Welcome to a new edition of Retro Corner and I have a unique spin-off from the Pokemon series that released in 2000. Pokemon Stadium along with Pokemon Snap was a spinoff for the N64 that brought 2D gameplay into 3D for the first time. However, this is no RPG adventure but just battles in a stadium and some fun features to play around with. When this saw a release, Stadium came in a big box because it was packaged with the Transfer Pak. It's a peripheral device you insert into the back of a slot on the controller. Then in turn, the player would insert a game boy title into the Transfer Pak. You were able to extract the information from any main game to run it on the system. Meaning you could play your team from the main Game Boy entries in 3D for the stadium battles. It was among the few titles that supported the Transfer Pak and its handheld counter parts. It's still considered a unique attachment device for the console. Gameplay The gameplay in the original Japanese release from 1998 was vastly improved for the North American edition. All the modes from the Japanese release such as Free Battle and Tournament are featured here. Now, all 151 Pokemon are all present and the player can use any at the start of a battle mode. A new mode called Gym Leader Castle got added and this has the player face several trainers, the Gym leaders and the Elite Four in a gauntlet style. As many have said, this feels like a complete game in comparison to the original Japanese release. Just as it is in the Game Boy Titles, the player must confront a few trainers before they could get to the Gym Leader. To make the challenge even more worth it, the game rewards the player with special Pokemon like the Starters. So if you didn't have two versions, Stadium could transfer these to the handheld titles via the Transfer Pak. Always dreamed of challenging a friend to a battle in 3D? Stadium made that a dream come true for us back then and all you need was a second controller and another Transfer Pak. Enjoying a battle always felt great playing against someone on a console instead of a tiny screen. The other tournaments had various challenges and classes to play through to unlock something. By completing Petite and Poke Tournaments on all difficulties unlocks the Game Boy Tower. However, by completing all tournaments on four difficulties will allow you access to battling MewTwo. Don't expect this fight to come off easy as here MewTwo came prepared unlike your last encounter. His difficulty is above moderate where he isn't impossible to beat but will need your best Pokemon to defeat him. EAD did MewTwo justice compared to Game Freak's efforts in making him a push over on the handheld titles. Usually when I think of a secret Pokemon that's powerful, you would think he be just as impossible to beat like with the legendaries. I still discovered a few issues that needed some work from the original and unfortunately they weren't addressed here. Let's begin with the difficulty spike in the tournaments on Ultra and Master Ball modes and it got annoying on most occasions. I would either miss most of the time with an attack, or your opponent executes critical hits on their turn. During one battle the CPU's team literally gave me eight critical hits in a row. That rarely happened in the Game Boy titles but on Stadium these moves like Slash were always programmed as a powerful attack. That is some unbalanced difficulty as there are better ways to increase this then simply letting the CPU or a move always get a critical hit. Another issue was I couldn't switch my team out when the CPU or the other players Pokemon fainted. On the Game Boy titles, this is always asked by the game when you faint an opponent's Pokemon. So why was this an issue for the studio of EAD? I assume it's because they thought this was a spinoff so the same attention the main games were getting wouldn't matter. Rating: 8.3/10 Graphics/Presentation The detail for this spinoff is genuinely good when you consider how Hudson develops Mario Party with cheap designs. Unlike Mario Party, the 3D Models have the design as they appear in their artwork from the Game Boy games. In fact I feel the developers took this farther thanks to the power of the N64 and allowing them to come off broad. The reason their detail and size is such a big deal is because this was the first time we were seeing them animated in 3D battles. The character models have the fewest blocky edges on their polygons and appeared smooth just like in the anime. The animation was also fluid and the characters moved in an exact manner as seen on the show. The special effects were the icing on the cake and made these attacks look truly believable back then. Just seeing attacks like Nightshade, Psychic, Surf, Hyper Beam and Solar Beam in 3D just made me sit there in amazement. Stadium wasn't Perfect Dark or Zelda: Majora's Mask but graphical on its own was still a pretty good effort for a spinoff. If there are some things to criticize then it comes from the environments. The Stadium Arena was a little genetic compared to Gym Leader Castle and the outside field. The crowd was the worst part as no form of animation is ever shown at any angle. It's just a still image of color dots on a black JPEG pasted on the polygon of the environment. Of course, in several wrestling titles from WWF and WCW had the crowd in the arena act as a still image. However, this got slightly better through Generation Five as AKI eventually started animating the crowd with moving up and down. They even had front images of each fan move separately from the other in a random order. The audio for the remixes sounded solid compared to the originals from the Game Boy titles. Despite the effort from the studio of EAD, the same isn't said for the commentator who constantly says the same thing in different orders. I never found it annoying due to the fact this is an old game from a time when voice overs sounded bland. I still can understand why some found him annoying and perhaps EAD should have never put in commentary. They even had an off option for him in the Option Menu, so EAD probably knew it was going get annoying. Rating: 8.0/10 Features/Content The content was jammed packed with stuff to do compare to the previous spinoffs like Snap. As soon as you get to the map of the area selections, the menu greets the player with several features. One of my favorite features is the Gym Leader Castle and the Game Boy Tower. As you can tell I am a fan of gauntlet style modes in most Adventure RPG titles because of the challenges they bring. I already got a slight taste of it in the Game Boy Titles which only made the Elite Four one of those special final battles. However, here they went all out as you face the Gym Leaders and The Elite Four one after the other while facing the mid tier trainers. I would put in countless hours into Gym Leader Castle because of how much it rewarded me with the starters and additional one time obtained Pokemon. I also loved the Game Boy Tower, and you could play the main Game Boy titles using the Transfer Pak in this mode. The best part allows gamers to play on three different speeds considering how slow the older titles ran. Of course you had to unlock Duduo and Dudrio speeds by getting all cups in the Poke and Petite tournaments. However, it will be worth getting these trophies if that means playing these games quickly. On top of that, the Game Boy Tower reminded me of the Super Game Boy on Super NES in many ways because of the same functions. The stadium tournaments played pretty good for an arena style battle as each difficulty were challenging. The only thing that really interested me about these tournaments was the fact you needed to get four trophies in the Poke and Petite Cups. That was really the only thing that would entice me to complete these, despite their unbalanced difficulty in the Ultra and Master cups. The mini games were probably the weakest feature because it literally felt tacked on and got added for no reason. Most of the mini games hardly compare to what Mario Party 2 had to offer. Rarely do I play these simple distractions as even as someone below the age of four could easily win. The multiplayer was a pretty good feature as anyone with a transfer pak and their own Red, Blue, or Yellow cartridge could face each other with their team. That made it so much easier and more engaging to have a battle on a console then on the small Game Boy screen. The fact Stadium was in 3D just made it more interesting at the time. That obviously was the closet we were going to get to a console Pokemon game. The Transfer Pak was probably the best peripheral device they released on the N64. It's especially true when the attachment offered players to interact between Game Boy Titles and console games. Rating: 8.7/10 Final Rating Stadium is hands down one of the best spinoffs in the series that Nintendo released from that era. It wasn't being sold on a novelty like Pokemon Snap or Pinball League and they had good intentions especially with the Transfer Pak. It's sad this peripheral wasn't used often by third parties when Nintendo only supported the device. The only company that wanted to use the device was AKI with the scrapped Game Boy Color port of WWF: No Mercy. The add-on allowed me to play my team or the other Pokemon I collected from the main games in 3D. Despite a few kinks in the gameplay, it still remains close to the main series. The graphics weren't the best the console saw at that point, but it's a step up from Pokemon Snap. The 3D models and the special effects were the best things for the graphics especially the remixed songs. There was a great deal of content and features to play around with and would offer a ton of replay value. When there are modes like Gym Leader Castle, the Game Boy Tower and the multiplayer, these were the reasons I came back. Gameplay: 8.3/10 Graphics/Presentation: 8.0/10 Features/Content: 8.7/10 Final Rating: 8.5/10 Great
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Retro Gamer has over 25 years of gaming experience and played many classics since the Golden Age. She has been an avid fan since the day the NES graced her life and changed it forever.
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