Black and White Update

Sprites from all 649 pokemon have now been ripped from Pokemon Black and White. To my mild surprise, a lot of pokemon from the original 150 have gotten new sprites yet again. This is cool and all, but it also renders many of my posts here TOTALLY OBSOLETE

Naw not really. Most of them are only slight tweaks, and since I don’t feel like going back and editing 14 entries, I’ll just go ahead and clump them here.

I don’t think any of these would have significantly altered what I wrote anyway. Perhaps a few: Weedle is now even more adorable, and Venusaur is even more enormous. On the other hand, Pidgey looks drunk and about to fall over; I really don’t know what they were thinking there. They seem to have gotten carried away with Wartortle’s size; it looks like it could eat that Spearow. That’s kind of unsettling.

And of course, after I just poked fun at Pikachu for always looking overly exuberant in recent games, they finally thought to close his mouth for him. With a yellow paintbrush tool. That’s seriously the only difference from the Platinum sprite, and yet it looks pretty okay now.

The pokemon that didn’t get new sprites reuse ones from either D/P, Platinum, or HG/SS, which I think is the first time they’ve reached back in time, across whole games, to bring back old sprites. A lot of them weren’t even good choices (also known as: not the choices I would have made). It’s kind of interesting for me to see which sprites the developers apparently thought were good enough to recycle, and which needed updating. But you won’t get to see that because I’m only including B/W sprites from now on if they’re new. So I’ll have to throw in an asterisk or extra label somewhere to denote which sprite is currently in usage.

Kinda makes you wonder where they’re going with the games from here. B/W are weird because they’re on the exact same console as a previous generation (before it was always one per—Gameboy, Gameboy Color, GBA). Will they ever remake Generation III, given that it wasn’t very connected to other games? Will they wait until after the next games on the 3DS? Will the world end in 2012?

I’m thanking my lucky stars they didn’t make another Onix sprite for B/W, because the usable width of this page is based on how many pixels it takes to put ten Onix end-to-end (735).