Pokémon Stadium (1999)

 

As a 90's kid, Pokémon was a major part of my childhood, so naturally I spent hours playing this N64 game growing up. Replaying it in my 30's, the game is still quite fun, though its flaws are also quite evident. 

This game skips the storyline and RPG elements of the mainline Pokémon games. Instead, here you can delve yourself directly into the battles by choosing six Pokémon from the 151 of this time and battle against various trainers and gym leaders. There are multiple options of how you can play this game. You can do quick one on one battles, you can compete in tournaments, you can battle your way through gym leaders, you can plug in one of your game boy games and play that game on the big TV screen or you can play a series of minigames.  

The lack of the story and RPG elements are both this game's greatest strength and its biggest flaw. It makes for a fun quick way to play some Pokémon, if you don't want to dedicate the time that you would need to for one of the mainline games. Though you are no longer raising or capturing Pokémon, there is still quite a bit of strategy to navigating the battles. These are trying to choose a variety of Pokémon in your line-up of six that will be able to stand against the widest variety of Pokémon and knowing what the right moves will be to use at what times. This strategy makes the battles fast paced and a lot of fun. However, at the same time the lack of raising and capturing Pokémon as well as any real storyline can make this game feel repetitive after a while. As such this game is a lot of fun, if you play it in short enough spurts. 

The minigames are similar to the main games in this way. These minigames are very simple and many of them are quite similar to one another. Yet each of these minigames is fun in their own right and as a kid, I played these minigames just as much as I had the battles, possibly even more. Again though, today these minigames are a lot of fun in short enough spurts but get too repetitive if you play them for too long of a period of time. 

This is a game that I love playing every once in a while, but if I play it too much I can easily get bored by the repetitiveness. 

-Michael J. Ruhland