Pokemon Black/White

Rating: E

Score: 10/10

The Pokemon series is back for another generation to enjoy. New monsters, new adventures, new connectivity, everything. HeartGold and SoulSilver came out just last year, do these games have enough in them to capture gamers from one generation to another? This game is a Nintendo DS exclusive title.

You're a young boy, off on your first adventures with your pocket monsters known as Pokemon! On your journey, you meet a group called "Team Plasma", who are out to free Pokemon from trainers, believing that Pokemon deserve freedom. That's all well and good, but when they steal Pokemon and property to prove their point, they must be stopped. Along with you, your neighbours join in your adventures, all inevitably to prove themselves by becoming Champion!

So the story's standard stuff minus Team Plasma, and so is most of the gameplay. It's a simple turn-based RPG at heart. You level your Pokemon as you want, and fight them against other Pokemon turn by turn. However, along with the addition of Double Battles two generations past, we have Triple Battles. Simple as it sounds, three Pokemon out at once. Mayhem and chaos ensues.

People may be unfamiliar with the craze that is Pokemon. You're given your first monster, called a Pokemon, and it's put in a PokeBall to travel around in your pocket. You use this Pokemon to fight off hostile wildlife consisting of other types of Pokemon, and catching them and traveling with those types as well if you wish. Your Pokemon can level up and evolve into stronger, better Pokemon after enough training.

What's the difference between the two games? A few exclusive Pokemon are available on one and not the other. This means that if you want all the Pokemon, or a version exclusive is not in your version, you need to make use of the connectivity. The Pokemon series do this with every instalment.

That is because the core of Pokemon rest in its connectivity providing trading, battling, online play, all the bells and whistles. Unlike before where you did local battling via different post upstairs of a PokeCenter (a hospital for Pokemon), now, you can use infrared for instant friend code trading (Nintendo's main way to stop pedophiles from adding your son/daughter as a friend. You must have someone's friend code and they must have yours to connect through WiFi), instant battling or trading, and different small minigames for items in your quest. You can even transfer yourself into your friend's file!

Different wireless connectivity methods have been simplified, and we have random WiFi battle additions (a feature oddly missing in the last games). Speaking of new features, battling is a bit more lively. Sprites of Pokemon now move about on the battlefield, giving a bit more life to the battling. All of the Pokemon also got a facelift to accommodate this feature, so say hello to a batch of the new, superior, sharper Pokemon.

Speaking of new Pokemon, because we're at a new generation, say hello to over 150 new Pokemon! Some of these Pokemon look silly, as was the way for all the generations of Pokemon, but a lot are really neat/cool/awesome/unique/whatever in their own way. In fact, with the exception of Generation 1 (the first games), these games probably introduce the highest number of great looking and neat Pokemon. Then again, these games do offer the biggest increase of Pokemon population, beating even the first generation's 151.

With all the new additions, it's hard to go wrong. It didn't take the core formula, but it did improve on it, in a "if it ain't broke..." sort of deal. Although it's as tedious as ever, gamers everywhere will want to "catch 'em all!"