How Baby

Didn’t I just post a comic? Gosh, time goes by fast when you’re trapped in a warm bubble of nostalgia, completely immune to how crazy the world is going outside.

So Pokemon GO is (legitimately) live in Canada! And of course I’m playing it! I caught a Dragonair the other day! How many more exclamation points can I use to convey that this is really big deal to me!

I have trouble talking about how important Pokemon was to me when it came out. I tend to trip over my words and just repeat “it’s just really important to me, okay, it’s really cool, it’s so important.” Pokemon, when it came out in 1998 with Red and Blue, was the reason I saved money to buy my own original (already used!) Gameboy. I got Blue, and I played it literally every day. With one save file, I became a master of the speed run, using the Missingno cheat to get Master Balls even though it glitched my Elite Four records (and probably kickstarted my fear of purposefully ‘glitchy’ things). When I got on the internet, of which we only had 100 hours a month, I spent my time looking up ways to get Mew (she was NEVER under the truck, no matter how often I looked). My first roleplaying character was on a Team Rocket-themed Pokemon battling chatroom. I’ll never have another experience like the life-consuming, reality-altering, future-defining, pure obsessive love I had for playing Pokemon (she says, tongue in cheek, fully cognizant of the fact she makes a comic about being a mom).

So of COURSE I’m playing Pokemon GO. And while it has its drawbacks (I yearn for more gameplay!!), I’m still out there, trying to recreate my perfect team – not perfect because of their stats, but because I loved them! As an adult gamer, finding something I enjoy without feeling the urge to play it “the best way” is super rare!