Pokemon Dash makes me want to sit down

so when I first moved out I went to check out the video game shops in my local area in one of them there was a table with a bunch of loose cards which I had to look through and I found a cartridge for a game called Pokémon Dash I never played it and I thought for six quid why not so I took it home with me I've enjoyed a decent amount of Pokémon spin-offs over the years Mystery Dungeon Ranger Magik op jump there are some real gems that don't get enough love Pokémon Dash isn't one of them also I've been told and you absolutely nothing going into it but I haven't exactly heard good things over the years just type in Pokémon Dash into YouTube oh look it's our good friend P he doesn't look too happy the worst Pokémon game surely it can't be that bad I should give it a chance it's just some Pokémon running fast what could go wrong but you know what else runs fast Opera not only does the Opera browser also run at lightning speed but it's perfectly optimized for maximum productivity and there's a new feature that'll blow your little socks off do you ever have so many tabs open that you can't even read what they are well for this relatable problem there is a solution with Opera you can hover over the tab you're on and add a little Emoji sticker on top of it is a sad read really about emojis Lucy yes it is I can put an emoji wearing a cowboy hat on this one Yeo I often have a lot of documents open while I'm working so I can put a couple of little exclamation points onto the main one I'm working on so I don't lose track of it or I can put a little musical note on this tab which has my relaxing music and rain sounds I can feel someone say saying but Lucy anything with the video will have that little speaker icon on the tab yes true but what happens when it's not playing it goes away and then I lose the video in my sea of tabs I can combine these silly little Emojis with the tab Islands which further enables my indecision and lets me tuck all of my open tabs into neat folders to go back to and definitely close later you can check out the new oppr update now it will change the way you look at tabs forever but for now we're going to go back to the dashing Pokémon though regrettably they do not run as fast as opra thanks to opra for supporting the channel Pokémon Dash was actually Pokémon's first yes title and this year it'll be 20 years old at first glance it looks perfectly Pleasant the box art was done by Ken sugimori himself and it looks gorgeous it would un ironically make a sick poster okay so I was looking up Pokémon Dash poster because I thought oh H wow I wonder if they did make those I would actually like one and I found something very unexpected this was a real magazine ad for Pokémon Dash that was part of a large campaign for the DS I hate it but I love it but I hate it you touch they run fast you can use your finger to help Pikachu Sprint to Victory your finger it's straight up saying yeah you can use your finger to play the game it's all good look let's be real we've all used the finger here and there on the DS but for Pokémon Dash nah son I'm not taking any risks even with the stylus it needs a screen protector this ad is a sure way to break your DS screen and the main visual like I can't what they were going for but surely there was a way to achieve that without this body horror of an ad the absolute jump scare of a promo line touching is good video game ads from around that time do have a bit of a reputation for being absolutely unhinged like it has this massive shock visual of something completely unrelated and then at the bottom it's like oh yeah this is the game maybe a tiny visual of the game play for ants I give this one for Dragon Ball GBA a pass because it's just such a luck and I also give a pass to this one for Kirby's Nightmare and Dreamland first PA for a choking Kirby just ahead of its time but even for 2000 standard the whole touching is good campaign was bizarre trying to appeal to a much much older audience you've got the good girl and the bad girl of the Nintendo DS she likes to send her little secrets using PTO chat sir I am six I just want to play Animal Crossing wild World Nintendo even held a touching is good contest where and I'm being totally serious they sent mannequin hands to anyone that asked for them and you had to take creative picture with one for the chance to win a DS add that one to your collection Grail the official Nintendo touching his good mannequin hand you can't make this stuff up anyway this poster was the fastest purchase I've ever made it takes pride of place in my office I also bought the choking curvy one that is all I bought that is all I bought that is all I bought what do you think it is I got no idea legendary oh thanks oh Jesus Christ why do you have a hand it's the official touching his good hand great what are we going to do with it it'll give you a hand where are we going to put it on display that's that's great getting back on track Dash was made by a developer I wasn't too familiar with being umbrella among their portfolio titles like my Pokémon Ranch heyu Pikachu isn't heyu Pikachu the one where if you say Sony PlayStation to Pikachu through the microphone then he gets all knocky with you okay I looked it up apparently that's just a lie I'm sorry I've ruined the magic for everyone umbrella also made the rumble series which while not anything groundbreaking was always a bit of silly fun for me hopefully that's what Dash will be too manage my expectations I paid £6 for this I was excited to try Pokémon's take on eraser though I know in my heart nothing will ever be able to overtake the pokeathlon courses I booted the game and I met with this interactable peer pull on his cheeks to make him go faster fun fact this little interactive Pikachu originates from the tech demo that they showed for the DS at4 Z3 it was a full-on collection of mini games but for the dash title screen all you can do is just poke and prod him I did think it looked a little out of place for the game you know it's called Pokémon Dash and he's he's not dashing he's good here he's on a break the game is a tap screen racer and yes again you will absolutely need a screen protector for it it uses these pseudo 3D Sprites and the objective is just to reach all the checkpoints in order are the fastest there are three grand prix with five cups in each one with 16 total dashes but don't get excited you only get to play as Pikachu in single player the five cups are green white blue yellow and red green Cup starts out nice and simple you got to get your checkpoints and it's very linear to ease you into it then it starts to introduce more variables the next checkpoint is on a different Island so you might need to take a ride on a Lapis or grab some balloons to take to the sky and go get it the map is very big so most of this time is spent frantically scrolling around the screen to try and find where you need to land I suppose that's the point of the game it's really just a test of reaction time or I guess you could just memorize the math in its entirety and do it that way I tried to look for little tells in the preview okay I got to look for this checkpoint next to a small patch of trees that'll be easy enough to find no a lot of the time the icons of the other races on the map obscure the checkpoints and yeah sure I guess if there's an opponent in that area then it's a good sign you're going in the right direction but it's not a sure thing and they could just be behind you or they could just be going the wrong way like maybe this is just a me thing I can't process the whole preview image I need to focus on the tiny details to know for sure where I'm going there are different terrains some slow you down and some are hazardous if you go into the water Pikachu will drown you can't land too quickly on most terrains so you have to be careful when you pop the balloons I don't really grasp the rules to this it feels kind of random to me whether or not I'll get punished and there's not exactly an abundance of info online about Pokémon Dash strats you got to try and notice what's in the surrounding area and find a strategic place to land regular grass land is safe so you can go as fast as you want when Landing there yep Pikachu gets a little concussion if he lands a bit too quickly on the pavement but with grass land no he's good 400 m an hour and not a scratch there'll often be these little patches of grass near checkpoints though if you can aim for those when you land you'll save yourself a good few seconds the problem is that the landing in this game does not work properly I can aim and line it up just right but the moment I pop the balloons to land it starts drifting to the side and I land on the Rocks if there was wind speed and direction that you had to take into to account when Landing fair enough but there isn't it just does that and once the balloons are popped good luck trying to get Pikachu to change course I'm taing at my screen like a madman trying to get him to aim back at the grass but the guy's got a Death Wish he's determined to land face first in the Rocks little lucy edit okay so I wrote this script and I thought it was pretty funny I felt quite pleased with myself and then I picked up the game again and suddenly it had stopped doing the drifting thing I wondered if my DS had joyon drift like is DS drift a thing no it's even worse than that you see these little gusts blowing onto the screen yeah that's the wind direction there was Wind Drift the entire time I never noticed them I just thought maybe they were decorative so the next checkpoint is quite far away and on the Navigator I see a Lapras right by me so I figure I can use him to swim across to the next one but no a lot of the time he'll be right across this tiny strip of water that I can't cross so I can't get to him but I've wasted a load of time looking for him because he's right there on the Navigator I'm practically touching him I don't know maybe this is intentional and I'm whining and it's part of the trial and error experience as you get to know the courses better or perhaps I'm being incredibly generous to the dash game I love how it asks you after every single cup if you want to take a break like yeah that 10 minutes of Pokémon Dash was too intense for me I need a breather having a feature that reminds you hey you've probably had a bit too much screen time buddy go outside the grass is waiting for you it's always a good thing sometimes I need that often I need that I always int end on doing a couple cheeky runs of batro in bed but then I've been playing it for 2 hours but this is just so counterintuitive I love it every 10 minutes it's just this reminder hey do you want to stop playing this game maybe this was just put in to prevent people from going mad and getting repetitive strain injuries but I don't know Pokémon Ranger was way more intense with all the looping you had to do and I could go for hours on that maybe I just have magic hands editor's note this is a lie clearly I'm getting older because I managed to give myself a repetive strain injury in both hands from playing too much batro I have little hands they could not cope with the mighty steam deck is this what happens does everything just go downhill from 25 so I went through this experience this very intense touchscreen game with two wrist braces in the regular Grand Prix I managed to get first place without much difficulty I did get lost a lot but so did the other guys so it was easy to catch up if you fall behind going into hard GP the guys from the previous lot didn't make the cut for the team except for Meowth and Torchic I know he may not have arms but he's been training hard and he doesn't need him the new opponents can be P2 Mudkip Charmander Jigglypuff and why not another racer with no arms maybe that's actually the secret Strat to speed or I guess why not could use its little flappy face things for arms hard GP was a rude awakening for me it was at this point that I discovered you can pause mid race and start over without having to redo the whole cup honestly quite a surprising convenience feature for a game made 20 years ago but regardless my hands are very grateful originally I wanted to flex and get first and all the Cubs But as time went on I realized that I would probably regret such a course of action but at last I managed to claw my way into the expert Grand Prix let's see who our opponents are this time Trio Marl apom Mightyena and blazak seems reasonable I want to appreciate some of these head shot Sprites I love whatever this Treo is there's face paling Blazer kin and this might is so angsty it's incredible the expert level is different to the prior to as you don't have to complete any of the checkpoints in order you just get dropped from the sky and you got to figure it out yourself but this time I get the balloon I was honestly dreading it because I'd already found parts of hard GP a little tough so surely by the end of expert GP I'm going to need a bit more than a wrist brace but to my surprise I found expert GP a lot easier entirely due to how it's set up having the time to assess the map figure out where I'm going almost makes it a different game to me it just works for my brain a lot better dare I say I was having fun to unlock each new cup you need to come at least third overall I tried to be quite strategic when I was going through the races so with the new revelation that I can in fact just start over so if I did badly in a particular race no I didn't there is a problem unique to the expert cup which is that the rankings are a bit off and they don't always give you an accurate picture of where you're at here I'm in fifth place and suddenly I hit a checkpoint and boom I'm in second I must have been going real fast in the last second there were quite a few times where I'd be doing quite well so I'd go to the last checkpoint and at the last millisecond it would put me behind look at this beaten by 04 of a second are you for real and I've already cleared the race so I can't even go back overall expert GP was a very nice change in Pace and I actually placed a lot higher than I did in the hard one so the credits are all what's next you can do time attacks which is just doing each individual course to try and get the best time but there's more I had started out optimistically thinking I could take on every course lots of sites put completion at maybe 10 to 15 hours which isn't that bad but clearly I was misled because there are extra courses how many you ask maybe another couple extra cups now there are 420 extra courses because Pokémon Dash was an advanced piece of tech and took advantage of the Dual slot mode so upon beating the first Grand Prix you can then plug a gba Pokémon game into the DS select your party and it just makes a map for it it was a whole thing they even had event exclusive maps and Sprites like like look at this little Pikachu and lepris one oh he so good I think this is a really cool idea if not a little questionable that you need to buy separate games to have access to the vast majority of courses I mean I say courses they're not really courses there's two checkpoints on each one and there's absolutely no kind of rout planning or strategy to it it's just a bit of fun but hey I get to explore every corner and crevice of this Spiel what more could I ask for Co

Channel: CandyEvie

Views: 120,959

Keywords: pokemon, pokemon trivia, pokemon funny, pokemon dash, nintendo ds, pokemon ds, candyevie, funny, cartoon, retrospective, video essay

Id: Y4XsVAxkljs

Length: 14min 0sec (840 seconds)

Published: Sun Jun 30 2024