Just a hot scoop for Pokemon fans out there. Parents, you have something to use ti entice your kid to do well in school!
Pokémon Mystery Dungeon: Training Future Hardcore Gamers
Don’t laugh at that kid playing Pokemon Mystery Dungeon. He’s in serious training.
Right now, the hardest of the hardcore are embroiled in the brutally difficult but extremely fun Demon’s Souls, a new role-playing game for the PlayStation 3. But as we speak the next generation of hardcore gamers are currently crawling their own dungeons, scrounging for loot and fighting for their lives. And they’re probably doing it with Bulbasaur by their sides.
Pokémon Mystery Dungeon: Explorers of the Sky, released this week, is at its core a roguelike — a riff on the punishing dungeon hacking computer game Rogue. Pokémon Mystery Dungeon is aimed squarely at kids, so it’s nowhere near as difficult. In the original game, when you died, that was it: Game over. Start from scratch. This kindler, gentler Rogue like keeps the negative consequences to a minimum. Bite the dust in a dungeon and you’ll lose an item or two, but that’s about it.
The nifty thing about this game is the way it serves as a beginner’s entry point into a niche gaming genre. It’s now possible for young Western gamers to follow the lineage of Mystery Dungeon backwards — through Final Fantasy Fables: Chocobo’s Dungeon for Wii and the woefully under-appreciated remake Mystery Dungeon: Shiren the Wanderer for Nintendo DS. Make it to Shiren and you’re just about ready to tackle thorny but awesome hardcore classics like Nethack.
This edition (the third dip for this generation of the series) features new playable Pokémon, a bunch of new side stories, dungeons and enhancements to the game’s various online features. You may not be ready to tackle Dwarf Fortress immediately after playing it, but at the very least, you’ll be ready for the new wave of Pokémon Mystery Dungeon games planned for WiiWare.
Image courtesy Nintendo
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