Well many people did buy multiple variations of the Nintendo DS. Black and White in North America were relased a few weeks before the 3DS so a few people did technically have 2 DS systems.
MerryBytes: No one in this world mistreats Pokemon. Player: Spends hours on a eugenics experiment breeding and tossing 30 newborn Pokemon until they find one with perfect IV's. Idk man maybe N had a point lol.
Except that having them have sex isn't mistreating them? It's not like you're breeding for negative traits, like how modern pugs have respiratory problems due to the shortening of their snouts. You're literally making the more genetically fit ones. So yeah, I don't see that as mistreatment of pokemon at all. And either way since pokemon are sentient, maybe N should _fucking ask them!_ Not every pokemon can communicate easily with humans but there's a *bunch* that can do so with telepathy or other means. Like fuck's sake, he really IS a representation of PETA, deciding for himself that these animals are being mistreated with no care for the supposed victim's thoughts on the matter.
I think rebooting the roster of Pokémon was a good idea and if the designs were better less people would have complained. Voltorb and Electrode are cool designs and a clever take on JRPG mimics.
Voltorb and Electrode also get a pass imo because they're using mimicry like real animals do, beyond being mimics in the RPG sense. It's neat. More importantly, the thing they are mimicking is itself an unusual object that people don't already encounter in their everyday lives irl. I see rings of keys every day, I keep mine on my desk, it's rarely not in the same room as me. Likewise, I see bags of garbage all the time. I've eaten an ice cream cone. But I don't see pokeballs in real life very often, even with as popular as Pokemon is. I've never held one, because they aren't real, and that adds to how engaging the design is, because it is inherently not mundane (though in-setting it is). Likewise, while I might see screws, ball bearings and magnets in real life Magnemite's design has them arranged together in a way that isn't how you normally see them. Having its "face" just be a single eye also helps avoid the "mundane every day object with a face" issue of gen 5's biggest complaint targets. Evolving into more of an already interesting, imaginative design is fine, Dugtrio/Magneton/Weezing are fine. And something that always bothers me when people defend the gen 5 bad mons is that they'll usually do as Merrybytes did here and point out pokemon from gen 1 that they consider lazy/bad/whatever. But here's the thing: gen 1 was the first. Even if I grant that some of gen 1's designs are bad, isn't it reasonable to expect the games to actually get _better_ with each generation? Isn't it reasonable to expect that the people in charge of pokemon designs get better at it and have less stinkers? Instead it seems like we get more as the series continues. I mean we've gone beyond 'that's just a Digimon" at this point, now we're at 'that's a Megaman character'! tl;dr- I wish people would stop dismissing criticism of certain pokemon's designs.
Generation 5 is still one of my favorite generations right next to generation 2 and generation 3 as long as we're talking about omega ruby and alpha sapphire. I do wish that game freak would try again with having an interesting story and some sense of character development and feel like an RPG but considering what the series was like after black-and-white 2 and still is, we're never gonna get something like generation 5 ever again. I know we'll most likely get the inevitable generation 5 remakes but considering what happened with the diamond and pearl ones, I don't want them to screw over black-and-white. The original games are fine as they are even with black-and-white one's flimsy points of telling a good story and black-and-white 2 with it's complete lack of risk for doing something new in it's storytelling. Still recommend them both and great review of this gen!
The problem with Black and White is that the writers have nowhere near the skill to tell the kind of story that they want to tell. The developer says that they were meant to be more mature rather than for kids, but like you say the writing never rises above childish. I've seen a lot of people defend B+W against criticism of its story, and it's never good. Usually it's less defending the game and more making excuses, or trying to invalidate the criticism. Like that Pokemon isn't about the story, which I would agree with! Except that Gamefreak clearly doesn't agree and has grown more and more determined to have story and plot be a large part of the main series. So you see, I _can't_ just ignore the story and enjoy the game, because the game _is_ the story, the developers put in a lot of time and effort to do so. This isn't like Doom where its plot is barely there as the barest pretext for why you're killing demons. So while some people might be happy to just mash A though all the dialogue, that doesn't make criticism of the story and storytelling invalid in the slightest. So, yeah. All those things you bring up about the plot just crush my ability to enjoy the game. N only thinking "Hey, you know these pokemon I've encountered are totally different from the ones I was raised with" at the very end and not actually talking to anyone about it. Everyone just _listening_ to Plasma's speeches and considering it instead of scoffing and ignoring them like they should, like everything about Pokemon gives me reason to believe they _would!_ Not noticing all of Ghetsis' or however you spell his stupid name's mistakes during his speeches which reveal him to be a comic book villain, despite even a child playing the game being able to tell he isn't honest. Hell, the fact that the gym leaders just don't do anything! They get intimidated by Team Plasma. Where the fuck are people with balls like Lance who'll fucking have his Dragonite Hyper Beam a mafia goon into the wall? Not in Unova I guess! (Just as a note I stopped playing when I got to Victory Road. I just ran out of steam, the game wasn't engaging me enough to come back to it so I set it down one night and never picked it back up. If the gym leaders suddenly get a spine and do something after that, I don't know and frankly them doing nothing for 80% or more of the game is too long to ask me to wait) They want to tell this big mature story but clearly have not a clue about how you tell such a mature, complex story. It's frustrating. Because I love traditional JRPGs! I love games that have a heavy story focus, Final Fantasy 10 is one of my favorite games of all time! So I'm not automatically against having a meaningful plot in Pokemon, but every time Gamefreak has tried they have messed it up. I mentioned in your gen 3 review that I think this started in gen 3, and I know you disagree with that and have a higher opinion of its plot than me, and that's fine. But I still really cannot help but see a decline in the quality of writing as the generations go on, coinciding with an increasing focus _on_ writing. And gen 5 is where it's most prevalent imo. I wish Gamefreak would be more self aware of their own limitations and capabilities and stop trying to push for big stories in their games, because they're clearly not good at writing them. Pokemon is at its best, for me, when the plot is low-stakes (gen 1, 2, and most of 7) and mostly in the background. Grounded foes who want understandable, believable, realistic goals like "making money through exploiting animals" or "being disenfranchised punks who vandalize property", things like that. Pokemon has ever been loved for its concept, of going on a journey through a world, seeing new sights and encountering fantastical creatures. _That,_ I would argue, is where Pokemon shines the most (when it's not completely fucking up the designs and losing sight of its own design style and making things that look more like Digimon than pokemon, or freaking Megaman characters or _fucking motorcycles!_) and what I think Gamefreak should refocus on. I'm sure a lot of this sounds like just some neckbeard bitching because a game series he liked as a child is different now. And it's true, my love of Pokemon games was strongest when I was a child, in the earlier generations. And I only experienced gens 4+ as an adult once I had money of my own and could get a DS and other consoles. ButI've re-experienced media that I loved as a kid and teenager, rewatched TV series and films and replayed games, and while some of them hold up, others don't. I like to think I can put aside my biases, can differentiate between whether something is good and whether I _like_ that thing. So yeah, I don't like that pokemon is different from when I was a child. But that's because I think the changes that have happened are changes for the worst, and that positive changes such as the physical/special split, removal of HMs, reusable TMs, etc, do not at all outweigh the negatives. Thank you for coming to my Ted Talk, be sure to tip your waitress and give Hilda a visit in the back alley after you leave.
It's cool, I'm glad people are willing to engage so strongly with my videos. I do try to hold back from going full neckbeard mode sometimes, but some of it always ends up showing up in what I write. That's why every other video I make has a section where I complain about the state of the Pokémon franchise nowadays. I have a lot to say about Gen 7, both positive and negative, but I think it's one of the best and one of the worst for this. It's really, really great when it's just trying to be a happy fun times vacation on paradise that maximizes the child-like wonder of exploring a world with magical creatures. And then Lillie orders you to get to the hotel and you have no other choice but to go along and unfold the story of Lusamine and the tentacle monster. I've actually been thinking a lot about the way I interact with video games for the past few months, and that includes the way in which I perceive their stories. There's this script I've been working on and off for over a year, and it has ballooned into an unhinged session of rambling about stuff that goes beyond just the game in question. I'm not sure when I'll actually get those thoughts out, but maybe on April Fools, just for the hell of it.
@@MerryBytes Oh dang, I'm definitely excited for that video whenever it comes! And thank you again for accepting my neckbearding in the comments. And yeah, I only played Ultra Moon, but what I played of it I really enjoyed. Even the weird little science fiction interludes with people from another dimension because they stayed in the background as just, charming exotic visitors who didn't get in the way. The first time they appeared I was dreading them being the bad guys and constantly showing up, but no! It was surprisingly pleasant. And then the game had to ruin things by deciding "You know what's a cool, child-appropriate topic for our video game for children that we say is for children and that's why they can't be challenging and need to be made easier with each generation? _Child abuse._ Let's make a physically and verbally abusive parent the focus of the plot for the final 15-20% of the game!" And, just... that's where I draw my own line. Because as heinous as genocide is and its inclusion in gen 6 is absurd, it's such a massive thing that it's hard to feel connected to it. Despite being a real thing, a thing that has been done multiple times in human history and even in some ways is happening today, it's just so big that it's difficult to really feel it as a personal thing. But abuse? No. That's very down to earth, grounded, mundane evil that real people possibly playing your video game could be going through. That is where I draw the line for what is acceptable in a game explicitly for children. _Especially when it's handled as horribly as it is by Gamefreak's writers._ Which is a pity, because I actually REALLY like Lillie! She's my favorite Pokemon character since Gary "Dicks" Oak. She has an actual character arc unlike basically anyone in the games since the rival in gen 2. I felt real sympathy for her, and horror when I found out what had been done to her by her mother (just because I felt that emotion doesn't mean the abuse stuff is appropriate for the game or done well, even as shitty a depiction of abuse as gen 7 has should evoke such a response from anyone who isn't a complete sociopath) and I was genuinely happy to see her self actualize at the end and begin her own pokemon journey. I honest to god wished there had been some kind of secret post-game or sequel where you'd follow her on _her_ pokemon journey like she followed you on yours. So you can see why having her be connected to the absolute worst parts of the game is frustrating to me. I can't wait for your gen 7 video where I can talk about all this *again!* Also, belated happy holidays :)
Man, Gen 6 really is something else, the dialogue in XY has some real tone deaf moments. Like Lysandre very publicly declaring that he's going to "purge the filth" and Sycamore just goes "damn Lysandre you're so cool and passionate". I don't remember Gen 7 being as egregious despite the whiplash between the comfy parts and the family issues, but I'll have to refresh my memory on that eventually when the video gets underway later this year. The Ultra versions do change the way some late story events develop, and some people prefer the vanilla version of the plot. I also played Ultra Moon before the original Sun and Moon so that probably screwed up my perception a bit. We'll see. XY comes first. But for now, enjoy your holidays!
I did not expect a Gen 5 video before a remake was even announced. I really liked the whole dex being fresh and not going into a cave seeing Zubat for the billions of time. Or go to the sea and see another Tentacool. But what annoys me is that the new Pokemon are mostly redesigned Gen 1 Pokemon and not something new. Another dex full of too many legendary Pokemon like in Gen 4 making only a few memorable. So most Pokemon felt like filler. Each Mono-Type is represented including a pure Flying type... why did Tornadus have to be the first pure flying type of all things? It annoys me to no end. What I also don't like is the high evolution levels of many Unova Pokemon which honestly should have been retconned. B2W2 kinda fixed some by allowing players to catch evolutions of rather underwhelming high evolution Pokemon early on such as Braviary at lv25 which even has the hidden ability. And funnily enough, you can even get a Volcarona around Gym 5 half the original capture level. Something that evolves at lv59 at a much smaller level basically giving you a legendary tier monster to break the game. BW2 really aged much better than I expected as BW1 was my favorite but the forced linearity with little side objectives and the similarities of many new Pokemon to old Pokemon restricted my enjoyment. Also the high evolution level problem of many Unova mons. PWT sadly has no Elite 4 members which is a missed opportunity. The entire Dark section is full of nobodies. Karen, where are you? Did you manage to make the Stadium games run yet with the GBC games?
Yep, I got Stadium in the works for 2023 sometime, though for some reason I can't get the GBC save files to be altered by the N64 emulator (Project64 in this case), which means I can't get rewards and item/Pokémon trades done. Everything else that just involves reading data from the GBC games works fine though, so I can use the Pokémon from the GBC games in Stadium battles.
Yes, though not by itself. Plans Change™ so I'm going to start going through the Serious Sam games I haven't covered yet, and then cover Siberian Mayhem when I revisit Serious Sam 4. A video on Next Encounter should be coming sometime in the next 2 or 3 months, then later comes 2, then BFE, and then 4 + Siberian Mayhem together.
Well many people did buy multiple variations of the Nintendo DS. Black and White in North America were relased a few weeks before the 3DS so a few people did technically have 2 DS systems.
MerryBytes: No one in this world mistreats Pokemon.
Player: Spends hours on a eugenics experiment breeding and tossing 30 newborn Pokemon until they find one with perfect IV's.
Idk man maybe N had a point lol.
Except that having them have sex isn't mistreating them? It's not like you're breeding for negative traits, like how modern pugs have respiratory problems due to the shortening of their snouts. You're literally making the more genetically fit ones. So yeah, I don't see that as mistreatment of pokemon at all. And either way since pokemon are sentient, maybe N should _fucking ask them!_ Not every pokemon can communicate easily with humans but there's a *bunch* that can do so with telepathy or other means. Like fuck's sake, he really IS a representation of PETA, deciding for himself that these animals are being mistreated with no care for the supposed victim's thoughts on the matter.
Happy to see my favorite generation get some love
Your content feels genuine. Keep it up.
Love your content and I've been waiting for the gen 5 retrospect for a long time. You did not disappoint.
I'm glad you enjoyed it, Gen 5 is a pretty spicy generation to talk about. Also, thank you so much for your very generous Super Thanks!
I think rebooting the roster of Pokémon was a good idea and if the designs were better less people would have complained. Voltorb and Electrode are cool designs and a clever take on JRPG mimics.
Voltorb and Electrode also get a pass imo because they're using mimicry like real animals do, beyond being mimics in the RPG sense. It's neat. More importantly, the thing they are mimicking is itself an unusual object that people don't already encounter in their everyday lives irl. I see rings of keys every day, I keep mine on my desk, it's rarely not in the same room as me. Likewise, I see bags of garbage all the time. I've eaten an ice cream cone. But I don't see pokeballs in real life very often, even with as popular as Pokemon is. I've never held one, because they aren't real, and that adds to how engaging the design is, because it is inherently not mundane (though in-setting it is).
Likewise, while I might see screws, ball bearings and magnets in real life Magnemite's design has them arranged together in a way that isn't how you normally see them. Having its "face" just be a single eye also helps avoid the "mundane every day object with a face" issue of gen 5's biggest complaint targets. Evolving into more of an already interesting, imaginative design is fine, Dugtrio/Magneton/Weezing are fine.
And something that always bothers me when people defend the gen 5 bad mons is that they'll usually do as Merrybytes did here and point out pokemon from gen 1 that they consider lazy/bad/whatever. But here's the thing: gen 1 was the first. Even if I grant that some of gen 1's designs are bad, isn't it reasonable to expect the games to actually get _better_ with each generation? Isn't it reasonable to expect that the people in charge of pokemon designs get better at it and have less stinkers? Instead it seems like we get more as the series continues. I mean we've gone beyond 'that's just a Digimon" at this point, now we're at 'that's a Megaman character'!
tl;dr- I wish people would stop dismissing criticism of certain pokemon's designs.
Most fun generation.. been a fan since gen 1
great series i enjoyed
Generation 5 is still one of my favorite generations right next to generation 2 and generation 3 as long as we're talking about omega ruby and alpha sapphire. I do wish that game freak would try again with having an interesting story and some sense of character development and feel like an RPG but considering what the series was like after black-and-white 2 and still is, we're never gonna get something like generation 5 ever again. I know we'll most likely get the inevitable generation 5 remakes but considering what happened with the diamond and pearl ones, I don't want them to screw over black-and-white. The original games are fine as they are even with black-and-white one's flimsy points of telling a good story and black-and-white 2 with it's complete lack of risk for doing something new in it's storytelling. Still recommend them both and great review of this gen!
The problem with Black and White is that the writers have nowhere near the skill to tell the kind of story that they want to tell. The developer says that they were meant to be more mature rather than for kids, but like you say the writing never rises above childish. I've seen a lot of people defend B+W against criticism of its story, and it's never good. Usually it's less defending the game and more making excuses, or trying to invalidate the criticism. Like that Pokemon isn't about the story, which I would agree with!
Except that Gamefreak clearly doesn't agree and has grown more and more determined to have story and plot be a large part of the main series. So you see, I _can't_ just ignore the story and enjoy the game, because the game _is_ the story, the developers put in a lot of time and effort to do so. This isn't like Doom where its plot is barely there as the barest pretext for why you're killing demons. So while some people might be happy to just mash A though all the dialogue, that doesn't make criticism of the story and storytelling invalid in the slightest.
So, yeah. All those things you bring up about the plot just crush my ability to enjoy the game. N only thinking "Hey, you know these pokemon I've encountered are totally different from the ones I was raised with" at the very end and not actually talking to anyone about it. Everyone just _listening_ to Plasma's speeches and considering it instead of scoffing and ignoring them like they should, like everything about Pokemon gives me reason to believe they _would!_ Not noticing all of Ghetsis' or however you spell his stupid name's mistakes during his speeches which reveal him to be a comic book villain, despite even a child playing the game being able to tell he isn't honest. Hell, the fact that the gym leaders just don't do anything! They get intimidated by Team Plasma. Where the fuck are people with balls like Lance who'll fucking have his Dragonite Hyper Beam a mafia goon into the wall? Not in Unova I guess! (Just as a note I stopped playing when I got to Victory Road. I just ran out of steam, the game wasn't engaging me enough to come back to it so I set it down one night and never picked it back up. If the gym leaders suddenly get a spine and do something after that, I don't know and frankly them doing nothing for 80% or more of the game is too long to ask me to wait)
They want to tell this big mature story but clearly have not a clue about how you tell such a mature, complex story. It's frustrating. Because I love traditional JRPGs! I love games that have a heavy story focus, Final Fantasy 10 is one of my favorite games of all time! So I'm not automatically against having a meaningful plot in Pokemon, but every time Gamefreak has tried they have messed it up. I mentioned in your gen 3 review that I think this started in gen 3, and I know you disagree with that and have a higher opinion of its plot than me, and that's fine. But I still really cannot help but see a decline in the quality of writing as the generations go on, coinciding with an increasing focus _on_ writing. And gen 5 is where it's most prevalent imo.
I wish Gamefreak would be more self aware of their own limitations and capabilities and stop trying to push for big stories in their games, because they're clearly not good at writing them. Pokemon is at its best, for me, when the plot is low-stakes (gen 1, 2, and most of 7) and mostly in the background. Grounded foes who want understandable, believable, realistic goals like "making money through exploiting animals" or "being disenfranchised punks who vandalize property", things like that. Pokemon has ever been loved for its concept, of going on a journey through a world, seeing new sights and encountering fantastical creatures. _That,_ I would argue, is where Pokemon shines the most (when it's not completely fucking up the designs and losing sight of its own design style and making things that look more like Digimon than pokemon, or freaking Megaman characters or _fucking motorcycles!_) and what I think Gamefreak should refocus on.
I'm sure a lot of this sounds like just some neckbeard bitching because a game series he liked as a child is different now. And it's true, my love of Pokemon games was strongest when I was a child, in the earlier generations. And I only experienced gens 4+ as an adult once I had money of my own and could get a DS and other consoles. ButI've re-experienced media that I loved as a kid and teenager, rewatched TV series and films and replayed games, and while some of them hold up, others don't. I like to think I can put aside my biases, can differentiate between whether something is good and whether I _like_ that thing. So yeah, I don't like that pokemon is different from when I was a child. But that's because I think the changes that have happened are changes for the worst, and that positive changes such as the physical/special split, removal of HMs, reusable TMs, etc, do not at all outweigh the negatives.
Thank you for coming to my Ted Talk, be sure to tip your waitress and give Hilda a visit in the back alley after you leave.
It's cool, I'm glad people are willing to engage so strongly with my videos. I do try to hold back from going full neckbeard mode sometimes, but some of it always ends up showing up in what I write. That's why every other video I make has a section where I complain about the state of the Pokémon franchise nowadays.
I have a lot to say about Gen 7, both positive and negative, but I think it's one of the best and one of the worst for this. It's really, really great when it's just trying to be a happy fun times vacation on paradise that maximizes the child-like wonder of exploring a world with magical creatures. And then Lillie orders you to get to the hotel and you have no other choice but to go along and unfold the story of Lusamine and the tentacle monster.
I've actually been thinking a lot about the way I interact with video games for the past few months, and that includes the way in which I perceive their stories. There's this script I've been working on and off for over a year, and it has ballooned into an unhinged session of rambling about stuff that goes beyond just the game in question. I'm not sure when I'll actually get those thoughts out, but maybe on April Fools, just for the hell of it.
@@MerryBytes Oh dang, I'm definitely excited for that video whenever it comes! And thank you again for accepting my neckbearding in the comments.
And yeah, I only played Ultra Moon, but what I played of it I really enjoyed. Even the weird little science fiction interludes with people from another dimension because they stayed in the background as just, charming exotic visitors who didn't get in the way. The first time they appeared I was dreading them being the bad guys and constantly showing up, but no! It was surprisingly pleasant. And then the game had to ruin things by deciding "You know what's a cool, child-appropriate topic for our video game for children that we say is for children and that's why they can't be challenging and need to be made easier with each generation? _Child abuse._ Let's make a physically and verbally abusive parent the focus of the plot for the final 15-20% of the game!"
And, just... that's where I draw my own line. Because as heinous as genocide is and its inclusion in gen 6 is absurd, it's such a massive thing that it's hard to feel connected to it. Despite being a real thing, a thing that has been done multiple times in human history and even in some ways is happening today, it's just so big that it's difficult to really feel it as a personal thing. But abuse? No. That's very down to earth, grounded, mundane evil that real people possibly playing your video game could be going through. That is where I draw the line for what is acceptable in a game explicitly for children. _Especially when it's handled as horribly as it is by Gamefreak's writers._
Which is a pity, because I actually REALLY like Lillie! She's my favorite Pokemon character since Gary "Dicks" Oak. She has an actual character arc unlike basically anyone in the games since the rival in gen 2. I felt real sympathy for her, and horror when I found out what had been done to her by her mother (just because I felt that emotion doesn't mean the abuse stuff is appropriate for the game or done well, even as shitty a depiction of abuse as gen 7 has should evoke such a response from anyone who isn't a complete sociopath) and I was genuinely happy to see her self actualize at the end and begin her own pokemon journey. I honest to god wished there had been some kind of secret post-game or sequel where you'd follow her on _her_ pokemon journey like she followed you on yours.
So you can see why having her be connected to the absolute worst parts of the game is frustrating to me.
I can't wait for your gen 7 video where I can talk about all this *again!* Also, belated happy holidays :)
Man, Gen 6 really is something else, the dialogue in XY has some real tone deaf moments. Like Lysandre very publicly declaring that he's going to "purge the filth" and Sycamore just goes "damn Lysandre you're so cool and passionate".
I don't remember Gen 7 being as egregious despite the whiplash between the comfy parts and the family issues, but I'll have to refresh my memory on that eventually when the video gets underway later this year. The Ultra versions do change the way some late story events develop, and some people prefer the vanilla version of the plot. I also played Ultra Moon before the original Sun and Moon so that probably screwed up my perception a bit.
We'll see. XY comes first. But for now, enjoy your holidays!
I did not expect a Gen 5 video before a remake was even announced.
I really liked the whole dex being fresh and not going into a cave seeing Zubat for the billions of time. Or go to the sea and see another Tentacool. But what annoys me is that the new Pokemon are mostly redesigned Gen 1 Pokemon and not something new. Another dex full of too many legendary Pokemon like in Gen 4 making only a few memorable.
So most Pokemon felt like filler. Each Mono-Type is represented including a pure Flying type... why did Tornadus have to be the first pure flying type of all things? It annoys me to no end.
What I also don't like is the high evolution levels of many Unova Pokemon which honestly should have been retconned. B2W2 kinda fixed some by allowing players to catch evolutions of rather underwhelming high evolution Pokemon early on such as Braviary at lv25 which even has the hidden ability. And funnily enough, you can even get a Volcarona around Gym 5 half the original capture level. Something that evolves at lv59 at a much smaller level basically giving you a legendary tier monster to break the game.
BW2 really aged much better than I expected as BW1 was my favorite but the forced linearity with little side objectives and the similarities of many new Pokemon to old Pokemon restricted my enjoyment. Also the high evolution level problem of many Unova mons.
PWT sadly has no Elite 4 members which is a missed opportunity. The entire Dark section is full of nobodies. Karen, where are you?
Did you manage to make the Stadium games run yet with the GBC games?
Yep, I got Stadium in the works for 2023 sometime, though for some reason I can't get the GBC save files to be altered by the N64 emulator (Project64 in this case), which means I can't get rewards and item/Pokémon trades done. Everything else that just involves reading data from the GBC games works fine though, so I can use the Pokémon from the GBC games in Stadium battles.
Are you planning to do a look at Siberian Mayhem?
Yes, though not by itself. Plans Change™ so I'm going to start going through the Serious Sam games I haven't covered yet, and then cover Siberian Mayhem when I revisit Serious Sam 4.
A video on Next Encounter should be coming sometime in the next 2 or 3 months, then later comes 2, then BFE, and then 4 + Siberian Mayhem together.
@@MerryBytes Cool, thanks!