Fire Starting - Black & White

We are at the final stop in this mini-series as we hit the release of Pokémon Black and White, March, 2011. My Pokémon pupil had graduated to Pokémon rival. She had leveled up from girlfriend to wife. We had also both evolved into parents. Together, we were packing up our life in Hawaii and moving across the ocean, across the country to settle (indefinitely) in Maryland where we are today. This turned into the closest thing to a true Pokémon adventure I've had in my life. We bought a minivan in order to drive across this beautiful country. Our adventure began in Oregon and would end in Maryland, taking us along the southern edge of the country instead of a more direct route. The Pokémon by our side were our daughter (2 yrs old), our son (1 yrs old) and our cat (6 yrs old).

It probably sounds insane, but it was extremely awesome. We bought a cheap set of TVs to play children's shows which we used roughly half the time. The kids slept the other half of the time. There was never much fussing, and only a few bouts of car-sickness on the first day of our trip. My son was the only one with known limitations. After seven hours of driving, he called it quits and cried, so our journey moved forward seven hours at a time. Each night we'd stop and rest at a hotel, or at the home of our friends and family we got to visit along the way. We also managed to stop at a playground for an hour each day which allowed the kids to blow off some energy and tire themselves out for the journey ahead. At night we would snuggle in our hotel beds and let the kids watch TV until they fell asleep, while my wife and I curled up with our Pokémon games. We were also alternating use of the PSP, a game called Jeanne d'Arc that we both highly recommend.

We made several visits along the way. We got to visit family in California and New Mexico. We made stops to visit old friends in Las Vegas, Tennessee and North Carolina. We spent a day and a night at the Grand Canyon - one of the most amazing and beautiful things I have ever seen. We drove across the Hoover Dam. All in all, this trip was more amazing than we could have ever hoped or dreamed. The only thing that could have been better was if our little Pokémon were old enough to remember it.

The fateful and unfortunate night we spent in Texas was the low point of the trip. My cat, Tama, long ago dubbed my personal Pikachu due to his penchant to cling to my side, slipped out of the hotel room and was never seen again. I had him since he was six-weeks old and he was my best bud during most of my lonely, depressed years. He didn't really like anyone other than me and my children. He was pretty unpleasant toward everyone else and he was something of a brawler. I took too long getting him fixed, so once he got his juices flowing he was out every night thinning out the competition for food and affection from the cat-ladies of Hawaii. He would come home with many cuts and scars from all his dedicated EV training around the neighborhood. He was a tough and mean old boy, but he had a true soft side for me and the babies.

This Fire Starter starts out so cute, but ends up so unfortunate.

I spent the whole night looking for him all over the hotel grounds and the surrounding area. Tama was often known to disappear for days or weeks at a time on his many adventures as King of the Strays. Because of that I felt the likelihood of him turning up when he didn't want to be found was incredibly small. It was with a heavy heart that I made the decision around 8-9am to check out of the hotel and move on. During our searches for him we discovered a huge population of cats and kittens in the area - I mean insanely large. So obviously cats were thriving around there. I knew it wouldn't take Tama long to assert himself and dominate the local scene. I do miss him quite a bit, though. Every time talk of getting another cat comes up, I feel quite sad.

Meet N.
This guy is oddly hard to forget.

In a similar way to Pokémon Ruby, my experiences with Pokémon Black were dwarfed by these events around it. I believe it's a good game, but I don't really remember too much about it. I couldn't tell you any of the Gym Leaders. I don't recall any of the Elite Four. I have no memory of any real rival, but I do remember the enigmatic N character. I also remember some pretty impressive fights against the Legendary Pokémon that were on the covers of the games' boxes - I still can't remember their names very well without looking them up (Zekrom & Reshiram). It's possible that it is a better game than Diamond, but without any concrete memories (and only playing it a quarter of the time I played Diamond) it's hard for me to accurately judge it.

I do recall they added the Entralink, which is Pokémon meets social networking - only a severely limited social network. The basic idea is that you transfer a Pokémon from your game up to the internet, where you are given a space online to decorate and explore. You grow your berries, collect items and meet new Pokémon friends that you can take back to the game. You can also visit other people's spaces and water their berries and things like that, but whether or not you can access your friend's spaces all seemed very unclear and limiting. I don't know the ins and outs of the system because once we were packed up and moving to Maryland, we weren't connecting our games to the internet at all. The service also didn't start right away at the launch of Black & White, so the time we got to spend on there was quite brief. It is an interesting idea and a great new way to connect with other Pokémon players around the world, if only it weren't quite so limiting.

This is how adorable the Entralink is in theory.

All this writing about Pokémon this week has gotten me rather excited about Pokémon X & Y. I'm excited enough that I'm not sure I can wait until October and I may pick up one of the several titles around the house and go another round. Pokémon is one of those great games to carry around with you in your DS, and it is one of the (few) reasons it's nice Game Freak has stayed dedicated to handheld systems for its delivery. It's simply the type of game you can play anywhere for a few minutes at a time, on the subway, or while waiting for class to start. It's so easy to just flip on, play for 15 minutes or so, and flip off.

I hope you have enjoyed this trip down memory lane through the 5 generations of Pokémon. I'm sorry that I haven't had the time to discuss in any detail the special editions of each generation: Yellow, Crystal, Emerald, Fire & Leaf, Platinum, Heart & Soul, Black 2 & White 2. Perhaps the "Fire Starting" series will pick up with these titles sometime in the future. I'm pleased with how much of my life I've covered in these articles, though. Each jump through the timeline has stirred up a lot of interesting memories that I have associated to playing Pokémon. We covered some dark times, and some extremely happy times. Most of these memories I haven't visited for a very long time and it was a pleasure to do so. Let me know how you felt about "Fire Starting" or about Pokémon Black & White in the comments below.

An actual photograph taken of my wife & I on the Battle Subway!

My "Week in Review" column will post tomorrow since I've had such a full week blogging. Next week TOP Gaming will go back to weekly articles. Expect something up on Tuesday!

-TOP
@TOPGamingBlog

A Backwards Problem

 I had a real shaky start with the Sony Playstation Portable(PSP). I bought it during its launch year in 2005 and a handful of games to go with it. I played it for roughly a week or two and then it went unnoticed for several years. It sat with my games collecting dust, waiting for a day when a game I was truly excited about was released for it. It got passed over many times for the Nintendo DS with its fun, innovative games and long battery life for many airplane trips across the Pacific Ocean. It was a sad little system that just didn’t connect with me the way it could have back in those early days. Many of my friends enjoyed it and spoke highly of it, but for some reason my PSP and I just never had much to say to one another. Then starting in 2008 things slowly began to change.

Zack! Look out behind you!

 I believe it was the upcoming release of Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII exclusively for PSP that got me scouring the house for my game system. I had moved twice since the last time I’d played it. I had to dig it up from its early grave, and what may have been most challenging was finding its power cord so it would be charged and ready to play when I bought this new addition to the “Final Fantasy” family. I could reserve an entire Tuesday article for a special rant for all the reasons I dislike the Crisis Core plot as an addition to the “Compilationof Final Fantasy VII,” but despite picking the story apart it was a really fun game and I got a lot of good times out of it. Most importantly, it reconnected me with my dusty, lonely PSP system and was the herald for a bunch of games I would go on to enjoy on the PSP from 2008 to 2011.

Suddenly games I actually wanted to play were coming out on the PSP and it was back in my good graces. It was Square Enix’s new system of choice to re-port old classics. Nippon Ichi Software (NIS) started developing more games for it, and re-porting some of my favorite games to it, including Disgaea and Disgaea 2. The list goes on, and I could bore you with detail, but suffice it to say someone told Sony I like Japanese-style role-playing games and Sony started releasing them in the United States. PSP got my attention after years of lying dormant in a box in the garage.

 Unfortunately, this all came crashing to a halt in August of 2011. My wife and I had recently purchased a 2^nd PSP so she could enjoy playing Valkyria Chronicles 2 with me. We had really enjoyed ValkyriaChronicles together on the PS3, but it did not have any form of multiplayer content, until the sequel. So here we are in August 2011 enjoying not one, but two PSP in what I consider their golden years, when they both spontaneously within a month of one another just stop working. The new PSP will not recharge its battery and I’m not in a position to buy a new battery because if it’s not the problem, I have 2 batteries and a broken PSP. Then the original PSP just stopped turning on. It was a sad day. We both had to let go of a game we were deeply involved in playing, Jeanne d’Arc.

Now I knew that early 2012 was bringing the Playstation Vita to the handheld scene. It was to be the successor to the PSP and a question remained, was it going to be backward compatible? Was it going to be able to play PSP games? The answer to that question is complicated. The PSP games I want it to play are on a format called UMD (Universal Media Disc) which at the time of PSP’s launch seemed like the most ridiculous format possible. Apparently Sony, or more specifically the Vita, agrees with me. The Vita does not have a UMD loading dock. It does however play digital copies of the PSP games, if you bought them and downloaded them from the Playstation Network (PSN). This was not the answer I was looking for so I waited and looked for more.

You see, it stands to reason that if I own a copy of a game that I purchased, I should also own the digital copy of it contained within the UMD. So really, all I would need or want is a way to access the digital copy to load it on to a Vita. Then PSP can be left broken and forgotten on the side of the road to make way for new and improved gaming system that will cater to all my needs. Sony offered the Japanese customers the option to transfer many of their UMD games to digital format for a price. That honestly feels like giving me a discount on re-buying something I already own, since it was a different price for each game rather than a flat-rate service charge. However, that’s better than nothing. Here in the US there is nothing.

History is vague on the details of this battle.

This led me briefly to a night of trying to find a way to convert my own UMD to digital format, or simply (dare I post it on the internet) acquire pirate versions of the digital copies. Mind you, I’m only talking about the games I own, and in particular I’m talking about Jeanne d’Arc which I really wanted to finish! However, I abandoned this course pretty soon after getting the idea. I decided I’d probably punish Sony in another way, which is to not buy the PS Vita. I typically don’t buy a system until it has a game I really want to own, so there wasn’t any real pressing urge to buy a Vita when it launched in February. I just would have preferred to upgrade than spend money fixing or buying a replacement PSP. Sony will lose out on about $250 this year in Vita sales and who knows how much in games. I don’t really think that drop in the bucket is a threat to them and I’m not really outraged by this inconvenience. It’s just a shame and a waste.

I feel backward compatibility should be an industry standard. Whenever possible, you should present the opportunity for your customers to continue playing their old games on your new systems. Preferably, you don’t charge them extra, but if that’s what it takes to provide the service, then at least you can say you offer it. I’ve personally never been in this situation, but the lack of this option has cost them a potential customer. I’m sure someday down the road I may be a proud owner of a PS Vita, but it won’t be in 2012. There are just too many good PSP games lying around the house, taunting me, begging me to play them. I can’t toss them aside, and I can’t ignore them. Besides, if PSP is any indication, who knows how long the PS Vita would sit in a box in my shed before they start to make games for it that I’m truly interested in buying?

-TOP

Related Links
 Sony explains why no Vita UMD transfer for US
http://www.shacknews.com/article/72563/sony-explains-why-no-vita-umd-transfers-for-us