Why I'm Allergic to Fat Eggs

There's certain Pokemon that I just don't want to use if blowing through a regular battle or (god forbid) a tournament situation. Some of them have movepool issues, some of them are too slow for an ingame rush, and some of them spilled ink on GameFreak staffers at the time of their development and lose on all counts as a result.

But there's one I have hated for nearly 10 years, to the point where I actually built entire GSC teams around getting it out of the way when I played competitively. One of my greatest moments was shutting up an annoying git on the bots with an Alakazam, and only because it had Psychic, Fire Punch AND HP Dark.

It's the fat egg.

If modern tiering rules were in place at the time of GSC and the bots weren't run by someone who got nuked from Azure Heights due to not knowing when to quit arguing with He Who Has The Button, I have no doubt that the egg would have been the first or second suspect (behind Snorlax) and probably banned for severely imbalancing the game. At the tail end of the game, it was being used even more than Snorlax - something like 35% of the time. Granted, there isn't as much choice (or as many battles) on GSBot then there would be on modern Shoddy, so it's not as impressive than Scizor getting 25% now. But at least Scizor (and Snorlax then) were actually doing damage.

Check that Bulbapedia link above again. Look at the base stats. They're like modern Garchomp - perfectly designed to be gamebreaking. Now consider that the equivalent of EVs in the 2nd gen allowed you to max everything. Imagine if natures existed in 2nd gen and the defense boost existed.

As it is, it had 1 true counter - and that required a 10% boost item since the Choice items didn't exist yet. It's imbalacing on the defensive end because it can recover constantly and has a perfect Counter for any physical attack you care to throw at it. It shouldn't take an hour and a half to have one battle, but I had more of those than I care to count.

I took a sabbatical from battling after Ruby and Sapphire were released, largely due to the fact that I was sick of debating the cheapness of Beedrill (I'm not saying you can't battle with it, I'm saying right now we can't use it so why bother programming it in). Once this got sorted out, I dipped my toes back into it when I wasn't e-fedding... and then I read blueshirt's moveset FAQ. Which includes, and I quote:

"blisseyisadirtylittlecheappinkwhorethatputregiceoutofajob"

in the description of Regice.

Yes folks, the Pokemon that single handedly made half of the attacks in the game UNUSABLE was back and worse than ever.

I haven't been back since.

Though I have thought about it again - the pendulum has swung so far to the physical side that Blissey is down to about 11-12% usage instead of 33%. Still, is there anything that can be done to nerf it?

Movie Gifts - The new Lovely Kiss Nidorans

Coming soon, to a theatre near you according to Bulbapedia, are four special Pokemon - three shiny gerbils and a fateful encounter Celebi. In addition to unlocking that one event in HG/SS, they all have new toys that nearly caused me to kill a Skitty upon finding out about them.

And the gerbils are all shiny, if you're into that sort of thing. But anyway...

Raikou: Zap Cannon, Weather Ball, Aura Sphere, Extremespeed
Entei: Flare Blitz, Extremespeed, Howl, Crush Claw
Suicune: Sheer Cold, Aqua Ring, Air Slash, Extremespeed
Celebi: Leaf Storm, Recover, Healing Wish, Nasty Plot.

"I'm killing Skitty right now!"

Let's look at this for each one:
Raikou: Zap Cannon is functionally useless in a world with Thunderbolt TMs (Voltorb Flip notwithstanding), and Extremespeed gives him a little bit of priority. Weather Ball is fun for Rain teams and even Hail teams (100 base Ice! Suck it Gliscor!), but oh mama, Aura Sphere. Ghost + Fighting is still resisted by little to nothing... and the ones that can take Shadow Ball + AS don't like getting Thunderbolts to the face.

Entei: I have to say, the fact that they're playing to this very blog with Crush Claw is amusing enough (hey guys, it's supposed to go to Dunsparce). Still, Howl makes Extremespeed and the long-awaited Flare Blitz extremely potent - so the question is, who's your physical Fire, Entei or Arcanine? Entei has Stone Edge and Iron Head, but Arcanine has Intimidate... hrm.

Suicune: Probably comes out of this with the least - let's face it, Sheer Cold is BANNED YOU *redacted* in most serious battles and it needs Extremespeed the least. Still, Aqua Ring could be a real pain in the rear on something with these HP/defense stats, and Air Slash is nice for coverage if nothing else. (So much for Ludicolo stalling it out).

Celebi: It only gets one new toy, but what a toy it is. The question is, does Celebi have the defenses to pull off more than one Plot before it gets hit with one of its multiple weaknesses and dies or BPs out of there? It's too bad Celebi doesn't have a tail, though - flavour-wise, Nasty Plot is one of the last moves you'd expect to see on Celebi.

This is part of the joy of post-release content for Pokemon, though - this may be the craziest post-release thing we've seen since those fateful Valentine's Day promos in New York that led to the existence of Lovely Kiss/Horn Drill Nidoking back in the GSC days. Or Eevee with Growth. Or Bubble Magikarp. The problem with all of this goodness is that because of the mandatory Shiny on the gerbils, their natures are locked in as well. And it's not known what nature that's going to be.

Basically, what this comes down to is this: If Raikou is stuck on something stupid like Bold, it's a stinkbomb waiting to happen.

Rapid Reversal

Thanks to DarthVivi in the comments here and a couple of people in the secret board who e-mailed me to direct me how to file a ticket advising GameFAQs management as to what happened last week.

Although they probably get hundreds of these tickets every week - usually after every swing of the banhammer - the management understood what happened and after I could re-verify everything the account was restored to its old level.

I'd like to think that my tenure didn't have anything to do with it, but as long as it came back I can still post on the boards... and I did kind of miss it. It's become such a part of my interwebs routine that it's awfully hard to quit it cold turkey.

Lastly, to the person or persons who caused this whole situation to begin with, I would like to refer you to the reply given in the matter of Arkell v. Pressdram.