Instantly addictive...is there Pokemon rehab?!

I am not normally a video gamer. I mean, the last system I purchased was a Game Boy. Not even a Game Boy Color, mind you. Just the normal, shades-of-gray Game Boy with its primitive graphics and battery-eating gluttony. So I pretty much shocked myself when, in an aimless cruise through Toys 'R' Us twelve days ago, I snagged a Nintendo DS Lite. In Coral Pink, of course, seeing as how I'm a girly girl.

Anyway, the reason I dropped $130 on a new system was just because the same store had Pokemon Trozei. I, like the rest of the free world, had been deluged with the commercials last year. I, like the rest of the free world, had played Tetris so much that I developed bruises on my piece-rotating hand. So I was intrigued from the start with the play of Pokemon Trozei, seeing as how it was so similar to Tetris. I hadn't encountered the game in a store to that point, as I am not a known habitue of the local Game Stop store. When I held the package in my hands and looked at the amazing COLOR! graphics and read the description of the game, I just couldn't live without it. At least, that's the excuse I'll use on myself in a month when the credit card bill comes in!

Okay, so I've admitted that as far as video games go, I'm like one step beyond the Atari 2600. Don't rely on me for expert opinions of graphics and programming and that sort of thing. Instead, I'm going to drone on simply about the play of the game.

As I've said, the game plays basically like Tetris. You're aiming to line up pieces to remove them from the playing board. Whereas in Tetris your goal is to complete an entire line, in Pokemon Trozei your goal is to line up four identical Pokemon characters. Once you do so, you have completed a Trozei. The screen then goes green, and this is where the game gets interesting. Once you have completed a Trozei of four Pokemon, you then have two seconds to complete a Trozei of three Pokemon. After you've managed that, you have two seconds to complete a Trozei of two Pokemon. This is called Trozei Chance, and as long as your screen is green, you can continue to match Pokemon until you run out of matches. Seems pretty basic, right? Well, read on...

The Nintendo DS Lite has two screens, one on the top and one on the bottom. Pokemon appear on both screens, but you can only move the ones on the bottom, and you must use the stylus to do this. The top screen is very useful, because you can see what is going to drop down next. For example, if there are five identical Pokemon lined up in the top screen, you can use the stylus to pull them down to the lower screen and make them Trozei.

When you move a Pokemon, you can move it in any direction. If your character is on the extreme right of the screen, you can move him right and he will appear on the extreme left, and vice versa. If your character is on the very bottom, you can move him down and he will drop from the very top of your top screen. You can move a Pokemon in midair to control where he will drop.

If your board is getting dangerously full, the screen will turn red and "hurry, hurry!" music will begin. If you don't complete a Trozei before the board fills up, you lose. Not a good thing, you know?

The Pokemon character Ditto (whom I am given to understand from reading on the 'net is a shape-shifting Pokemon) acts as a sort of a wild card. Ditto can be matched up to any other Pokemon to complete a Trozei of any length. Now, if you complete a Trozei of more Pokemon than you are required to, you can make a Ditto appear. Thus, if you make a Trozei of five Pokemon when you only need to make a Trozei of four, you can get a Ditto added to your board. This will be very important, as I will explain later. And that's it for the basic play.

You have several options in this game. You can play in any of the four modes: Adventure, Endless, Pair, and Battle.

Adventure Mode: This mode has a story to it, a lame one, true, but a story nonetheless. You are Lucy Fleetfoot, an agent of S.O.L., and you are fighting against the Phobos Battalion, who is collecting Pokemon balls for a reason that is central to the story and I will thus not divulge it. You're trying to get them back by using a Trozei Beamer, a device that can make Pokemon travel by satellite. To do this, you have to line up for identical Pokemon (thus explaining the game play). You go through three training sessions (practice boards) and then you are unleashed on an unnamed world where Baron Phobos is holding sway. You play 20 regular levels (called Secret Storage), 5 large levels (called Huge Storage), five mobile levels (a train, a walker, a submarine, a jet, and a drill), five training sessions (the first three of which you have already completed at this point), one Phobosphere, and Dr. Who's Den, on which more later.

Once you have completed all those levels, you are done with the easy mode. You have then unlocked the hard mode, and you complete all the same levels again. The levels now require you to complete more Trozei and to attain higher point totals. If you manage to complete the hard mode, you can unlock a secret game that I wouldn't dream of spoiling.

The Mobile levels are controlled by various generals in Baron Phobos' army, and they make the Mobile levels very hard. The generals can add a rock to your board, which can only be vanished if it is Trozei'd with a Ditto. On some levels, the rock is pushed onto your board sideways, which really hurts if you are completing a Trozei and the rock just took a crucial Pokemon's place. On other levels, the rocks are dropped from the top and you can't be rid of them until you get them to your bottom screen and you Ditto them into oblivion. And on the hardest Mobile level, a mechanical arm places a rock onto the board, usually onto something really useful like a Ditto or a rare Pokemon (and more on rarity later).

Endless Mode: Endless Mode is just regular levels. The lowest levels have very slow dropping Pokemon and very low Trozei numbers to complete. Once you complete all the required Trozei, you move up to the next level and the pieces drop faster and the required Trozei number is higher, and so forth. I have reached level 81. I'm not entirely sure how the levels go, as it is apparently infinite. A nice feature of this mode is that, once you have completed five levels, you can start directly on level five when you next play Endless Mode. And this holds true for every group of five levels that you complete. When you have completed level ten, you can start at level ten next time. The only thing is, you have to complete levels in groups of five. If you stop at level eleven, you can't start at level eleven next time, you can only start at level ten. If you skip ahead and you complete the level to which you skipped, you can get an insane point bonus, which can give you some really ridiculous high scores. (Which explains how I, a really novice gamer, can achieve a high score of 1.9 million.)

Pair Trozei: I haven't played this mode yet, as I am too cowardly to seek out someone else to play with and thus admit that a mid-thirties woman is addicted to a video game. This game needs another person with a DS Lite. You can share the software with the other person, so even if they don't own Pokemon Trozei, they can play with you. The shared game is limited in function, though, so it's best to play this with someone else who also owns the game. Each player is trying to complete a Trozei level, and if you are winning, you will send Ditto over to your opponent's board to help them complete the level. This level is great to play if you are trying to capture the rarest Pokemon, and more on that later.

Battle Trozei: Again, haven't played this yet, but basically you are playing AGAINST the other person rather than playing with them. If you are winning at a level, all your unmatched Pokemon get sent to your opponent's board. In this mode, however, you are playing with completely different Pokemon than your opponent, so if he gets a bunch of your Pokemon he can only match them with Ditto to get them off his board.

Okay, now for the much alluded-to Dr. Who's Den and rare Pokemon. There are 386 Pokemon to collect. The common ones are repeated on many levels no matter which mode you are playing. The rare ones are parceled out three to a level, no matter which mode. The only exception to this that I've found are the hardest levels in Adventure Mode, in which you can only capture two rare ones. The rare Pokemon will not all appear when you are playing a level. In fact, often a rare one will not appear on a level at all, requiring multiple tries at that level to capture the rare Pokemon. To make it even harder, until a Pokemon is captured, it appears on your Pokemon index (more on this later) as a silhouette, so unless you are really familiar with the Pokemon canon, you're not going to know a rare Pokemon when you see it. Reading on the 'net or playing the game obsessively will help you get better at identification.

If you are an addict like me, you will never stop playing this game until you've captured all the Pokemon. 386 doesn't seem like a lot, until you realize how many rare ones there are and how hard they are to catch. Let me put it this way: I've been playing the game nonstop for twelve days and I have captured 92.5% of the Pokemon. It's unlikely I'll ever reach 100%, because in addition to the rare Pokemon, there are 21 "legendary" Pokemon. Of these, I've seen and captured only ONE.

Remember how I said that there is a target point score for each level in Adventure Mode? If you beat that target score, you get a Prize Coin. You will want to collect as many Prize Coins as you can, because if you play in Dr. Who's Den, you need a prize coin for each two minutes of play. You'll want to play in Dr. Who's Den as much as possible, because rare Pokemon appear much more frequently there. In fact, that's where I've captured the majority of the rare ones. So in order to complete the list, your ultimate goal, you'll play the game over and over again. And you'll need bushels of Prize Coins.

Remember how I told you to make Ditto, the wild card Pokemon, appear on your board? Well, in order to capture a rare Pokemon, you will want lots of Dittos running around, because you usually don't have anything to match the rare one to. (I've very occasionally seen two rare ones that I could match, but this is uncommon, except in levels 10,14, and 19 of Adventure Mode, when it's the selling point of playing those levels.)

It's a good thing that you have an ultimate goal in this game, because the other levels just aren't that challenging. If I, a very occasional gamer, could defeat the easy mode of the Adventure mode in three hours, and the hard mode in 24 hours, and get to level 81 of Endless mode with three days of practice, it's not a very challenging game. The challenge, nay, the attraction, of this game, is getting that 100%.

The "legendary" Pokemon appear so rarely that I'm not sure I'll ever get them all. The one I did get (Kyogre) I got from accessing a hidden board that I will leave you to find. (I'd hate to spoil a surprise!) But the promise that I will, someday, "catch 'em all" keeps me playing until the power light goes red and I have to stop to recharge. *sigh* Why does it take so long for the battery to recharge? For all I know, that "legendary" Pokemon was appearing during the downtime!

For the obsessive Pokemon collector, there is an index, accessed by touching the book icon on the lower left of your screen with your stylus. Until you capture a Pokemon, it will appear in the index as a silhouette. Plan on spending a lot of time in there so you can learn the general shape of the rare ones. The crown icon next to the book icon will give you access to your stats in all the levels. The coffee cup icon next to the crown icon gives you access to your Agent Card (which you will want to investigate VERY closely, hint hint!), your collection of other people's Agent Cards (which you can collect if you play Pair Trozei or Battle Trozei), and Espionage mode, which pings wireless internet connections for you to find someone to play with or against.

WHAT I LIKE:
-That ultimate goal of capturing all the Pokemon. Otherwise, this game would be Tetris with cutesy cuddly characters instead of boring old shapes.
-The fact that you can repeat a level in Adventure Mode if you lose that level, without having to start back at level one.
-The thrill of capturing a rare Pokemon!
-Easy to understand the basic play
-Nice graphics (good detail for such tiny characters!)
-The musical themes are appropriately upbeat or urgent without being terribly annoying

WHAT I DON'T LIKE:

-The beginning levels are soooooo slooooow
-The Adventure Mode is entirely too easy
-Give me a freakin' clue where to find the legendary Pokemon, Nintendo! Come on!!
-Once you complete the easy mode in Adventure Mode, you are stuck in hard mode unless you reset the game. Not to worry, you will retain your Pokemon percentage and high scores if you reset! However, you will want to play on easy mode because it's far easier and quicker to get Prize Coins on easy mode and therefore easier to get those rare Pokemon. Unless, of course, you're an expert gamer, in which case you won't have any trouble getting Prize Coins in hard mode.

PRICE PAID: It was $34 at Toys 'R' Us, but I had a $5.00 coupon, because I am a cheapskate.