Pokemon Dash review:
You've been warned.The Deeko MinuteRace using Pikachu and... um... that's it Use just the stylus! No buttons necessary! Hours of pain and suffering! Horrible use of the Pokemon License Track editor that sucks as much as the game! Difficulty: Retarded Number of Players: 6Other RecommendationsPokemon Fire Red Pokemon Ruby ANYTHING but this...
Pokemon Dash review:
Pokemon games have come in all shapes and forms, and we still remember battling through Pokemon Red and Blue in Japanese. The franchise is now bigger than ever, and of course it’s all in English now, so all the young kiddies can play! This is where Pokemon Dash comes in to play. Pokemon Dash is Need for Speed for kids. Control Pikachu through dozens of different courses through different environments to win every race and be crowned king of all Pokemon. Watch out for Miowth though!GameplayThe gameplay in Pokemon Dash becomes bland very quickly. There’s not that much to do apart from looking for Lapras, balloons, Power-ups, or scraping the touch screen with your stylus like there’s no tomorrow. For those unfamiliar with Pokemon, a Lapras is a water Pokemon that you use to travel across water with, especially in Pokemon Dash. The main aim of each race is to get to the checkpoints before the other Pokemon in the race. There’s always around eight to ten checkpoints, and they’re not always as in order as you would hope them to be. That’s not necessarily a bad thing though, because it means you’ll be traveling from one end of the map to the other a lot.Battling it out through the roughest terrains is what Pokemon Dash is all about. There’s all sorts of different rules in the Dash world, for example, if you’re flying with the balloons, you can’t land in a forest area, however you can skydive onto normal grass by popping the balloons. If you land on a hard terrain from popping the balloons however, then you’ll be paralyzed for a few seconds while you scrape the hell out of your touch-screen to regain consciousness. Pokemon Dash is not a pretty game for your Nintendo DS, and if you get agitated you may find that you’re scratching your screen by pressing too hard. Usually a quick brush over with a cloth will get rid of all marks made though.As you battle through the “one player” mode, you’ll find that there are three different GP’s, and gaining 3rd or better in that cup will unlock the next one. Inside a GP is five different cups to race through which all have six to eight races within. The races of course get harder as you progress, and the competing Pokemon get a lot faster. The screen above shows the map, where you can see what sort of terrain you’re going to come across and how far away the next checkpoint is, whilst the touch screen shows Pikachu racing along as fast as his legs can go, as you use the stylus to make him run. In the bottom left corner you can find your speed, but there’s really not much point paying attention to that as there’s so much more going on that you need to pay attention to in order to win.When you find some balloons, you simply slide the stylus on the side of the screen to be lifted into the air, and you can then travel incredibly fast across the map, however you can’t view the map in the top screen like you could before, instead there is a small map view of the next checkpoint. As long as you remember which direction the next checkpoint was in, there’s usually no trouble finding it. That’s right, when you’re on the ground, there’s an arrow constantly pointing in the direction of the next checkpoint, and it also tells you how far away you are from it by using the colours green, yellow and red.Pokemon Dash supports multiplayer races, if you can be bothered. The developers of this game could have put in several mini-games to create a much longer lasting multiplayer situation, but unfortunately there’s only race mode. Still, you only need one card to play, so if you or one of your friends has the game, feel free to give it a go!Graphics & SoundPokemon Dash isn’t exactly the most graphically advanced game on the market. The graphics barely surpass that of a GBA game, however the Pokemon are very well modeled. Perhaps this game would have been a lot better if the view of the Pokemon dashing wasn’t overhead, but 3rd person instead. Nintendo have done a good job to make sure all the terrains look different however, so thumbs up for that. The sound is on par with all the other Pokemon games. Nothing terribly outstanding, but a nice blend of noises coming out of your fully surround sound setup Nintendo DS.OverallNintendo DS fans, Pokemon Dash is definitely worth hiring. There’s not much out on the DS at the moment, so games like this are all that will keep your NDS from turning into a paperweight at the moment. You may even find that you like the unique touch-screen style racing. The game takes a good 4-5 hours to beat, which is good when you compare it to other Nintendo racing games, i.e. Mario Kart. All in all Pokemon Dash is special in its own way, and is a one-of-a-kind in a market full of games that have been done over oh so many times.Thumbs Up Lots of races to battle through. A unique title not to be missed by any Pokemon fan. Thumbs Down Not much variety.. They could have made a story mode if they wanted to! Average camera angle, making the maps feel a lot smaller than they should be. Not enough different types of power-ups. There should have been weapons to take out the other Pokemon with. full size >>
Pokemon Dash review:
Admittedly, there’s a little more to it. You’ll encounter a variety of different terrain, including roads, grass, sand, and water. While your Pokemon can easily reach top speeds on roads, it will move noticeably slower over grass and sand. However, you can offset this by collecting icons that correspond with the different terrain types (i.e. grass icons for grass, sand icons for sand, etc).
Pokemon Dash cheats: