Day 72: Pokémon Pinball (GBC)

What did my random selector Pikachu-se as today's title to play from my 565 game backlog...

Pokémon Pinball for the GBC
Previous days' entries can be read HERE

A generation of Gameboy owners will likely be incredulous when I tell them that this is not just the only Pokémon game I own, but also, now, it’s the only one I’ve played.

I guess I missed out on the original kerfuffle thanks to being in my twenties, and after that I never caught up. I had a Game Boy pretty early on, and quite a few friends got them over the years, but I don’t remember anyone owning or playing a Pokémon game. It was all about Tetris, F1 Race, Tennis, and Super Mario Land. I lived in a Pokémon-free bubble until the cartoon turned up on TV - and even then I was baffled by its popularity.

Since then, the premise has never appealed, and the RPG stylings only serve to put me off further. The only reason I own Pokémon Pinball is because of my addiction to gimmicky video game stuff; bespoke controllers, bizarre attachments, bonkers bolt-ons… I love them all. So seeing Pokémon Pinball in a local shop with its bulbous cartridge to facilitate the rumble feature was impossible for me to resist.

Day 49: Xtreme Sports (GBC)

Xtreme-ly happy to back on the GBC in my ongoing efforts to play one title from my 593 game backlog for every day that the UK is in lockdown...

Xtreme Sports for the GBC
Previous days' entries can be read HERE

A little over a year ago I was compiling a large imgur post titled An A-Z of great Dreamcast games. I had a really good game that I was already familiar with for every letter of the alphabet except one...
I do quite a lot of video game A-Zs, it’s a good way to mix up the format rather than trotting out the world’s millionth ‘Top 25’ list, and usually ‘J’ is the problem letter - but obviously this is not the case with the Dreamcast - the phenomenal ‘Jet Set Radio’ has that more than covered. 
No, it turns out the Dreamcast has only one game in it’s entire library that starts with the letter ‘X’, and  technically that's only in North America where the game otherwise known as ‘Sega Extreme Sports’ or ‘Pepsi Max Extreme Sports’ was given the radical new name of, simply: ‘Xtreme Sports’.

Obviously I had to do some research and play the game to include it on the list, and in the course of that research I discovered that alongside the Dreamcast & PC game was another, completely unrelated, game of the same name for the Game Boy Color, and what’s more it was developed by none other than WayForward Technologies, a developer of whom I am quite a fan. So I bought both versions.