Get Real, Pokémon

I need to stop bothering you fucking people with such petty bullshit


Imagine if that’s what Professor Oak said during
the tutorial for the next Pokémon game

Reality is testing me something fierce today, I’ll tell you that much. Just that feeling of moving from one minute to another filled with nothing but the energy of rolled eyes and stubbed toes. My “cold open” today (see above) has a slightly more direct reference point of sorts, as there was a massive Pokémon leak that went down over the weekend, a moment in time I’m sure Nintendo’s lawyers were likely truly delighted to see in terms of job security and a steady paycheck.


Anytime Nintendo’s lawyers get wind of a new
Pokémon fan made website hosting unofficial mods

Among some of the juicier details involved with the data leak, was the code name for the Switch’s successor, which was confirmed by the leak to be “Ounce”, the next major Pokémon release is entitled Pokémon Legends: A-Z, which is due out by next year, and also apparently the source code for HeartGold and SoulSilver, which is likely to be a major boon for the modding community, in whatever hidden underground bunkers they’re all still cooking up romhacked versions of Pokémon games while successfully trying to hide from Nintendo’s lawyers at the same time.


The average dwelling for Pokémon Rom hack makers

There’s a lot of other details involved with the initial leak itself, and this is one of those happenings which will likely to continue to bear fruit, as gamers and modders the internet over will scour through the nitty gritty in search of even more yet to be discovered truths previously buried among the data debris. One of the more interesting tidbits I’m still waiting on hearing about is whether or not Gen 10 of the Pokémon series, internally nicknamed “Gaia”, will even be any fun to play or not.

(Pikachu liked that)

Not to be such a Pashy-Pissy Pants about the series, but it’s been riding on the fumes of nostalgia for awhile now, and the series is about due for some kind of serious overhaul. The reappropriation of the design approach in utilizing the Breath of the Wild style gameplay in Scarlet and Violet just didn’t cut it, and even after numerous updates, the games still felt like fucking betas, with very little in the way of compelling gameplay to deliver in any meaningful way.


Is this a pic of a poorly implemented Pokémon game?

A lot of people have been going on for-fucking-ever about the series finally getting the MMO treatment, and I can’t emphasize enough what a shitty effort that would end up being. Would it generate money and hype? Yeah, but something more akin to Pokémon Go was and is still a much safer bet to how something like that kind of adaptation can work, and I really don’t think we should go any further down the road of mass player exchange in trying to move the needle on that particular reinvention process. I know this flies in the face of recent thoughts I had in both regards to remakes and games in general, but I think it’s about time Game Freak go back to the old drawing board to inject some much needed life in the Pokémon franchise, lest they remain in a creatively bankrupt state of mind.


Let’s pretend “just add guns” isn’t an option

I think the series is just in dire need of a bit more complexity, as they keep building the whole thing outwards instead of building inwards. The series has subsisted too long on shallow simplicity, and the people that grew up with the series have indeed grown up themselves, and are ready for something meatier to bite down on. Especially when you consider why Gen 1 is always so heavily focused upon, in that it had cultural relevancy in being ripe for the nostalgia wave, with newer iterations being less favorable for not bringing anything interesting enough to the table. When you combine that with the notion that even “retro” gens of the Pokémon series, like gen III for example, were already dramatically less popular when they even initially launched, and you realize they’re going to run out of nostalgic track to run that train on sooner than later.


A sneak peak of what the remakes to Pokémon Black and White’s
launches would look like

Truth be told, I don’t claim to have my finger on the pulse of the Pokémon fandom, so all of this might be horrendously off base conjecture that may completely contradict an average fans outlook and public desire, which makes me the old man shouting at clouds right now in terms of where Pokémon as a series should be headed, but last time I checked, the geriatric millennial is pretty much the series bread and butter if we are speaking to the reality of relevant demographics, so I don’t feel like I’m chugging stupid juice right now in critiquing Pokémon as a whole. With all of that said, I think Pokémon is in need of a much needed self-identity overhaul, pronto. Make the games more real without being more realistic. We need some kind of depth involved, or the Pokémon series is destined to drown in the shallow end creatively speaking. A sad fate for such a beloved franchise.

~Pashford

Spilled Tea: Switch 2, Warhammer, and AI…

…Oh my!

The Principle of Credulity is a philosophical axiom by Thomas Reid that suggest we have “a disposition to confide in the veracity of others, and believe what they tell us”.


Everyday on the internet leads me to believe this is very true

Today is all about about gossip and rumor here on ATE , as there seems to be quite an awful lot of it swirling around gaming news sources as of late, so what the hell? Let’s spill some tea. Before we begin, I just wanted to mention that throughout my day, I always have a hundred little conversations with myself that I think “hey, this would make an interesting aside for one of my ATE articles”. I think that share is possibly one of the first times I actually remembered to retain said kind of conversation, and we are all technically worse off for it. Not because the share was inane or valueless, mind you, but as a reminder of all the times I was unable to remember the rest of them. I really got to start carrying around a tape recorder ala Coop from Twin Peaks to record my thoughts, as every time you read a write up, it is only one of a very large number of permutations we both could have delighted in, had things just turned out differently.


Strange how it all works out

With multiversal shenanigans now in play as a relevant topic of interest, we shift our focus to a peculiar happening that timeextension brought to revelatory light, with a delightful little article going in-depth about how some Capcom staff were initially resistant to the whole idea of crossover fighters involving the Street Fighter crew from very early on. Apparently, due to the lack of sales of X-Men: Children of the Atom and Marvel Super Heroes in Japan, many at Capcom were silently hoping X-Men vs Street Fighter would die a quiet, quick death. This gave the team a lot of wiggle room to over deliver when the time came, and the break out success of the title would go on to eventually spawn the Marvel vs Capcom series, which has stood the test of popular time, as evidenced by the recent release of Marvel vs Capcom: Fighting Collection: Arcade Classics release.


As I always say: set lower expectations and then over deliver

Continuing on with the theme of what is old is new again, it looks as if Nintendo’s lawyer have finally caught wind of Palworld, an open-world multiplayer survival game, which has designs reminiscent of the big N’s own critically acclaimed Pokémon series, and are ready to mount a legal battle over copyright infringement claims. I’m surprised Nintendo’s legal ninjas took so much time getting around to this one, as this sucker has been making lots of noise since earlier this year, and is even an official release on multiple platforms, and not even a fan made dealie. Ultimately, time will tell if Nintendo wins out with the legal disputes involving the developers of the game Pocketpair, but Nintendo has historically been quite grumpy about this kind of thing for a long time now, and regularly geared towards legal actions in the course of their own history. They even took Blockbuster to task for copyright infringement over their manuals for Christ’s sake. I might love their games, but the Pokémon company has had a stick up their ass over petty frivolities for awhile now, so I hope this just blows up in their face.


How Chinpokomon flew under the radar all these years I
will never know

Staying on the topic of Nintendo, potential images of the follow up to the Switch have “leaked”, according to a number of rampant shares on the internet, which I surmised were all pulled from the same dodgy ass source on the internet that no one bothered to check the legitimacy of….or at least I thought as much, and then I read a piece from Eurogamer commenting on the whole affair. The article mentions how the models do seem to correspond with data that has leaked in the past about Nintendo’s next console, but they did come from a 3D modeler’s post on a Chinese social media website, who as since deleted the posts. Like most leaks: dubious at best, and what took someone possibly two hours to make is now going to be discussed for two weeks with endless pissing competitions involving the veracity of the claims themselves. No news from Nintendo on the matter (big surprise).


Everyone knows the Switch 2 is just going to be 16 Gamecubes
duct-taped together, what are we even speculating for?

In another moment of interesting hearsay, IGN reported about a bizarre happening involving recently released shooter 40,000: Space Marine 2, in a story that allegedly has the CEO of Saber, Matthew Karch, commenting on a Youtube video by user Asmongold about the quality of the title. The gist of the posit which was *allegedly* Karch, has the CEO going on about other devs “imposing morals on gamers”, reinforcing games should be about the design itself and not beating the brow of gamers with some kind of overt messaging muddying the waters. Putting aside for a second just how broad of a declaration that is to even confront, the comment hasn’t even been officially verified as the actual CEO, and a comment which could potentially be some kind of windup from a rando impersonating him, trying to create a fuss in the comments section on a Youtube video in a silly attempt at fanning the flames in the name of some obtuse culture war nonsense. I guess, regardless of whether or not it is actually the CEO of the company hanging out in a Youtube comment section (why would he?) giving praise to their own game (why wouldn’t they?), a good game is a good game regardless of messaging. Don’t worry about what other people are playing, do what you want.


To quote a modern day prophet

And finally, to wrap our daily tea spilling as we are nearing an empty pot, EA decided to remind people why they were voted worst company in the US two years in a row, by deciding to make generative AI as their main talking point in a recent investors day presentation, much to the surprise of no one who is use to EA’s bullshit. They went on to assure onlookers that AI is not a buzzword, and is a core element at the heart of their game development strategy. Read the room guys: with so many negative news stories coming out weekly about foot in mouth comments involving AI, to other very real impacts the practice of using AI has had on workers within the industry, you’d think EA would avoid saying the quiet part out-loud and just keep the fuck quiet about their internal machinations, just to save some face in the name of good PR alone.


A picture of EA’s new PR manager

Cheers for joining me in spilling some tea. Until our next party, then…

~Pashford