ranking games from pikachu's pokéchow

what is pikachu's pokechow, anyway?

pikachu's pokéchow was a fansite created by jess and additionally run by laura and jessica, for lack of any remnant of online handle. i found this website when it was still contemporary, because, after exhausting every other "official" pokemon fansite sources, i finally learned how to google and stumbled upon it that way.

this site is the origin of a game i think i've mentioned before - shoutout to dragonfree for pointing me to it! - and thought was lost media. the webmaster of PKC made a lot of little games like that, apparently, of which frisky furret is one of seventeen (!). sooo, i thought, why not play through them and write about them in order of how i'd rank them? plus, that means others will get to play some obscure fangames as well!

if you wish to play them, too, you can! be warned that they have noooooo volume control, though, so you WILL get autism blasted. turn down your volume ASAP!!!!

the games

magnemite mayhem!

i'll be honest, this one is really simple. you click and drag a sitting magnemite into a magneton. i find it kind of boring overall, and it was a little bit confusing to me to figure out what i was meant to do to increase my score. the bright background also isn't so fun. that said, though, i think having the magnemite orbiting is a pretty cool effect.

pidgeot panic!

guide your pidgeot by moving your cursor around beedrill and catch as many magikarp as you can! the magikarp fall at a random downwards-and-to-the-left angle, which can be troublesome, but at least you have three HP, so even if you touch the beedrill, they all despawn for a moment and you can recover.

lotad's lament!

this one is simple, but kind of RNG-dependent. you catch the pineco as they fall, but you're also really slow, so you may lose some HP from pineco that are dropping too far from you. that said, though, you do get +1 health every 500 points, so it's not impossible.

electric soldier porygon!

a clunky side-scroller, where viruses are "attacking your computer" and you have to guide porygon by dragging your cursor around. you are armed with a left-click missile, but it unfortunately respawns if you click it again and it's still out on the field, so spamming click is not an option. great news, though: they don't make you lose points if they get to the left side of the screen, so just dodging them works too.

my main complaint with this is that it's kind of obtuse and the moving background can be distracting. and the hitboxes on the viruses can be a little weird when you're a rectangle with transparency....

trapinch terror!

you guide a bouncing plusle or minun with your mouse to get to your friend on the other side. watch out, though, because trapinch seem to be raining from the sky?? somehow you can zap them though!

this one is actually pretty novel. you can tell the webmaster was having fun figuring out new ways to put together different game elements from more stock-type games. it cycles through different platform layouts at random, too.

ditto dropoff!

you play a spinarak trying to catch ditto for your trainer(?). you click and hold to send spinarak across a highway, and you can only grab a passing ditto if you're descending. sometimes the ditto will transform into krabby and teleport you back to the top of the highway.

i think it would be a little more fun if you went faster, or if it worked kind of like web of vernax from neopets, where there was an actual string left behind that would catch the ditto. then maybe krabby could cut the line and damage you somehow...

shedinja showdown!

you play a shedinja in a desert (complete with pyramids!), surviving against an onslaught of gligar. you can click to launch a shadow ball (?) or just move the mouse around to avoid them; having them pass you doesn't make you lose. and you can spam shadow balls if you want! yay.

i could see this being augmented with scaling sprites as they get closer to the bottom edge (to give that '3d' effect without actually using 3d), but i also think it's fine as-is.

unfortunately, the "3d" variant of this game doesn't work for me via IA, so this rating is only for the 2d variant.

hoppip hazard!

a game where you shoot pokeballs out of a cannon to catch hoppip floating by. you have a reload charge meter, so you can't just go shooting randomly, and the angle is controlled by the cursor's Y-axis value, so going up and down vertically is how you aim.

aside from the up-and-down control (perhaps better done by tracking mouse position dynamically), i think this one's fun and a little addictive to play. i'd love an iteration of this where you could upgrade the cannon somehow.

elemental emergency!

using the three hoenn starters, hit a colored circle for points. the color needs to match the type of the starter you hit with.

i'll admit the 'miss counter' is really interesting. i wouldn't have thought to count misses for it. i could see an alternate game mode where you're trying to tick down a boss health meter, where misses would make YOU take damage instead...

graveler gunblast!

a shooting gallery game. this one is surprisingly fleshed out, with ammo, timer, and lots of moving targets.

although i'm not much of a fan of gun-related games like this (and therefore terrible at aiming), i think this one's pretty fun. i like the different elements here that make it feel more complex or deep than it would otherwise be.

mareep mansion

help mareep get through the haunted house with your cursor! the mareep has some amount of momentum or velocity, meaning you experience some slowdown if you stop suddenly a short distance away.

this one is challenging, but i find it fun. i used to find it funny when mareep would get got by the ghosts when i was a puppy, but now i'm like, noooo, mareep :(

meowth kart race!

unfortunately, this one wasn't archived :( it's an enigma berry of a game.

jigglypuff journey

krabbyball!

a game where you hit a ball towards the ocean with some other krabbies (krabbys?). this one feels really responsive and snappy.

deoxys' dander!

a little pong clone. similar to krabbyball, but not quite as fun to me... there's a molecule on screen that will eat your ball as well.

frisking furret

this is a game i played really obsessively as a puppy. i was straight up enamored enough that it's the game i remembered the clearest, and is the reason i went looking for these games at all.

the gameplay is pretty simple. locate boxes (hidden under logs) and bring them back to the center of the map without touching a roaming growlithe.

there are a few things that annoy me about this game, as much as it's lodged itself in my brain. the growlithe roaming can randomly find and break the boxes themselves, though their AI seems to be extremely simple and they don't follow you or anything. but this means that you have to find the boxes before they do, and the fact that you run really slowly makes it a lot more difficult to get all four, let alone more than like, two.

i would love to see this game reimagined as i originally thought it was: an isometric 3d game where you run through hollow logs, get squares, and bring them back, maybe trailing behind you (while the growlithes try to touch them, maybe). but as it stands, i think it's simple, but cute.

psychic assault!

i don't know how to describe it... kind of a tower defense type game, but lacking some fundamental tower defense elements (a set path, more than 2 types of defenses, and it has manual input during some 'waiting and watching' stages). it's a little buggy and hard-cuts when you lose.

the final list

enough of that, though, let's get to ranking these! from my favorite to least favorite games, here's my list:

1. krabbyball
2. frisking furret
3. mareep mansion
4. furret frenzy
5. elemental emergency
6. hoppip hazard
7. graveler gunblast
8. psychic assault
9. trapinch terror
10. deoxys' dander
11. lotad's lament
12. shedinja showdown
13. pidgeot panic
14. ditto dropoff
15. electric soldier porygon
16. magnemite mayhem

meowth kart race is not here because it wasn't archived... alas... i also don't remember it working on my old '98 when the site was still around, so whatever it was like will remain a mystery.

closing thoughts

this fansite was a real gem. i mean, that many free flash games in one place made by one person is really crazy to me, especially when the content wasn't solely focused on the games themselves.

i think this is a real testament to the kind of fan-community pokemon had circa the early 2000's. a bunch of kids, teens, or young adults in college making passion projects and sharing them with each other. i think that it's really beautiful that we had such tools back then to make things you could share on your own website.

it is a bit sad to think of how resources for gamemaking for amateurs is somewhat limited nowadays. there's roblox (lol), there's RPGmaker, sure, sure, but the loss of flash is felt across the entire world wide web. for as many vulnerabilities it had, it also had so many memories, and i won't forgive adobe for pulling the plug on it like they did, just completely deprecating and neutering whatever was still out there.

this is why resources like flashpoint and the internet archive are so important. without archival teams, so much would be lost. of course, it's not feasible to save everything, but there are some keystones of early internet that we wouldn't have record of otherwise.

i hope people will continue to make things and share them with each other without profit incentive forever and ever and ever. i know i will!

also, special thanks to dragonfree for helping me locate this fansite again via my post on the johto times forum. you rock, as always!