Pokemon XD is out in America.

[TK n Happy Ness]

I bought Pokemon XD yesterday.I played for about 40 min so far.Dont look to me to write any guides I may be 2 years on beating this.I still have to beat Collosium and Fire Red and I have to beat Sapphire again......Long Story.

It's been done. Coronis did an XD guide over at SPP.

 

[Iceburgh]

Thats good.By the way whats SPP? And why doesnt Nintendo just give everyone their wish and make Pokemon an MMORPG.

 

[Sillymence]

SPP is short for Serebii.net.

 

[FabuVinny]

As for an MMORPG, Nintendo are only really entering the internet business at the moment, so give it a few years and a DS MMORPG isn't out of the question.

 

[Misty]

A Pokemon MMO would not work well. I can tell you that much.

 

[Argy]

Just look at NetBattle. Average and beginner players would never be able to win at anything.

 

[Rayne]

I'm still a bit skeptical about this one. For those who've already played it,
I was just wondering how different it was from Colleseum.

 

[The Big Al]

I got it for free for buying a Game Cube.

For one thing, the animation is a whole lot better. The people's mouths actually move and when people change positions when they win or lose, they stay that way. The Pokemon are also more fluid in their movements. It looks like they actually bothered to make a good game instead of a rushed pice of crap.

 

[Dogasu]

Rayne, I was skeptical too, but I was pleasantly surprised by this game.

I'm about 10 hours into the game as of this writing (I'm about to fight

Spoiler

the guy who kidnapped Justy in Phenac City

), and so far I can tell you that it's a WHOLE lot better than Colisseum was.

Spoiler

I think one reason that the game is so much better is because they reuse so much stuff from the previous game. I know that sounds crazy, but hear me out. They reuse all the same graphics (I don't know what you people are talking about when you say "the graphics are better," because they're not), so they can spend more time on the plot than they do worrying about how to model a certain pokemon. Pretty much all of the locations from the first game are there (in addition to new places), so the game developers can spend more time working on the game mechanics instead of trying to figure out the map for a particular city.

And as a result, the game has a much better flow than Colisseum did. Colisseum just felt like a bunch of random events strewn together - go to Place A and fight some shadow pokemon, go to Place B and fight some more shadow pokemon, and then go to Place C to - you guessed it - fight some shadow pokemon. Every now and then you'd go find a cog for some machine or deliver a package to some professor, but the vast majority of the game just had you go from place to place and snag all these shadow pokemon in a quest that didn't seem to have any real end.

In XD, however, you have to deal with the return of Cipher, and everything you do is in an effort to (at first ) prevent their return and then, later, to thwart them. You're working to get the Purifcation Chamber back up and running, or to rescue the main professor guy, or to get back the cargo ship that was stolen at the beginning of the game. It seems like a game that's driven more by the actions of the human characters than it does the quest to catch (or, in the case of Colisseum, "snag") pokemon than any other Pokemon game before it.

Other additions to the game make it better as well. The Poke-Spots are a nice addition because you can always take a break from your main quest to catch some regular old pokemon. The Purifcation Chamber makes purifying pokemon a LOT less tedious, and I'm glad to see the PDA's e-mail system actually getting used in this game (unlike the first game, where you only really received e-mails after you'd beaten the game and were running around doing sidequests).

The game has its downsides, of course, but all in all, I can say that the game is far superior to Colisseum. It's definately worth a buy.

Of course, one of my major gripes with Colisseum was its horrible "ending," so I can't really fully compare the two games until I beat XD.

 

[Geodude]

And the wild Pokemon with just normal moves do have a purpose. If you're like me, you probably prefer to use the purified Pokemon with better-than-natural moves most of the time, so I like to put captured (former) wild Pokes in the purify chamber, thereby freeing up the purified ones for training.

 

[The Dude]

My mom bought it for me yesterday, but because of schoolwork, I haven't had a chance to play it. I need a new memory card. I also need to get my GC out of the box it's been in since August, and hook it up again to the TV. Thank dog my mom picked it up, or I would have wasted my five bucks preordering it. I'm really excited because I have Thursday and Friday off this week, so four-day weekend. Calloo-Callay!

 

[Strawberry Delcatty]

Well, I'm liking XD a LOT better than Colleseum. It's also the first game I played for more than an hour since who-knows-when. Why? Here's my list:

-The music is a lot better. Love the VS Mode menu music to death, and Miror B's battle music is tied for second along with the new Cipher Admin theme.
-I can snag Delcatty and Meowth.
-A lot of the new areas are interesting. Kachinko's Mansion is worth a few laughs.
-I can snag Delcatty and Meowth.
-The characters are interesting.
-I can snag Delcatty and Meowth.
-Purification is a lot easier (and faster to me).
-Did I mention that I can snag Delcatty and Meowth?

This list may get a little longer overtime.