Pokemon on consoles.

One of the first games I bought for my gamecube back in the day was Pokemon Colosseum. I'd seen trailers and I was really looking forward to it. Playing it was very interesting. The first thing I really liked about it, was the way the Pokemon looked. Nintendo clearly wanted people to feel like the Pokemon were more than just blips on a game boy screen and so poured a lot of effort into the appearance of the Pokemon. They moved! They moved naturally, doing stuff like wagging their tails or other stuff ( Yawnma would zip about the stage) It was really cool and the Pokemon were to scale. In the Game Boy version, you could read the Pokemon's statistics and see their height and weight and Colosseum would translate that on screen. Wailord looked huge!. And any game that made the move Leer look cool, is pretty cool in my books. But the console version ditched the traditional style of the: Catch Pokemon, beat the gym leaders, battle everyone in sight and complete the Pokedex. I found that Colosseum was a more driven story about these things called Shadow Pokemon. I liked the idea a lot, but it wasn't pushed far enough. The only difference between the Shadow Pokemon and the regular was this move called Shadow Rush and this other thing called Hyper Mode. Colosseum's sequel Gale off Darkness perfected the Shadow Pokemon idea. Shadow Pokemon's shadow moves were super effective against every type but other shadow Pokemon and the new Reverse mode was much more flushed out than Colosseum's hyper mode. But, the main drawback to both games was that you couldn't catch wild Pokemon, only use the snag machine to steal other people's shadow Pokemon (which, oddly enough, no-one seemed to mind to much) In Gale of Darkness, you could catch a grand total of 9 wild Pokemon. Wow. That's probably why some people disliked the gamecube console versions. 

But these games were not the first Pokemon games on consoles. Pokemon Stadium and Pokemon Stadium 2 for the N64 came first. For that era, the Pokemon looked beautiful and I guess that's what everyone wanted, to have the closest thing to real Pokemon they could find. But there wasn't much of a story mode, just a bunch of battles you could have with anyone. And this idea was also a bit flawed. Take a look: 

Anyway, if the trainer was smart, he would have sent out Nidoking to fight Electrode.(sorry for the abrupt ending)

See? It all looked a bit clunky and rough. But this idea would be perfected years later in Pokemon Battle Revolution. I understand that it didn't receive great critical reception, but it's not about story mode at all. It's about having a few friends over to connect their DS's to the Wii and watch as the Pokemon they trained turn into spectacular looking monoliths. Accompanied with commentary from the guy from the Pokemon Show. Everything felt like it should in that game and look, the moves actually land! No, I wouldn't buy Battle Revolution, but I would rent it if my friends were coming over and we wanted to have a giant Pokemon Battle!

Still, despite it all, I still prefer Pokemon on handhelds.