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- Oct 18, 2012
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1) Personally, I still find it disturbing to have living creatures as Casino prizes. Even in a pokemon game. What if Game Freak think the same these days?
Well again, if we want to really get into this then I personally find it weird to go out and start stuffing living creatures into pseudo-brainwashing devices and then forcing them to battle or trading them like collectibles. I'm not going to trade my dog for anybody else's just because I think there's is cooler, am I? But it's a Pokémon video game so it's whatever~
2) Yes, the new laws are surely one reason why Game Corners disappeared after Gen IV. But if GF wanted to keep the actual concept, they could have. They just had to put Voltorb Flip in all future games from BW onwards, instead of the traditional Game Croners. This way, they would just have one feature for both Japanese and international version of the games.
But they didn't carry Voltorb Flip in future games, even though it was legal. Why? I think it is because what I said above. If TMs can't be used for prizes, and Pokemon can't be used for prizes, the Game Corner loses its purpose. Besides, Voltorb Flip was more hated than loved from what I've read, so they probably thought it was better off out of the game.
I imagine the unpopularity of Voltorb Flip is probably the reason why Voltorb Flip wasn't brought back...
In any case I'm not saying that the reusable TMs weren't a factor in the removal of the Game Corner at all. I just don't think they were an immediately motivating one - rather it was something more serendipitous. Like they were thinking, "Okay so this Game Corner problem, what are we going to do about that? Should we even bother? It's a lot of work. Oh hey, it just so happens that we're also thinking about making half of the usual prizes infinite use, so yeah, maybe axe it." But clearly they're not averse to putting reusable TMs behind an effortwall, just like their one-use counterparts. They mainly just wanted to improve the utility of TMs themselves, so that you would have no compunctions about actually using them on your Pokémon.