Throwback Thursday - Pokemon Red

I'm not a gamer. The only games I play are Mario Kart and Mario Party on my friend's Wii when I visit her in Pennsylvania. So, when my friend's boyfriend was telling me about Twitch Plays Pokemon a few months ago, I looked it up and thought it was a very interesting social experiment. I was sorry I didn't know about it when it was going on, but I don't frequent Twitch. And that was the last thought I gave to it. Then I went home for Christmas break and found my 17-year-old Gameboy color and my Pokemon Red game. It was the first video game I remember owning, it was the game used in the very first Twitch Plays Pokemon experiment and I really wanted to see if it's all I remember it to be.
Long story short - here's my opinion of a nearly 20 year old game.
The game play is pretty easy, which is not surprising considering it's a decade old children's game. The mazes and puzzles were my favorite parts, mostly because it was fun to see how much I actually remembered and where I got stuck.
This game doesn't deal kindly with people who don't like grinding, which I really don't. I like fighting other trainers, but not the wild Pokemon I found in the grass. Maybe it's some deep rooted sense of victory I get when I beat somebody, even if that somebody is a computer. Or, more likely, because wild Pokemon don't give you money for winning.
That brings me to the story itself here a little bit - this is an interesting society in the game. People walk around with thousands of dollars in their pocket, get into fights often, use small animals to fight for them, and willingly reward the victor out of their own pocket. There seems to be a distinctive lack of police and little by way of technology that doesn't revolve around Pokemon. The most interesting device is the Pokemon storage system and the Pokeballs. They can take living, breathing animals qne transform them into electronic data and back, all without any apparent harm to the Pokemon.
But there are no motor vehicles, airplanes, or really any of the technology we take for granted. They have bikes, Pokemon that fly and Pokemon that swim. That's the best you get by way of transportation other than by foot. It's a very interesting fictional culture. But I digress. This post is about the game, not about the little society I found in it.
Did I enjoy my blast from the past? Absolutely. And I think it's a testament to the old Gameboys that mine was still fully functional after so many years. All it needed was AA batteries.
I also have Pokemon Silver and Gold, which also haven't been touched in about a decade. Maybe you'll see a throwback post about those too sometime!

To read more about Twitch Plays Pokemon, visit en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitch_Plays_Pokemon.