I guess I was just destined to get into Pokemon. The Pokemon franchise has swallowed up every single one of my hobbies within the past year: video games, comic books, cartoons, toys and trading card games. In fact, the exclusivity of Pokemon Snap to the Nintendo 64 was the sole reason I bought the console, just as the special Pikachu edition was the only reason I bought a Game Boy Color.
Yes, I'm a sucker. That has been well established throughout DredPage. But once you strip away all the wide-eyed merchandise (awww... cute!), the kids putting gaming cards in collector albums (make a deck and play, dammit!), and the parents claiming Pokemon leads to gambling (and temporary tattoos lead to real ones)... Pokemon Snap still stands out as a great game.
I'm always willing to front a game a better rating if it is wholly unique. That's why PaRappa the Rapper impresses me. I love games that deliver an entirely different gaming concept. Pokemon Snap sends you out on a first-person safari hunt, where your job is to take pictures of the various pokemon hiding out along your trail. It's very simple, completely addictive, and one of the most engaging games I've played in a long time.
Walk with me now to mysterious Pokemon Island. Those violent Pokemon Trainers aren't allowed here, because this island is truely a wonder. All kinds of pokemon live here in relative peace... both common and rare. Any trainer who could get to the island would surely despoil it by capturing the beasts and forcing them to become professional wrestlers. That's why Professor Oak has selected you, a world-class photographer, to travel the island and snap pictures of the pokemon in their natural habitats.
Pokemon Snap is a trip to the zoo... the pokemon eat, sleep, cavort, chase each other, hide and laze about while you drift through with your camera. At the end of each journey, Professor Oak looks over your best pics and rates them. Oak values action shots, big figures, centering... plus the rarity of the pose or amount of like pokemon in the same picture. You get to save over one hundred photos to the cartridge's memory, so you can always look back over your work. (But once you've started an ongoing game, don't ever select New Game, unless you want to start completely over and erase all saved pics. I think that is a major flub... you can't have multiple players with multiple games on the same cart.)
You goal is to catch them all... but Snap maxes out at just over 60 different pokemon. Which is not even close to the number of "real" pokemon flooding US shores, which runs over 150 (with more on the way.) As you get more and more pictures, Oak gives you trinkets to attract even more pokemon... food to coax them closer to your shutter, pester balls to scare them out of hiding or knock them sensless, the poke flute to play some music for them, and the dash engine to speed up your travels.
It's relatively easy to grab 40 to 50 different ones without much work; the last 10 to 20 require clever chain-reaction effects or special randomized circumstances. Getting really top-notch photos is where the game's replay value comes in. You'll want to keep repeating levels in search of high-scoring photos.
Even so, the game runs short. A more serious version should have two to three times the levels and contain all 150+ in one form or another. But as the first major league Pokemon video game release, I'm sure Snap was subject to some downsizing to make the game easier for children. Here's hoping the fad continues long enough to generate Snap 2.
For a limited time, Snappers can print out stickers of their best shots by taking the cart to a local Blockbuster Video and using the Pokemon Snap Station. For $3.00 you can walk out with a tiny sticker sheet of your proudest photos. This Pokemon thing sure is making somebody rich.
Pokemon Snap is also a great game for parents who are leery of the trend's more questionable aspects... the animal fighting, the card trading and the general panicked feeling when the store is out of cards. Snap brings you into the world of these little deformed monsters without any sort of meaningful violence at all. The most aggressive you can be is to chuck apples at a group of collected Charmander and watch the fruit ricochet from one orange head to another. And there's no overly leggy teen girls, cross dressing or pompous badge boasting (like you find in the cartoon.) The majority of the included creatures are of the cute-and-cuddly variety, not the scary-and-snakelike kinds. This game is entirely suitable for ANY age and ANY demeanor. Unless you hate going to the zoo. The toughest hurdle for younger players will be the controls, but an enterprising parent could always just control the camera movement and put the toddler in charge of hitting the shutter button.
The game also shows off the N64 rather well. Since there's nothing particularly taxing going on, the processor is free to generate some nice landscape vistas, waterways, and other placid scenes. The characters themselves are polygonal but not distractingly so, and they all animate in convincing, "natural" ways. When you get your first close-up of Pikachu, you won't see a 3D dot to dot diagram... but rather a lively photograph of a pikachu in the wild.
