Hello and welcome to my bad idea of the week. As I said back in my ‘Low Dex’ Run of Pokemon FireRed, you might have expected me to do the classic Pokemon Nuzlocke someday. You’ll be glad to know that today is finally the day I do a Pokemon Nuzlocke. For those that are unaware, a Pokemon Nuzlocke is a special rule set that can be used to make any run of a pokemon game much more difficult. The two main rules are that if a Pokemon faints, it’s considered dead and cannot be used for the rest of the game, and you can only catch the first Pokemon you catch in each area. There’s a plethora of extra rules one can apply if they desire to modify the experience. In the past I only played about half of a Pokemon Pearl Nuzlocke up until my main damage dealer had fainted and I didn’t feel like grinding my Pokemon to catch up. Level grinding and knowing the biggest challenges a game has to offer are two of the most important things you need to form your strategy. For example, if you pick Charmander in Pokemon FireRed, you should either make sure you have a pokemon with a fighting type move or overlevel your charmander to the point where it can sweep Brock’s entire Rock type gym or your run will end right then and there. For my run today I’ll be playing Pokemon Emerald and using Mudkip because he’s a viable pick for the entire game. In retrospective I should have added the No Duplicate Pokemon clause so I didn’t get three Poochyenas in a row. Overall I think it’s a fun playstyle if you want to mix things up for your next pokemon run.

Hello and welcome to this week’s bad idea. This week I’m going to ignore one of the most iconic lines in gaming history “Gotta catch em all”. That’s right, it’s finally time for some Pokemon  challenges. If you’re a follower of my blog and are a Pokemon fan you probably would have expected me to do a nuzlocke as it’s the most common type of challenge run within the community. Well have no fear, that day will come in early April 2020. For today, we’re doing what’s called a ‘low dex run’ which means I’m going to complete the game while catching as few Pokemon as possible. I got the idea to do this run because a youtuber called Alpharad played through the entirety of Pokemon Emerald with just a Mudkip. This time I’m planning on playing through Pokemon FireRed. I decided to start my playthrough by choosing Squirtle as he is very bulky and can learn Surf, which is both needed for for overworld navigation and is a good move to use in battle. Unfortunately, I will need to catch at least one other pokemon to use the HM moves Cut, Flash, and Strength. Squirtle can also learn a set of moves that is tailor made for taking down the Elite Four and Champion at the end of the game. As I went through this run I realized how easy the early pokemon games really were if you could overlevel our starter to insane levels by the endgame. When I first tried this run out over the summer of 2019 I believe that I had beaten the Champion with a level 79 Squirtle. If you want to mix up your classic Pokemon experience I would highly recommend giving this run a try.

Hello and welcome to this week’s edition of me having bad ideas and acting upon them. Last week I attempted to beat Super Mario Sunshine without jumping which ended rather prematurely to say the least. So this week I decided to try something that was within the realm of possibility. This week I am going to play through Fire Emblem: The Sacred Stones on the highest difficulty available, which is Hard Mode. For those unfamiliar with Fire Emblem games, they are a series of turn-based tactics games that could be compared to a giant game of chess by some. I personally found the series in high school when a friend of mine at the time told me about this cool game he had found for Game Boy Advance. It was actually the seventh game in the series, Blazing Blade. However that eventually led to me eventually picking up many more games in the series later in life. However, I never got around to trying Sacred Stones until recently. When I asked one of my roommates what game in the series I should do this week, he said Sacred Stones because it’s his favorite game. The run itself isn’t going to have any special rules like last week. After all, I would like a chance to actually finish the game this time. I’m going to play however I want to on the highest difficulty. Overall I felt my run was lot easier than I was expecting it to be. For the maps I played I honestly had more difficulty with Echoes on a lower difficulty than I had had with this game so far. I’d highly recommend it if you’re looking for a challenge but you don’t want something too insane for a challenge run.