"hmmm....It's kinda like Tetris but you match colors instead of shapes"
"Oh so like Dr. Mario! Yeah I know that game!"
"No, no it's....Dr. Mario pales in comparison. It's hard to explain"
"No I get it, you match the colors and the blocks disappear, have you played Dr. Mario?"
"YES I'VE PLAYED DR. MARIO. POKEMON PUZZLE LEAGUE IS LIGHT YEARS BEYOND DR. FRICKEN MARIO AND IF WE PLAYED IT I WOULD DOMINATE YOU UNDERSTAND!?"
As someone who was born in 1981 I should not be as familiar with the characters of Pokemon as I am. I have an excuse...sort of. My knowledge of Squirtle, Bruno, and Mew 2 come from a single video game that used the Pokemon theme to push a rather complicated puzzle strategy game. It would be like if Tetris was called "The Disney Princess Puzzle Game" and the only difference was that Ariel and Jasmine were feeding the blocks onto the screen. In my opinion, it was a marketing blunder by Nintendo because the Pokemon theme turned off anybody who would have really latched onto it. It was released as one of the last wave of N64 titles right before puzzle games hit it big online. It's so obscure, I doubt anyone who reads this has ever heard of it. There are currently uncountable puzzle/strategy games floating around the net with new ones made all the time but none will ever come close to the speed, layers, and intensity of Pokemon Puzzle League.
Before I go further I want to take a moment to try and explain what made it different than the others to put it into some sort of context. Imagine a grid of colored boxes in a chaotic order. The only thing you can do as the user is select two boxes and swap them left to right. If when doing this three or more boxes of the same color align, they disappear and whatever was above them falls into the newly vacant space. Instead of the pieces coming faster and faster from above as in Tetris, the mash of colored boxes scrolls increasingly fast up from the bottom until it reaches the top and you die. A fairly simple premise very comparable to Tetris at first glance. What makes it different is unlike Tetris there is no limit to how many moves ahead you can think or how fast you can make that happen. Tetris gives you one piece in a box that indicates what you will be getting next. Pokemon Puzzle league is designed so if you make a line and that causes blocks to fall into place making another line then you get rewarded by sending a large obstruction onto your competition's puzzle next to you. There's no end to how large a "combo" you can make by setting up a chain reaction of destruction. As you get better at the game you find yourself thinking more and more moves ahead of what your fingers are doing. Two player battles can get pretty fierce. The rounds hardly ever last more than two minutes.
The first place I ever signed a lease on was a basement apartment built under an Acupuncture clinic. Over the course of six months I lived there about ten different people rotated in and out of residence with never more than five at a time. It was two bedrooms with a laundry room (the third bedroom), an out of commission sauna (the fourth bedroom), and a couch in the living room (the fifth person slept here, it wasn't really a bedroom). It was dubbed "The Cave" and as with anybody's first pad outside their parents place, every night was filled with debauchery. Pokemon Puzzle League was introduced to The Cave by my friend Jeff when he moved in. We played a lot of Mario Kart and Super Smash Bros. but little by little Pokemon took over until it was the only thing we did, not just video games wise. With his previous experience Jeff dominated the competition for a while. One by one we each became better players and when we did, the games started to get really intense. I mean, REALLY intense. There would be a room full of silent people, eyes wide to the screen. All you could hear was the machine gun button clicking from the two competitors and the occasional soundbite of a Pokemon when a large payload of destructive blocks was being delivered to an opponent. When two experts are playing then you are both one shred away from losing for 90% of the round, so when someone dies it's always shocking and causes the room to erupt especially if the round lasts five or more minutes. I was sitting in a wooden chair once when playing a particularly serious round and when I lost I must have jolted by body from the shock because the chair collapsed into a pile of splintered kindling. At the end of every month the four or five people who were living there at the time would play an all day tournament for who would get which rooms. Those rounds were the most serious of all since there was more at stake. At night I would try and sleep starring at the ceiling which unfortunately was a white grid of boxes. Every one of my roommates confessed that they too saw the ceiling change into a myriad of colors and as they dosed off would be switching them around to make patterns.
Eventually everyone went their separate ways. My new apartment had a ritzy bar at the end of the street which wasn't my scene. One of the young bartenders eventually recognized I lived nearby and started hooking me up with free drinks whenever I came in so it became my scene. One night a well dressed man sitting at the bar next to me struck up a casual conversation. I forget how it started but I quickly learned that he was a game designer at Nintendo. This made sense since the Nintendo compound was right next to the Microsoft one nearby. I mentioned Pokemon Puzzle League and his eyes lit up. He excitedly informed me that he was one of the lead designers of that game and although it never took off commercially, it was a favorite among Nintendo employees. I knew no matter how dramatically I explained my passion for it, he would never understand the true extent but I tried anyways. He was beyond thrilled to hear me talk about the strategies I developed with my friends. I told him that my only complaint was that there were no more difficulty levels to unlock after beating it on "super hard". He replied,
"There's super hard. Super hard unlocks when you beat very hard"
"No, we beat very hard AND super hard then there's nothing left to unlock", I said.
"That's impossible, we designed Mew 2 to be unbeatable in super hard mode, we didn't even make a video to play at the end, what plays at the end?" He asked.
"The same video that plays at the end of very hard. I was disappointed with that as well" I confessed. He was shocked and I think it was the first time in our conversation that he realized just how serious I was about our obsession with it.
Years later I visited Jeff who still had his N64 and all his games and we played a few rounds. He killed me quickly every time, I had lost it completely. I was only thinking about three moves ahead maximum at any given time. I decided to write about my account of this game when I realized recently that I'm afraid of it. A few days ago I was browsing prices for used N64s on Amazon considering getting two or three of my favorite games of yesteryear. I looked up Mario Kart and Goldeneye but not Pokemon. I fear it like a recovering crack addict fears a room full of people smoking it. When I think about the game, along with the fun parts I'm haunted by those sleepless nights moving imaginary blocks around in frustration. I remember the bitterness I would feel walking in the cold for a beer run after losing an epic match. The game is just too intense, and that is Pokemon's puzzle. A conundrum where something is so aggravatingly enjoyable you can't indulge in it.
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