I’ve just added some updates to the iPokédex today, inspired (as was the iPokédex) itself by questions my son asked that I couldn’t answer.

The search page now offers a “special evolution conditions” dropdown menu, allowing you to see at a glance all of the various special evolution conditions that exist and, with a click, get a list of the Pokémon affected. (So now he knows which Pokémon evolve with Thunderstone.)

I also added a link to a handy battle chart on the “sources” page, although I would like to add a direct capability to select a type (or click the type on the Pokémon’s detail page) and instantly see all of the details about that type’s strengths and weaknesses. That’ll be version 1.3.

Yes, I am into Pokémon. Way more than any 34-year-old could possibly justify. At least I have a kid I can use as my excuse. But it’s getting pretty serious. First the DS video games, now the trading card game, and of course I will sometimes watch the TV show and DVDs with him.

If you know anything about Pokémon (or, for those of you over the age of 10, who don’t), you know there are a lot of them. In fact, the sheer, staggering proliferation of them seems to be the main point, or at least a shrewd marketing tactic. As a result, there’s a lot of information to know about them, and thus arose the idea of the “Pokédex,” or Pokémon Index. The Pokédex is both an element in the games and the TV show, and a tool for fans, to store and retrieve information about all of the various Pokémon.

That’s all well and good, but what I really wanted was a version that was always at my fingertips, i.e. a version that works on my iPhone. Strangely there seemed to be no iPhone-friendly Pokédex out there. I can understand why an official one wouldn’t exist, what with Nintendo’s reluctance to license their brands to other hardware manufacturers (a smart move when you consider the disaster that resulted the one and only time they tried it), and especially when you consider that the iPhone is now essentially a competitor to the Nintendo DS.

Anyway… the point of all of this is that I’ve built my own iPhone-friendly Pokédex, which I am oh-so-creatively calling the iPokédex. Don’t bother going to ipokedex.com though. (Yeah, I have no idea either.) I may eventually register a unique domain name for it (assuming I don’t get sued in the meantime), but for now you can find it here at this relatively pithy URL:

room34.com/pokemon

Enjoy!

Since I was in my mid-20s when Pokémon was created, I never really “got” it. The only thing I knew about it was the whole seizure thing. But then I had kids. Just before he turned 4, my son went through a brief-but-intense phase of obsession with the Pokémon cartoons and toys just before he discovered Mario and the video game floodgates opened, leaving all past obsessions (Thomas, Star Wars, etc.) in the dust (if you’ll pardon the mixed metaphor).

So as the video game thing took off, I bought him Pokémon FireRed for the Game Boy Advance, thinking I could tap into his pre-video game interest. I vaguely knew that the games were RPG-style, but I didn’t make the connection that, unlike in many games, where there’s reading but it’s fairly inconsequential, in a Pokémon game it is absolutely essential that you be able to read in order to play. Since my son’s still a pre-schooler, that didn’t work out so well. Read more »

I would imagine that most people who are bothering to read my blog have at least a passing familiarity with the infamous Pokémon seizure incident back in 1997. After all, it was even parodied on The Simpsons.

I’ve finally united my interest in obnoxious JavaScript with my desire to pay my own tribute to “the incident,” and so, I present to the world my Pokémon Seizure Inducer. I’ve also made a permanent link to it in my Curiosities section.