Pokemon Summer Camp: That was ages ago

Yes in our long running series (2 including this one) of up to the minute live blogging of videogames events posted a month after the fact we are proudish to relay our thoughts on the Pokemon Summer Day Camp way back on the 25th of August.

Yes after all my fanboy whinging about how Nintendo hates europe, it seems that they heard my whiny plees and decided to do a Pokemon Summer Day Camp which promised much pokemon related fun and the oppurtunity to get a Mew for the GBA games, which is sure generous Nintendo. How many other games let their players wait 4 years to get something they should have had anyway.....

So Chuff_72, our TGAM street correspondant and myself went along in the interests and purity of videogame journalism. Definitely not because neither of us wanted to go alone and one of us, really, really wanted to go. As it turns out we were both movinghouse that weekend but promises and pleading with our better halves meant we busted down to sunny Brent Cross in London for our chance to catch the elusive Mew.

Upon finding the Toys 'R' Us car park after a pleasant stroll through London surburbia we were unsurprisingly the tallest people there, excluding parents, and of a minority being between parent or children ages. It was predictable but unpleasant still. The sun at this point was beaming down and as the English are want to do we joined a lovely queue.

We were so enthused and a little less self concious so we whiled away the time by taking pictures of the queue a là MTV mid 90s
Then, as the English in queues are want to do when we are queuing, the complaining started and Lo! We were at the back of a queue that wasn't due to move for another 30 minutes our diligent loud mom sources revealed. So very self conciously we took out our DSes, confirming to any suspicious parent that we hadn't spontaneously joined a queue but that we were there for the pokeymans or possibly to fiddle their kiddies.

Then the queue got much longer and we were proud that we had had the foresight to turn up so early. Foolish fools at the back of the queue. How we laughed! And then the queue didn't move for ages again. Then it was announced that the queue would split into two. The queue we were in would be for the goody bags and the new queue would be to skip straight to the Mew download. About four people moved to form the Mew queue but we were confident that we'd swipe a goody bag then pick up Mew and ride off into the sunset to help our better halves move house. What a day!

And then the sun got hotter and hotter and higher and higher. Still the queue refused to move and the Mew queue started to grow. Using our expert navigation skills learned from Windwaker we used a boy dressed as Pikachu to mark the progress of the Mew queue and for what must have been an hour we watched him not move from our own stationary position. By now the grumbling was discernable up and down the line and a few parents, probably of adopted children, started to implement time factors for their children. "If this queue doesn't move in 15 minutes we are leaving". Bastard parents but they were right, it was unbearable like some form of torture, the heat reflecting off the asphalt and burning our chins. For what? Well Mew of course. Also, at this point I found out I had locked my girlfriend in the house. Alarm bells began to ring that I'd got this far for nothing.......

And then just before we thought about missing out on the goodie bags and skipping to the Mew queue before it got too long there was a sudden slow movement. We were slightly winging our way to a goodie bag!

Half an hour later we were nearly getting our goodie bags. By this point the Mew queue had grown into the longest queue I've seen in at least five years. We grabbed our recently filled-out trainer cards, complete with answers stolen from a knowledgable five year old and ran to the counter to receive, what I believe to be one of the poorest goodie bags I have ever queued two and a half hours for. An A4 school planner (pokemon themed), a Pokemon diamond/pearl bookmark, a Pokemon diamond/pearl postcard, two pokemon movie posters which were adverts for Pokemon toys on the back, a set of pokemon stickers and a pokeball badge, which might have been wearable, was I the type, except it had CARTOON NETWORK emblazened on it, covering the bottom half of the badge, ruining it's wearability as some kind of secret sign to other Pokemon players. With heavy hearts lifted, slightly, by the prospect of getting a Mew each we moved to the now infinitely long queue to get the Mew download.

This is the Mew Q about an hour into it. By this time sweat is dripping from every pore and my forehead is blistering. I had one go on the DS and I went to the underground but the wi-fi was so slow and my old DS became unviewable with the shining sunlight I turned it off. Children all sides of us were making ridiculous trades and Chuff_72 was visibly distressed at seeing and hearing so many shiny DSes getting dropped on the floor in all the excitement and heat. Until finally we get near to the tent.
At which point this prick (above) totally pwns some kid half his age and quarter ours with a hacked shiny Rayquaza. Chuff_72 eggs me on to speak out about the injustice and to take cheaty boy on in a (pokemon) fight but I'm too hot and not at all afraid that he'll beat me with his hacked team. He smokes the whole time too which is jarring because I had run out of all smokables. Also, quite why a guy who had audibly hacked to get a shiny Deoxys, Celebi and Rayquaza was queueing to get a Mew is also, perplexing.
Has the word queue lost all meaning yet? I hope it has because it is a little way to how Chuff and I were feeling this far into our epic adventure. Then:


The end is in sight. A poor woman who has been going up and down the queue telling people to free up a space in the party on their game all day is clearly annoyed and frustrated that no one has been listening which is why the queue is so slow and that the command is so foreign to the parents that they can't even enforce their kids to do it.



We're there! And rewarded with tits as well as Mew which ever so slightly comes near to almost beginning to make up for the awful conditions we endured. Both of these people were very nice and didn't make a comment about two 20 somethings with childrens goody bags at a Pokemon event and we didn't make snide remarks about how one gets to become a Pokemon Summer Camp helper because we were secretely jealous that they could get as many Mews as they wanted.

So that's the story of how we got Mew and much like Ash Ketchum we had to endure hardship and many trials to catch this legendary pokemon. But we made it. I've been Cunzy1 1 and this has been TGAM. Thank you very much and goodnight x x

[PlanetEarth]: LFG Need Healer

If you were in the UK this summer you may have noticed that there was in fact no summer, we have lost “seasons”, we have expelled so may fucked up gasses into the atmosphere that we have effectively killed summer. It is this writer’s humble opinion that we have in fact fucked-up the whole world, beyond fixing. Hurricanes, Tsunamis, Seas drying up, and all sorts of other weather related extinction events happening on bigger and grander scales. This of course makes things like wars, oil, Jihads, Politics, Religion, PS4, the 9th WoW expansion, Nintendo doing a global release of a title, the end of Lost, the iPod-killer and the Spice girls re-uniting, all redundant.

And so what does our government do to try and stop this issue… it encourages us to use less carrier bags from the supermarket. Yeah nice.

The whole problem is that there is too many of us, and we have reached a point in our social evolution to the point where no-one cares, we work 9-5, then eat our tea in front of Coronation Street, and just hope that things will be ok. And nothing will change, bar some kind of social revolution, but none of us can be bothered because we are just counting the hours to the weekend.

In theory this makes everything redundant, science, arts, and yeah even gaming, as all of our progress will not be saved.

[1. General] [PlanetEarth]: LFG Need Healer.

So this is a big shout out to the Developers, stop delaying games, we don’t have much time left… especially if it’s all grind-fests. I bet if you were to weigh up the amount of hours left in the world versus the hours required to grind all classes to maximum level (including skills etc) for the MMOs already out there, it wouldn’t be that far off. The time left for classics to be classics is also dwindling.

Ok, let’s say for instance there is a big mass extinction and humans do manage to survive, what sort of future do we have to look to? And more importantly what will happen to gaming.

1. Matrix Style.
Arguably the best scenario for games, the machines take over then slot us all into one giant MMO, unfortunately it seems that the game we are stuck playing is a pretty version of second life, and you can only get funky moves if you take the red pill, and deal with RL stuff.

2. No-Technology.
Yeah this is bad news, what with the tidal waves, flooding, or the sun being blocked out by smog/volcanic ash. We have no real means to power 360s, let alone HDTVs. Also Microsoft would likely get destroyed, no more Critical updates for Direct X 13, and no customer support for the Red rings of death.

3. The resurrection.
God gets resurrected, he is so pissed off with what we have done to the planet, that he smites all the n00bs and haXXorz with his uber-1337 deity skillz.

4. Bizz-world
The success of WoW keeps stretching into the future, to the point where everyone on the planet has an account. They release a new patch, which integrated the worlds last remaining power sources actually in the game. Problem is some blizz-employee, spills his coffee on the main server.

/earth
The world (server) has gone down.
/exit earth

5. The dead shall rise from the grave
Mutations, and scientific experimentation to try and extend human life leads to Zombies. The last salvation of man is the new Carthage: Raccoon city. No games here, just a weak Resident evil link.

6. A Utopian society.
We learn to live underground, but not in a skanky Xion way, we harness the earths core for energy, living in a balance with nature/consoles, getting our exercise from the Wii 3 using the full body wii-mote, getting entertainment from the Xbox 1080, getting porn from the internet, Sony will still be there pushing blu-ray.

Etc…

Anyway remember this the next time you pick up a game you have not completed: Finish that bad boy because in a few years there may be no more gaming/humanity. And don’t feel bad about playing them either, as everything will be gone too, all those “worthwhile” pursuits such as Arts and Sciences with be worth as much as the games: Jack and Shit, and Jack just got radiation poisoning from the nuclear fallout.

Alternatively if you don’t want to complete it, go recycle something.