Pokémon Stadium

Pokémon Stadium 2

/ Red Metal / 17 Comments

With the international success of Pokémon Stadium for the Nintendo 64, Game Freak’s bestselling franchise had presence on both the handheld and console markets. The latter game was especially novel for its time, having introduced the Transfer Pak. With it, players could insert their own copies of Pokémon Red, Blue, or Yellow into these devices and have the creatures they raised battle it out in 3D. Naturally, Nintendo EAD was compelled to make a sequel following the release of the mainline series’ second-generation games: Pokémon Gold and Pokémon Silver. This sequel was showcased at the Nintendo Space World festival in 2000. It was originally going to be entitled Pokémon Stadium 3 domestically before being changed to Pokémon Stadium Gold/Silver, seeing a release in December of that year. Western fans wouldn’t have to wait too much longer for the game to be released internationally, seeing the light of day in March of 2001 in North America and October of the same year in Europe. As only the second of the two games in the series left their native homeland, it was dubbed Pokémon Stadium 2 abroad. Does this game successfully keep up with the core series’ evolution?

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Pokémon Stadium

/ Red Metal / 22 Comments

In defiance of Nintendo’s expectations, Pokémon became a worldwide phenomenon when it debuted in the West in 1998. Realizing they had a new, venerable franchise on their hands, they decided to branch out the series as Satoshi Tajiri and the rest of Game Freak devised a sequel. One of their projects was to be called Pocket Monsters 64. True to its name, it would mark the Pokémon franchise’s console debut. Not only that, but because it would debut on the Nintendo 64, the franchise was to jump from its simplistic presentation on the Game Boy and into the third dimension. Nintendo even planned to up the ante by having the game debut on the 64DD (Dynamic Drive). This Nintendo 64 peripheral would utilize a new storage media and afford players many freedoms, including the ability to create characters. These plans ultimately fell through when it became clear the 64DD would require much more time to develop.

Responsibility of this game’s development ultimately fell on Satoru Iwata of HAL Laboratory. Putting his programming expertise to good use, he and his team converted Pocket Monsters 64 to a standard 32-megabyte cartridge. He ported the games’ unique battle system to work on the Nintendo 64. It took an entire week to read the Game Boy source code. Once that was done, he converted Shigeki Morimoto’s programming to the new console. Due to technical limitations, the final product only contained 42 out of the 151 Pokémon. The fruit of their labor, Pocket Monsters Stadium, was released in August of 1998 whereupon it sold 270,000 copies within its first month.

In February of 1999, Nintendo announced a follow-up intuitively named Pocket Monsters Stadium 2. Reception to its unveiling was positive. The original game was criticized for its anomalously high difficulty and several Pokémon being unavailable to use. This prompted Nintendo and HAL to tone down the AI for the sequel. The game saw its domestic release in April of 1999 before debuting internationally the following year. Abroad, the game was retitled Pokémon Stadium due its predecessor having never left its native homeland. It became one of the Nintendo 64’s bestselling titles, moving one-million units before the end of 2000. Did Pokémon Stadium allow the series’ traditional gameplay to make a triumphant entrance to home consoles?

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