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Pokemon Dash
Dash away from this title!Submitted by: Unicycle (unicycle1977) on Monday March 28th, 2005 at 12:16 PM EST
Rating: 2 out of 5 Stars  Now, I'm a big Pokemon fan, and I love the idea of a Pokemon-themed racing game, but come on! This is probably the worst Pokemon spin-off I've ever seen (Hey You, Pikachu! included) At it's simplest, Pokemon Dash is a game that puts you as Pikachu (and no, you cannot change your racer) racing against other Pokemon. Your goal is to run, through grass, trees, sand, snow, water, and lava to get to pokeball-shaped checkpoints all over a series of islands shaped like Pokemon and Pokemon-related items. For great distances you can ride a hot air balloon through the sky or a Lapras across the ocean. The basic concept is awesome. What a neat idea to pit Pokemon against Pokemon in a non-battling manner. No longer are we cock-fighting with imaginary animals, we're racing them. Why this wasn't just a Pokemon themed "Mad Dash Racing" I'll never know. I'm not saying they should have copied the XBox launch title, but they sure could have made the game a lot more fun. Instead, players are forced to constantly rub the stylus on the touch screen in the direction Pikachu is supposed to run. This gets tiring after the second course, and you have to finish six courses in a row to finish a cup. There are five cups, and when you're finished with that, a harder version appears. And then another harder version. That's a lot of rubbing, and unless you're a hardcore gamer with a lot of arm-stamina (don't take that wrong), you won't want to play after the first set of races. The checkpoints need to be touched in order, and sometimes they are so far away from each other, it's impossible to know how to get to the next one. Sure, they show flashing arrows to tell you the direction. But when you run for about 5-10 seconds in that direction only to discover you've hit ocean, and the only way across the ocean was the opposite direction, you've lost a lot of time. You've also probably lost a LOT of patience. This has mechanics that suggest it's a kids' game, but it's so hard to keep up with such lack of direction, this is a friggin' hard game. Pokemon Dash is the first title to really take advantage of the possibility of linking up a DS cart with a GBA cart. Feel The Magic XY/XX had some limited support with other Sonic Team GBA titles, but Dash takes it a bit further. If you have a copy of any of the Pokemon GBA RPG's, you can plug it in the bottom of the system and create Dash cups with courses shaped like the pokemon in your party. It's a really neat idea, except the outcome is very sloppy. The resulting courses look like a mish-mash of all the different terrain types in the game, and there is once again no clear path. The good news for these tracks is that they are mostly all on one island. No more running around aimlessly looking for a balloon or Lapras to get across the sea. If this game had unlocked something in the RPG's, instead of the other way around, I might feel more compelled to play. As it stands, it's a poorly thought out realization of a neat idea. This is what happens when you license such a great franchise out to such mediocre development teams. I don't hate the game, but it's very poor. I don't recommend it to anyone. Save your money for Pokemon Diamond and Pearl when they come out, or if you really want a cute racing game, wait for Mario Kart DS. 
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