Casey Baseel at Soranews24 reports that the city of Yokohama in Japan has Pokémon-themed mailboxes! The article tells us that, in Japan, while there is home delivery of mail, pickup is only at public locations like post offices and mailboxes. It’s those mailboxes that have the characters affixed to them. Because we can’t resist spoiling things, the Pokémon present are Pikachu (as seen above), Eevee, and Piplup. The article has more information, including detailed information on where to find them if you’re in Yokohama!
The Pokemon Mystery Dungeon games are interesting offshoots of the mainline Mystery Dungeon titles. They make clear a stark difference between primacy and popularity: if you only care about sales, then there is no question that Pokemon Mystery Dungeon games are the main games, because their sales vastly outweigh the other games. The games in the second generation, Explorers of Time/Darkness/Sky, are the best-selling Mystery Dungeon games of all. You have to know that there’s around 30 other games, many much older than the Pokemon flavor, in fact older than Pokemon itself by three years, to know the whole story.
Yet the PMD games are still Mystery Dungeon titles, and they play very similarly. They’re graphical roguelike dungeon-crawl games, just, you, your teammates, and your opponents are not generic fantasy creatures, but Pokemon. That is, specific fantasy creatures. Trademarked ones, in fact.
Because PMD’s fairly popular, you’re more likely to find investigations into its internals than the Shiren or other Mystery Dungeon games, just from the number of people who exist in its audience with both the will and skill to investigate. Yet, those internals are close enough to the MD standard that they even provide insight into how classic Mystery Dungeon operates.
YouPotato TheZZAZGlitch’s usualy video stomping grounds in Pokemon, but they have a fondness for PMD, so they’ve made a video on how the first generation (Red/Blue Rescue Team) generates its dungeons, and what do you know, many of these floor types are also very familiar to me from my time exploring the Shiren games, and it doesn’t seem a stretch at all to presume they’re run by the same, or at least a very similar, algorithm.
Do You Know Gaming’s subseries Region Lock has turned up a number of Pokemon games that they made for Sega systems in Japan! The Pico and Advanced Pico Beena systems were home to a few edutainment titles that taught through a variety of minigames. With no actual Pokemon gameplay, these titles are mostly curiosities today, but they are curious ones! Curious curiosities!
It’s pretty light as far as videos go, and more than a little click-bait-y, but it does show off some extremely obscure software.
From the depths of Mastodon, in that land of elephant people, four years ago josef posted a brilliant combination of a Beatles classic with some 8-bit Pokeflair. While the video seems gone from its initial upload, he reposted it on YouTube, which is what is embedded above.
