Kelsey from Pink Gorilla Games stops by and shows us some of the side games from the Pokemon series. This includes hidden gems, imports from Japan, and even bootlegs and rom hacks you may have not known about!

GAMES SHOWN:
English Games:
Pokemon Snap
Pokemon Channel
Pokemon Colosseum

Imports:
Pokemon Typing
Pokemon Picross
Pokemon Hajimete
Pokemon Tretta Lab

Bootlegs:
Pokemon Snakewood
Pokemon Crazy Hit
“Pocket Monster”

Video Transcription:

Metal Jesus: Metal Jesus here, and I am back again with Kelsey.

Kelsey: Hello. Today, we are gonna be talking about Pokémon spin-off games. This includes games that came out here in America, games that never made it outside of Japan or Europe, and also some bootlegs.

Metal Jesus: And this is perfect for me because I don’t know anything about Pokémon. So let’s take a look. So I don’t know anything about this. Where should we begin?

Kelsey: I guess we should like start with some game that you guys might be familiar with because they did come out here in the States. Some of you guys have probably even played these. We’ll start with a really obvious one that I think a lot of you guys know.

Metal Jesus: I do have this one.

Kelsey: You do?

Metal Jesus: I do.

Kelsey: Okay, awesome. So this is Pokémon Snap. If you haven’t played this game it’s an awesome kind of like, I guess it’s technically a rail shooter. But you’re taking pictures of Pokémon and their environments and you get to do things like throw apples and throw balls at them to try to get them to do certain things to pose really well for a picture. This was really popular. A lot of people want this to come back, and I do too. You even have fun with this game, right? You’re not even a Pokémon fan.

Metal Jesus: Yeah because I like rail shooters so, for me, it was very easy to start playing it. So, yeah it was pretty cool.

Kelsey: So that’s one you guys probably already know of. This is one of the ones I liked when I was a kid. This is called Pokémon Channel. You guys might have played a game called Hey You Pikachu, this is pretty similar to that. You have a Pikachu that you’re kind of just roaming around in the environment with. There’s also a big TV mechanic in it and it’s got a bunch of different channels on it that you interact with. There’s even like a coloring section on the TV, a bunch of really interesting kind of weird mini-games.

Metal Jesus: Is it a kid’s game?

Kelsey: I would call it a kid’s game. You know this came out in the GameCube era, I don’t know, five years or so after the original Pokémon came out. So this is when people had started to grow up a little bit but, for people like me, I was still a kid when this was out.

Metal Jesus: That’s cool, okay.

Kelsey: Finally, this isn’t even a game, but they released a bunch of these. These are Pokémon Videos, literally, just videos you put in your Gameboy Advance and you can watch an episode of Pokémon.

Metal Jesus: It’s kind of wild that they were able to encode video small enough to put on a cartridge to play back in the day.

Kelsey: I think so too. And it only has like two or three episodes on any of these, but they actually did this with a lot of series including a lot of Nickelodeon shows and I think Yu-Gi-Oh as well.

Metal Jesus: Does it look good?

Kelsey: Yeah, yeah I would say so, especially for the Game Boy Advance. The games we’re used to seeing on that are all 16 bit so it was surprising that the screen has the capability to do something like that.

Metal Jesus: Are those collectible at all? The videos.

Kelsey: I don’t know. I actually won this in a contest for free so I have no idea what they are worth. They’re probably not worth a whole lot because I’ve never really heard anyone talk about wanting them.

Metal Jesus: I could see me nerding out it, though, especially if there’s anime. That’s cool.

Kelsey: Pretty cool thing. So I’m going to move onto imports. Now there’s a lot of really cool import things that we didn’t get over here in the States.

Metal Jesus: Now before you start, though, I wanted to mention that you work at Pink Gorilla which, in Seattle, has a bunch of stores and they specialize in imports. And so is this where you got a lot of the imports at?

Kelsey: You know a lot of these I actually got myself, just I do a lot of importing personally. A few of these I did get from the store, though, and I can point out which ones those were. So I guess we’ll start with my favorite one. Now this actually came out in both Japan and Europe but, sad Americans, we didn’t get this.

Metal Jesus: Can you say what this says?

Kelsey: This is Pokémon Typing. I think this one’s called like play and collect Pokémon Typing DS.

Metal Jesus: I thought you were going to say the Japanese word.

Kelsey: No.

Metal Jesus: That was a test.

Kelsey: Sorry. Of course, in Europe, it’s called Pokémon Typing Adventure. This is super cool and although it has…

Metal Jesus: So it’s a keyboard for a DS?

Kelsey: It is a keyboard for the DS. This is the only game it works for sadly. It would be really cool if it worked with Animal Crossing, but it doesn’t. It comes with a wireless keyboard which I will take out and show you just because I think it is so cool. And the object of this game is you’re kind of going down the line just kind of like in Pokémon Snap and you’re typing out the name of the Pokémon as they appear and as you type them…

Metal Jesus: Like Typing The Dead?

Kelsey: Yes, exactly like Typing The Dead, except you’re not killing them.

Metal Jesus: I love that game. I’m actually really good at that game.

Kelsey: Are you?

Metal Jesus: Oh yeah.

Kelsey: I’m not so good at this one.

Metal Jesus: I can type really well.

Kelsey: Yeah?

Metal Jesus: Mm-hm.

Kelsey: See I’m like one of those point and…

Metal Jesus: Yeah.

Kelsey: So I’m not very good at it. This is the really cool keyboard accessory that comes with it. It’s wireless.

Metal Jesus: It looks nice.

Kelsey: Yeah, it’s really cool. It also comes with a stand, which is nice, so that your DS can be propped up while you’re playing the game and you don’t have to be looking like that all hunched over it. So the DS will sit up just like that, kind of like a little screen right in front of you, and then you can play with that wireless keyboard. Pretty cool.

Metal Jesus: That’s pretty cool.

Kelsey: Yeah, this also came…there’s a version with a black keyboard. I have not been able to find it, though.

Metal Jesus: So you have both versions here? You have the import and the American?

Kelsey: This is European. This one didn’t come out in America sadly. This is in English so this one a lot easier. I just recently got this one, and I had always been playing this one. It’s kind of complicated because all the Pokémon names are not their normal names. It’s their Japanese names. So I’ll be like “Oh, Tepig. No, just kidding. That’s Pokabu.” That’s why it’s a little difficult if you don’t know the Japanese names for the Pokémon.

Metal Jesus: That’d be me.

Kelsey: Yeah or the English names in your case maybe?

Metal Jesus: Yeah, that’s true.

Kelsey: So here’s another really weird one. This is called Pokémon Treta. If you ever go to Japan they actually have these giant arcade machines with a big Pokeball on it, you can kind of see it on the cover here right there, and there’s usually a long line for them because people love them. So they come with these little pog looking things and you battle these pogs against other pogs and can win these Pokémon in the machines. This is actually kind of the home version of it and it’s an attachment for the DS that allows you to read what’s on the pogs, look at what their types are, look at matchups. It allows spaces for two of them in there so if you get a new a little pog, that’s probably not what they’re called but that’s what they remind me of, you can put them both side by side and see how they would match up. Kind of cool.

Metal Jesus: Yeah.

Kelsey: Has cool little chips and it has some of their stats on the back here. This is the one that came with the limited edition Pichu. This is the first print of this game, and it’s really almost just like a Pokedex because you can’t really do anything with it. You have to do all the actual battling and getting of the Pokémon in the arcade part.

Metal Jesus: That’s cool.

Kelsey: But it’s cool.

Metal Jesus: Yeah. All right, I’ll be Vanna.

Kelsey: Yeah there’s a lot of stuff and a lot of these are really big. Oh and this also does come with a stand for both the 3DSXL and the regular 3DS. But it’s a big box so it looks a lot cooler than I think it actually is. This is a game that actually did come out in the States, but I wanted to point it out because the Japanese one comes with something really cool that we didn’t get. This is Pokémon Coliseum. It’s kind of like Pokémon Stadium, and it comes with this translucent black memory card. This is the only way to get this translucent black memory card. It’s a Japan exclusive memory card, which I think is kind of a goofy concept, but it’s a cool thing to have.

Metal Jesus: Yeah, that’s cool. And that cover rocks.

Kelsey: If you’ve never seen a Japanese GameCube boxes, by the way, they’re obviously very…

Metal Jesus: They’re awesome.

Kelsey: …different than ours, and they’re pretty cool.

Metal Jesus: Yeah.

Kelsey: Here’s another really cool one. This is Pokémon, it’s called like Pokémon Beginning Cards or Pokémon Beginner Cards, some who speaks Japanese will probably correct me on this. I apologize. But this is a game that teaches you how to play the Pokémon trading card game.

Metal Jesus: I love all this physical stuff. This is so awesome.

Kelsey: Oh, it’s so great. We never get anything cool like this in the States. So it comes with the game, of course, and a bunch of actual Pokémon cards, so you can start battling with your friends with the assistance of the DS teaching you what to do. You’ve seen like those cooking, those recipe games on the DS? Kind of think of it like that. You’re just using the game as an aid to help you guys play. And it comes with mats and counters and all the stuff you would need to get started.

Metal Jesus: That is cool.

Kelsey: Yeah. Another one you guys have probably seen in the States, but you may not know this, this is kind of fun trivia. This is Pokémon Stadium. You remember we had two here. Well, they had three. This is the original Pokémon Stadium. This is Pokémon Stadium 2, and this is our Pokémon Stadium 2, which includes the gold and silver Pokémon, so Pokémon from the second generation.

Metal Jesus: So with all these imports do you play them in Japanese? Are you able to get through them even though you don’t know any?

Kelsey: Some of them. Pokémon typing is pretty easy. That I actually totally recommend if you like Typing The Dead and if you like Pokémon, it’s a dream come true for you. And I think you’ll be able to get through it even if you don’t get the European one, even if you get the Japanese one, it’s still pretty easy to get through. It’s just menu navigation really. The 64 games not so much. You can play them and I’ve played like the mini-games in them because these all have mini-games, but you would have to know all the names of the moves to really work. So the first Pokémon Stadium they got we actually never got here. This only has about 70 of the original 151 Pokémon in it. So it’s not the full thing that we got, which is this one. Kind of confusing but to recap, their one doesn’t exist for us, their two is our one, their three is our two.

Metal Jesus: Yeah, I’m confused. Sounds like the Final Fantasy series.

Kelsey: Kind of, yeah. They do that to us sometimes. They’re like, “They’ll figure it out. It’s fine.” This is the final thing I want to show off. This is super cool and a fun piece of Nintendo trivia as well as Pokémon trivia. This is called the Nintendo Power Cartridge which sounds a lot like the magazine, same name. But in Japan, they had these cartridges you could buy. They’re completely blank, and you’d take them up to lots of convenience stores would have a little kiosk where you would load a game of your choosing onto a game or onto the cartridge.

Metal Jesus: Are you kidding me? This is awesome.

Kelsey: It’s so cool. And you’d pay for whatever games. A few games could only be purchased this way. So this one I’m holding right here is Pokémon Picross. That was the only way to get this game, and you guys have probably seen they’re now releasing one for the 3DS finally after all these years.

Metal Jesus: Wow.

Kelsey: So this is really cool, and this one’s one of the more rare ones because like I said, there’s no other way to get it other than through this download service. It also had a lot of other games like Dr. Mario and Super Mario World, Donkey Kong, all those kind of things were available through this service. And they were cheaper based on how long they had been out, so you could download some of the older ones real cheap and some of the brand new games that just came out, Fire Emblem for instance. The Radica, I think is how you pronounce it. Do you remember that one? That was one of the games you could only get like this and it retailed for 9,800 yen or roughly $75. That one was expensive, but most of these games were pretty cheap. And all of the cartridges look exactly the same so you if you want to know what’s on these, you have to actually plug them in and see.

Metal Jesus: Oh, because it depends on what you do.

Kelsey: Yeah, whoever wanted, I mean they all look exactly the same and someone could have put it in there a loaded Dr. Mario or they could have loaded this really cool Pokémon Picross on it.

Metal Jesus: This is so cool, where did you get that?

Kelsey: This I actually did get at Pink Gorilla. They come in kind of randomly. People just kind of find them and if you don’t have a Super Nintendo or a Super Famicom or Retron or anything on you, you wouldn’t be able to test it and know what’s on it. It’s not like most games where you can just read the label and be like I know what that is.

Metal Jesus: So you have some bootlegs that you want to show as well?

Kelsey: Yes, I do have some really cool bootlegs here. These are just some of the things I collect, obviously, none of these are licensed by Nintendo in any way shape or form. This is some guy who decided they wanted to make a Pokémon game. So this one’s cool. This is on the Mega Drive, and it is a platformer in which you play as Pikachu and you kind of go through these different levels. It’s actually really hard.

Metal Jesus: So is it a hack of a previous game or…

Kelsey: No, I don’t think so. I think this is all new. I’ve seen that a couple of people have found versions of this game on other systems as well. I’ve seen a Super Nintendo version of this as well as a Mega Drive version of this. So obviously, this one kind of got around. It was not just a one-time thing. And I haven’t really gotten past level four on this because it’s pretty hard. Half of the creatures in this are not actually Pokémon. They’re just random monster someone created and then some of them are Pokémon. So you go through a level, there’s some enemies that are sometimes Pokémon, sometimes not, on the way and then you usually fight like a boss at the end. There’s like Snorlax and some other ones that you have to defeat but it’s not easy. This is not an easy game. This is a really weird one. I actually haven’t gotten this to work yet because you need a modded PS1. This is a bootleg PS1 game called Pokémon Crazy Hit, and this is lovely, lovely cover art. It says, “hit me” at the top. This is Whack-A-Mole with Pokémon.

Metal Jesus: Okay.

Kelsey: I’ve watched videos of it, and I still need to mod my PlayStation to get it to work but…

Metal Jesus: You had to have it.

Kelsey: I had to have it. It was like $5 and it’s hilarious. Just the cover art itself makes it worth it. And this is my favorite. I wouldn’t really call this a bootleg. This is a ROM hack. So this is a fan created one relatively recently rather than a lot of these were probably passed off…

Metal Jesus: A ROM hack is where they start with an actual game then they just swap out the artwork basically?

Kelsey: Exactly. And the story, text, that kind of stuff. So this is Pokémon Fire Red, originally, and it’s called Pokémon Snakewood. This is Pokémon set in the zombie apocalypse.

Metal Jesus: Oh dude, this sounds awesome.

Kelsey: So throughout your time running through this Pokémon world, you run into a bunch of zombie Pokémon. You can catch them and use them on your team. You’ll also run into zombie trainers. They usually have zombie Pokémon. There’s some really weird parts. There’s a decapitated Pikachu head on a stick at one point.

Metal Jesus: That sounds awesome!

Kelsey: Yeah. And there’s some guy who you fight half way through it who has glued a bunch of Pokémon together to create just one horrible, horrifying sprite that you end up fighting and it just shows up as a monster.

Metal Jesus: The fact that it has blood spatter on the cover…

Kelsey: Yeah, it’s great. It’s a little cheesy at times and towards the very end, they kind of break the fourth wall a lot, but it’s worth playing if you just want something totally weird.

Metal Jesus: Wow, that’s cool.

Kelsey: This one works pretty well. Sometimes the bootlegs you find are like really hit or miss with whether or not they’ll work on your systems but never had any problems with this one because this one’s actually manufactured rather than…

Metal Jesus: You can tell by the cover…

Kelsey: Yeah, someone spent time and care on this instead of you know “Hit Me.”

Metal Jesus: That’s cool. Well, this is just a small sample of some the stuff you want to talk about, which I’m pretty excited about because I don’t know if it’s obvious, but I don’t know crap about Pokémon. I have some, but I really haven’t jumped into it.

Kelsey: It’s kind of a younger person’s thing I would think.

Metal Jesus: Just call me old. That hurts because it’s true.

Kelsey: Older than me.

Metal Jesus: That’s true. This is only part one, right?

Kelsey: This is part one. I own quite a bit more than this so if there’s interest, I’m more than happy to share the rest of it. There’s a whole lot more, especially English ones, I only barely touched on the English ones. But more imports as well and a lot more bootlegs.

Metal Jesus: That’s cool. Well, we’d love to know what you guys think on the comments below. Please let us know. Thanks for coming on.

Kelsey: Thank you. Thanks for having me.

Metal Jesus: That’s awesome. All right, thanks for watching my channel. Thank you for subscribing and take care. You know, they say with age comes wisdom. That’s the theory anyways. You know what also happens with age? You get gray hairs. Did you notice my beard? I’m getting some gray hair. Damn! I still feel 18. What the hell? When did I get old? When did that happen? So annoying. So annoying.