It’s summertime! Another EXP Share month has ended. While on the short side, I’m happy that everyone seems to be enjoying these random discussion post. Here are the post from last month’s theme:
Your Wit’s Got To Be Twice As Sharp As Your Sword by Later Levels – There are a handful of lines that I can remember vaguely from games. Kim has a whole script memorized to the point she could perform a one-actor stage performance. It also helps that it comes from one of her favorite games of all time.
Gaming Strengths and Weaknesses…. (EXP Share) by Board Musings – One of the greatest strengths that you can have is understanding some of your weaknesses. Melanie shares not only their biggest strength, but also one of their favorite games that has an adorable penguin on the cover.
Name That Tune! – EXP Share #7 – I like music. One of these days, I hope to recognize more than just Final Fantasy music and become a true patron to video game music.
Those were the post for May’s EXP Share Posts! If there were any that I missed, please let me know. Now to this month’s topic:
The post that I wrote for the last EXP Share made me a little heated. You shouldn’t take that anger out on anyone or anything. Instead, you should use that energy to do better things and push you to great things. I’m not the only one who uses some of my pent up anger to give me the extra boost to tackle difficult things. With that in mind, this month’s EXP Share will be able overcoming obstacles that at one point seemed daunting.
Share A Story About A Difficult Obstacle In A Game That You Were Able Overcome.
What classifies as difficult is subjective to the person performing the task. I find playing survival horror games difficult to play due to my heighten anxiety, but others can play them normally with no problem. Sometimes, just finishing something you set out to do can be the most difficult part to do. Whatever felt difficult for you, let us know for this month’s EXP Share post!
Hello everyone. I hope this past month was full of learning new things and increasing your intelligence stat. If not, there were some really good posts this month full of video game trivia that were shared by other bloggers. Learn some interesting things by giving their post a read!
EXP Share: Trivia About My Favorite Video Games by Thero159 – Thero provides some great behind the scenes development for Final Fantasy X. I was surprise by some of the things I learned since I thought I knew a lot about the game already.
Gaming Facts FTW by Later Levels – Do you have what it takes to answer all of Kim’s trivia questions that date back to 1972 to the present? Then test your knowledge in Kim’s new game show which should totally be a thing (Pete can be the model co-host)!
EXP Share: Lightning Round by Ace Asunder – Solarayo busted out the good stuff and shared some trivia that came from her collection of game guides. It was fun listening to her talk about one of her favorite series of all time.
Thank you all for sharing and reading! If there were any that I missed, please let me know. Let’s take a look at what’s in store for this month.
When it comes to telling personal stories, you can only ask so much until you run out of topics, or start repeating the same story. These EXP Share post won’t last forever, but I want to try creating new topics that showcase the bloggers in the community in different compacities. What does that intel? I don’t know yet, but I did think of this question while writing this post:
Share A Interesting/Weird/Fascinating Gaming Related Thing That You Are Good At And/or Proud Of.
Are you good at identifying voice actors without looking at the credits? Do you hold a record for a speedrun? Do you own everything relating to a specific series? Have you 100% completed every game in your collection, or with a specific series? Let us know what you are really good at! Don’t worry if you think your talent is dumb or ridiculous compared to others. This is something that you are good at and are proud of, so be proud of it and share it with the world!
The madness of March is behind us now, so let’s start moving towards April. Before we do, I would like to share some of the EXP Share Posts that others have written this month. Thank you all for continuing to contribute!
Plot-twists, instant deaths and naked missions by Kim from Later Levels – Kim starts things off by providing several times she was caught off-guard in videos games, television, and books. I know of two of the situations she mentioned, and I had a reaction close to it.
Dragon Quest XI’s Shocking First Act Ending by George from The Gamer With Glasses – Dragon Quest wouldn’t be the same without its narrative plot twist to keep the player engaged with the story. This is no different for Square’s eleventh mainline entry in the long running series. Now I need to catch up and get to this point.
EXP Share: Elephant Noise Giant Boss Guy by Solarayo from Ace Asunder – *Insert elephant noise* I have never heard of this boss in Metal Gear Solid 2, but I enjoyed watching Genni’s clip from her stream doing so. I makes you wonder what other weird secrets Kojima put in his games.
Thank you all for sharing! As always, if I left someone out please let me know and I will add you to the feature list. Now onto this month’s topic.
Honestly, this might be my second to last month where things are going to be on the back burner of things until I finish up school. April will be when final papers and projects are due, and then in a couple of months I will be taking my End of Program exam to win that sweet sweet prize of crippling pain a shiny new piece of paper to hang on my wall! While I’m off doing research this month to wrap up my second to last round of classes, I thought of a fun EXP Share post that will be a bit different. This time around, I don’t want you to share a past experience you had with your favorite type of media, instead, I want you to share what you found out about your favorite things!
EXP Share Post #6 Share A Piece or Pieces of Trivia About One Of Your Favorite Games
If you are like me, I enjoy watching videos about gaming history and trivia. I bet there are somethings that I might not know or you might not know about one of your favorite games. So for this month, I am asking that you share with us some trivia about your favorite game! It could be on one game, or multiple if you like. Don’t worry if it is common trivia that most may already know. There are things people already know and there are some that none know; so no pressure (unless you are telling me again for the umpteenth time that Super Mario Bros 2 is just a reskin of Doki Doki Panic…)
February has come an gone, meaning another EXP Share month has come to a close. There are several posts that other bloggers have shared with the community, and I am thankful for their participation! Here are the posts that were shared this month!
EXP Share: A Story That Involves Someone Special To You by Thero159 – Thero is at it again and sharing a story about teasing her younger brother. As an older (and younger) brother myself, I understand power it feels to watch someone stay on high alert when the threat is a defenseless butler.
EXP Share #4: My High School Friends by The Gamer With Glasses – George is back with a reminiscing post about his friends in high school. What feels like a golden age of gaming to some people, I couldn’t help but feel nostalgic myself from reading his post.
My Blogging-Friends and the Games We’ve Shared by Later Levels – Kim shares several stories that may look familiar with a lot of you. Kim’s influence in the blogging community has helped her connect with so many people, and it shows with how much she cherishes some of those memories.
EXP Share: Cat Companions by Ace Asunder – When I said anyone can be a special gaming partner, I meant that anyone could be. Solarayo dedicates her post to her two best roommates; who happen to be here furry companions.
Gaming With Those Special People by DanamesX – I am plugging my post this time since I was very late in getting it out. With working on the Pokémon Catcher’s Catch collab and personal stuff, I almost did not get my own post out. I decided to add short stories from several people in my life that I am always happy to play games with.
Thank you for always sharing! Now to this month’s topic.
March March March! It’s hard to believe that it is March already. Where has the time gone? For most of us, we try not to think about last March, but sometimes reflecting on one event makes us think how we survived during other events. One way we escape the dreaded void is by escaping into another void; video games, tv shows, or books in most cases. But, what happens when your escape pod leaves you into an even darker void that completely negates the other thing that you were escaping from? That my friends brings me to this month’s topic:
Share a story where an event in a game, tv show, movie, or book left you in shock and your reaction to it.
A “what the f***” moment has bound to happen to us at some point. Why not share that story with others! I’m also opening this questions up for the first time to other mediums outside video games. If your story has a spoiler in it, you might want to let your readers know of it ahead of time (yes things that came out 20+ years ago can be considered a spoiler to someone who hasn’t experienced it yet). As always, the prompt will go until the end of the month March 30.
Welcome to Collection Tales! This is the series where I pull stuff from my shelves and talk about the history that I have with them.
Today’s post is a special one since this is a part of the Pokémon Creator’s Catch Collaboration that was organized by NekoJonez and features posts from 12 bloggers altogether. We all came together to write about the Pokémon series in our own special ways. Make sure check out the hub by clicking the link above or the image below that will take you to everyone’s post, and thank you to everyone who helped and contributed to the project.
For today’s Collection Tale, I wanted to look at one of my favorite games on the Nintendo GameCube, Pokémon Colosseum, and its sequel, Pokémon XD: Gale of Darkness.
While I have the most memories and nostalgia for Colosseum, I have played about half of Gale of Darkness to form an opinion. If I start rambling on and on about Colosseum more than XD, just know that it is the one that I’ve played the most.
I don’t remember exactly when we got Colosseum, but it wasn’t too long after it released on March 22, 2004 in the states. There were three factors that got me and my brothers excited about this game. One, we thought this would be close to a mainline game on a console. Around the time, people were wondering if we would ever see a mainline Pokémon game on the big screen. From the commercials that we were looking at, this seemed like a test run to see if it could work, or lead to a whole new separate series. The second factor was that it could also be an evolution to the Stadium games. A stadium is just a small colosseum if you think about it, so this new game could have been like those games with a story mode added to it. While those two predictions didn’t come true at the end, both games did a great job of giving players a great adventure on a smaller scale (on a bigger screen).
The third factor was this commercial:
Credit: Japancommercials4U2 YouTube Channel
This commercial is silly and cring, but I remember it well.
Onto what the games are about. Pokémon Colosseum followed a story where an evil organization, Team Snagem, is stealing Pokémon and turning them into fighting machines. They do this by closing their hearts and turning them into the equivalent of mindless animals. You play as Wes (or whatever you want to call him) as he breaks into Team Snagem’s hideout and steals a device known as the Snag Machine. With this machine, Wes can steal Shadow Pokémon from trainers before they can cause further harm. Assisting him is Rui, a strange girl who is able to identify Shadow Pokémon. Together you team up to solve the mysteries of the Shadow Pokémon and stop the people behind it.
The story is a little one-note, but it has interesting characters and a tone that is much darker than most games. The Orre region that the game takes place in is an almost barren wasteland where only the tough come to duke it out, which is the only thing to do. The Orre region features no wild Pokémon since it is not a place where Pokémon can be found normally in the wild (even though we’ve seen Pokémon exist in areas like this). People come here to participate in colosseum battles which are normal battles, just in a large arena.
Gale of Darkness is a similar story but with a different cast. You play as a young kid who lives at a Pokémon research center in the Orre region. After hijinks occur, you are given a new snag machine to capture shadow Pokémon which have once again appeared and rescue the professor of the center. It is not nearly as mature as the original game, but it retains the same great gameplay and mechanics with a few new things. Since I haven’t finished the story and I honestly don’t remember much outside the main plot, I think of Gale of Darkness as an expansion to Colosseum and a look at the aftermath of the Shadow Pokémon incident.
The Shadow Pokémon themselves are interesting because they look like normal Pokémon to most people. Shadow Pokémon will not hesitate to attack anyone rather you be another Pokémon or human. Snagging them from trainers is the only way to acquire them and get them off the streets. What’s stopping you from taking your opponent’s entire team? Morality, and the game won’t let you. To reverse the effects of the shadowing, you have to use the Pokémon in battle and reduce it’s darkness gauge. As you dwindle the gauge, the Shadow Pokémon will regain some moves that it forgot, and reveal some of its nature to the trainer. Once the gauge is empty, you will take it to a shrine blessed by Celebi to purify its heart. The Pokémon will then obtain all experience points it earned from battles, and may evolve if it can. Purifying all the shadow Pokémon becomes one of the end goals of the game since you can then grow your team and take on the different battle challenges in the game. Gale of Darkness changes the purification aspect a bit by allowing you to store Pokémon in special boxes that purify them over time. I would love to see the concept of Shadow Pokémon return in game in the future, but as of this writing, the last time we would see Shadow Pokémon would be in Pokémon GO.
The copy of Colosseum that I have is the original that I had from childhood. We didn’t preorder it, so it didn’t come with the download code for Jirachi. A quick ebay search will tell you how rare a copy of that is. My game still has the original case and manual that has been through a lot. Along with the game, we got the Official Nintendo Players Guide to the game. We were obsessed with guide books since we didn’t have the internet to magically solve all our problems (you young people will never know the struggle sometimes). I was lucky enough to find our copy of the book recently at my brother’s house. Unfortunately, he had stored it in a cardboard box in his outside shed (my inner librarian weeps), so I’m cautious about the potential of hidden mold. It has been out there for years though, and if it hasn’t been destroyed by the elements since, then there might be hope for it.
It wasn’t until college that I got a copy of Gale of Darkness. For some reason, we never got it when it released and it flew under our radar since. I was able to find this copy at my local GameStop around the time they were cleaning out their GameCube inventory. I was lucky enough to only pay $13 USD for the game which is nowhere near how much you have to pay now for a copy. I ended up with two versions of the guide book thanks to my own stupidity. I had forgotten that I purchased the Prima guide and paid a good amount to get the Official Nintendo Players Guide.
Now onto a story that I share with these games. I already mentioned that I’ve spent the most time with Colosseum, but maybe one day I will have stories to share about Gale of Darkness. I think Colosseum is one of the few games that I have played multiple times. That is mostly thanks to my younger brother who loved to see me play this game. He would request me to play this whenever I had the chance to play the GameCube, and he would watch along as I took on the different challenges in the game. I didn’t have a problem with it, since there are plenty of content to do in the game. One such thing was a Mt. Battle, a 100 battle gauntlet as you ascended up this mountain. The challenge takes a while since battles can start to get tedious after a while. What made the challenge worth it however is the prize at the end. If you manage to collect all the Shadow Pokémon and purify them, then you can get Ho-oh at the top of the mountain. This prize alone made us both want to complete it. After a while, we were able to reach the top of the mountain and defeat the last challenger. We made sure that all Pokémon had been captured and purified before we finished, but no Ho-oh showed up. After reviewing the guide book, we discovered that we had to do the Mt. Battle challenge in Battle mode. We had done it in the Story mode. It is safe to say that we never got the Ho-oh after discovering that.
To wrap things up, I highly recommend playing these games if you have the means. They are my favorite spinoffs of the series since it introduces this semi mature not found in most Pokémon games. The games were not afraid to show off one of the darker sides of the Pokémon universe and show one of the more sinister sides of things. If you have Pokémon Ruby or Sapphire, a Gameboy Advance, and a link cable to you can hook up to your GameCube, then you can have battles with your friends on the big screen. Why you would go through the trouble of doing that in this day and age is your business and I am not one to judge. You can also transfer Pokémon from Ruby/Sapphire to use in game and vice versa. I would love for them to bring the Orre region back for another adventure, or introduce a new small region facing their own shadow Pokémon incident. If we ever get a rerelease or another game in this spinoff, I highly recommend you to give them a try.
Once again, thank you to everyone who contributed to the Pokémon Creator’s Catch and make sure that you give the other articles and videos and read/view!
Tales from the Backlog 