind of king gets the news that his daughter has been kidnapped and immediately thinks, "Oh, I know, I'll call the local plumber! Maybe in his spare time he can fix the leak in the upstairs bathroom!"I have too much faith in the parliamental system to see that being a logical train of thought for someone in charge of an entire kingdom.

4) The giant monkey has set his hideout as a building clearly in the middle of construction. Kidnapping a princess is not an easy task; it requires a certain degree of smarts. So I would argue that there is no way a relatively intelligent giant monkey would choose that pile of rafters as his hideout. Anything works better than that; an island offers security, underground you have privacy, and even a finished building seems safer than a haphazard stack of beams. Sorry Mr. Yamuchi, not buying it.

5) The monkeys best defense against your advances is to throw barrels you. And not even logical barrels. Dear Japan, rolling objects to not just stop tumbling to fall down a staircase, or even move backwards up a slope. That's just not how things work here in the states. And not only that, but what is an infinite stack of barrels doing at the top of that scaffolding? And why on earth do some of the barrels break to produce little walking flame men! I'm not asking for a lot here people, just a little bit of rational thought in my arcade games.

And last, but not least...
6) When you reach the giant killer ape, he gives up. Yup. That's it. No extra barrels to throw, no monkey punches, no temper tantrum. "Oh hey Mario, sorry about all that barrel stuff back there, just lost my mind for a second. Want the princess? Take her! Go to town! Why don't we do lunch sometime?" Sorry world but that is not how I like my giant monkeys to act. That ape is at least 10 times Mario's size! And he just throws in the towel like a giant, ape-like baby. What kind of message does that send to America's younger generation? Don't worry kids, if at first you don't succeed, just give up everything you've ever worked for. Nice.