**Game talk starts at 13:00**
The fact that we haven't seen a Pokemon Snap re-release, remake, or sequel on smartphones, the Wii U, or the Switch is almost mind-boggling.
And then you remember it's Nintendo...
We all played this, right?? I remember this being one of the few games I could play with my brother and not fight (much). Pokemon Snap. You're on rails, and you can't die. You just take photos of Pokemon. Might sound silly in 2019, but holy hell this game was a big deal twenty years ago.
Outside of the cartoon, we hadn't really seen much of Pokemon outside of their pixelated Game Boy iterations. Getting to see all of our favourites (and that loser Charmander) out in the wild was pretty damned cool. Being able to throw apples at them to make them happy or angry was even cooler. And flipping through your roll of film to find your best photos and using them to impress a weird old man? The coolest.
That's all Pokemon Snap was. Try to get Pokemon to react to something you did, so you could snap killer photos of them. The better your photo, the better the score. That's it. No fighting. no bosses, no real drama or story. It didn't need it, though. There was something so addictive about constantly trying to get a better shot. You could play levels over and over looking for secret paths or different ways to cause the pokemon to do things you could get new photos of. And obviously, the biggest hook (for me anyways), was constantly exploring in hopes of finding a new pokemon. I don't think all original 151 were in here (which is very weird), but enough were there to justify running the levels or and over again. This was, in 1999, the closest we'd seen to Pokemon in real life.
This game SCREAMS for a sequel or remake with today's technology. Being able to spin around with your Switch, take photos, and then post your best ones online would be fucking awesome. Because admit it, when you got a killer shot of a Charizard looking all pissed off, you wanted to show it to everybody. Anybody. Someone other than that stupid old man Oak...
This wasn't the deepest game in the world, but it didn't matter. It was huge. We all loved it (whether we admitted it or not), and my buddy Andre and I had a hell of a time looking back at it. Give us a God damned sequel, Nintendo!!!