Pokemon Pedometer Pals - THE POKEWALKER!!

swiftyshq

i wanted to make a post about this so so so bad. oh my god. i was so huge on the pokewalker when i was in middle school. i used to clip it to a string around my neck - i had forgotten about that until i dug up some drawings recently! - and i loved bringing some of my favorite team members with me to school. i was a rather lonely child, so they were kind of like my imaginary friends!

i still have a pokewalker - my first one died in a washing machine, and a friend gave me theirs, so i've had that one ever since. i would really like a second one, TBH, but that's purely for love of the pokewalker, rather than for any material gain. it's just such a fun toy.

some time ago, i wrote an article on my website titled "pokewalker methods" which acts as an aggregate of a bunch of videos i've found on youtube of people's auto-watt-earning doohickeys. i always enjoyed this sort of thing, even back in the day. a rube-goldberg machine for gaming the system... and there were so many of them! people were really ingenious about it!

what sort of memories do YOU have about the pokewalker? 🎤

Darren

swiftyshq I loved the Pokéwalker because it reminded me a lot of the Pocket Pikachu Color, which I loved as a kid, and am carrying with me again currently on another quest to reach a million steps (I did one million with the Pocket Pikachu already)

The Pokéwalker was a lot more advanced, and while I didn't use it to its fullest potential, I had a lot of fun with it walking around the office at the time and commuting to and from work. I am very happy to say that I have two Pokéwalkers, and I actually used one a few years ago when I played Pokémon HGSS again. I hope to use them again next year once i'm done with my Pocket Pikachu Color challenge 🙂

I believe there's some courses that you can't get anymore, is that right?

swiftyshq

Darren i remember your posts about the pocket pikachu, i was really proud that you got so far with it! it's too bad pikachu went away at the end...

there are quite a few that you can't get officially anymore; yellow forest, for one, which had flying and surfing pikachu, was an event-only one that i recall being bundled with the spiky-eared pichu (which was also game-locked!). there are, however, ways to get these again, though, through fan-run DNS addresses, for however long that lasts. my only gripe is how they're always random, so you have to try multiple times to get one you want.

kathy

I love the pokewalker!! One of my favorite facets to pokemon is all the insane hardware and peripherals you're either provided and/or expected to use to engage with it's world and your little guys! The depth it brings to already really meaty games like HGSS is honestly mindblowing, especially since when coupled with all the unlockable courses you can get almost every Hoenn pokemon and most Sinnoh mons using just HGSS and the pokewalker. A lot of rare pokemon from all four regions at the time are stuffed into the later courses and it makes the whole process really rewarding. It's also the only way to get Dive Balls in HGSS without trading LOL, but again the rarity makes it so much fun!!

Last year I decided to start the challenge of getting one of every pokemon from every course, so I started taking my pokewalker to work everyday where I do a lot of walking, usually after a shift I would have walked around 5000+ steps. Which most of the time gave me a lot of watts to stockpile or gamble away for rare items. I went crazy with it, every other week or so i'd be like Oh boy what course am I going to unlock this week!! And then I'd get to explore it throughout the week, trying to get every pokemon. My Heartgold boxes are stuffed almost to the maximum from extras that I plan to trade to Ranch to watch them run and play with toys.

The best part is that i'm not even finished! I kept the routine of adding a pokemon in before work and then periodically checking throughout the day to make sure I got pokemon from each certain step threshold and then finally sending back everything when I got home. I got all the way up to the Icy Mountain Road course which requires 30,000 watts stockpiled! Each time you send new pokemon back from the pokewalker it's caught date is when its sent back so some day when I finish catching em all; I would love to look back and see how long it took me and when I was the most active with my walker!

Since I stopped using my walker every day around January, I found a poor Mareep from the Icy Mountain that stumbled onto my path that was trapped in my pokewalker for pretty much all of this year. I sent her back only a few days ago and ever since ive just been taking her everywhere in game while I harvest Apricorns or do daily events because I feel bad!

Anyways enough rambling, I really like the pokewalker and what it brings to daily life. Helps me remember each day as I get older!

swiftyshq

kathy this is so sweet what!!!! i really adore this idea. i wanted to do something similar, but i don't go out all that much, so i don't actually have much opportunity to use a pedometer. i really agree re: extra content for a meaty game; HGSS has so much stuff to it, it's definitely the Definitive version of johto to me!

ICanSnake munchlax with explosion is craaaazy!!!! i can hardly imagine a snorlax with explosion.

Sheep i can definitely understand! i was too obsessed with it to let it sit at home; i felt like i was leaving a pet at home when i could be taking it to school with me LOL. i'm sure whenever you dig it up it should function with a new battery!

tkarispe the distributed downloadable stuff was SO COOL. getting yellow forest from my local gamestop felt mind-blowing at the time. i remember hearing it was a pretty accurate pedometer compared to other contemporary pedometers, too, but i don't know how substantiated that is. at least compared to my digivice toy it was pretty accurate!

i feel the same way vis-a-vis pokemon go too. the adventure sync isn't quite the same. heck, the medium in which the game exists just isn't the same. it's not a dinky little add-on with an LED screen, it's a fully-featured game itself! but i still prefer the pokewalker's simplicity and novelty. and i don't need to connect to the internet. which is always a bonus for anything i use...

ICanSnake

I had a Pokewalker in high school and used it a lot. I downloaded the event courses when they officially came out in 2010 to my SoulSilver, both Yellow Forest and Winner's Path. I got a lot of the exclusive Pokemon like Surfing and Flying Pikachu. It was a really great device. Unfortunately sometime during marching band practice over the summer, I lost my Pokewalker on the field and could never find it again.

A few years ago I managed to get another Pokewalker and I recently replaced the battery on it. Actually these past few days, including today, I was using my Pokewalker! Over the past 2 years I was getting more Pikachu from Yellow Forest, but the last few days I've been getting Pokemon from the Winner's Path course. The spawns I have right now include Munchlax with Explosion!

I also have a Japanese SoulSilver with an officially downloaded Yellow Forest, so one day I want to connect my Pokewalker to my Japanese game and get the Surfing and Flying Pikachu with my JP OT and ID. The issue is my OT on my Japanese game was "???" because at the time I couldn't read Japanese so I wanted a way to differentiate when they were talking to me or not.

Sheep

I think my Arcanine is still stuck in there! Honestly I'm not sure where mine currently is, and I was a bit shy to bring it out in public with me, but my friend offered to do it for me so I lent it to her for a while. She enjoyed it a lot! I mostly liked it as a collectible, so I kind of just put the occasional Pokémon in there and admired from afar.. lol. Bit weird, but I was a shy teenager. I need to go find it and see if it's still usable in any way!

kathy

tkarispe swiftyshq I really adore how the pokewalker contextualizes your strolls in an abstract way; There's enough imaginative wiggle room that it honestly gives you more to personalize about your caught pokemon compared to something like GO where virtually you're always walking in-game in a bright green cyber landscape. While in the walker you're told and described where you and your pokemon are travelling to and I love how the pokemon found in each are themed. Like having Jirachi on your save file allows you to go to "Night Sky's Edge" which is described as a like an ethereal mountain and its like Yeah im sure Jirachi would show me some secret mirage wishing cave that only appears like once a year. Honestly the Mareep I got is really special because as far as i'm concerned I don't think wild mareep have ever been catchable or cited to live in cold, winter climate but she's a sheep, it makes sense!

Sheep Something I really like about the pokewalker is that it really is sleek, when I took it to work with me it was able to be completely out of sight and not get in the way of anything. I could not taking anything like the Poke Ball Plus to work with me cuz its just to too bulky and embarrassing LOL. Though to be fair that is also a game controller. Honestly for the walker you could easily swap the shell with black one used for the Wii Fit U pedometer and pretend its just a "normal" pedometer because it uses the exact same pedometer & shell size as the pokewalker. I'm honestly quite curious if you could use an infrared PDA to rewrite the Wii Fit U pedometer's rom to instead be just a pokewalker so no one has to by scalped ones but it may not be possible.

tkarispe

I loved the PokeWalker so much. It was like a beefed-up Pocket Pikachu that allowed you to romp around with the Pokémon of your choosing (let's take Gyarados on a stroll around the neighborhood today!) and had fantastic benefits when connected with HGSS. And the fact that they distributed downloadable content for it made it feel like a side game in its own right, and not just a peripheral. I really wish I still had mine; I unloaded a lot of my old Pokémon stuff years ago and I kinda miss it now (although a lot of it went to my niece, so at least it's still in the family).

I know I've said this before on other threads, but I would absolutely love if they released something similar for this day and age, either a new pedometer device or a mobile game that utilizes phone pedometers. I think it would have a lot of appeal for those of us who get nostalgic about pixely digital pets. (And it would also be a nice way to experience Pokémon on the go if you, cough, happen to live someplace that isn't really conducive to being able to achieve much in Pokémon GO.)

tkarispe

swiftyshq I loved those Digivice toys. I'm not ashamed to admit I carried multiples of them at the same time. Got kinda chaotic when multiple battles initiated simultaneously, but that was all part of the fun.

And yes, I don't think GO can be considered a true replacement for things like the PokeWalker and Pocket Pikachu; it's really a different type of game. Plus, honestly when I go on walks, I'd rather be looking at the scenery than my phone screen; the PokeWalker was nice because you just accrued Watts while on the go, and could check in on the device when you had some downtime. The gameplay didn't require you to be actively monitoring the game like GO does. I also liked that the PokeWalker and Pocket Pikachu had much more of a virtual pet angle to them, whereas GO is more about battling. I like opportunities to just hang out with my Pokémon without being compelled to be competitive.

kathy That's a really great point; I loved the imaginative areas in the PokeWalker and it was lovely to envision your Pokémon strolling through them. It also had the advantage over Pokémon GO in that you could freely choose your environment and thus what sorts of Pokémon would be available. I currently live in a very land-locked location and don't really have any opportunities to visit bodies of water, so Water-type Pokémon are really difficult for me to come by in GO, which is extremely frustrating. The PokeWalker had the effect of transporting you to a different place when you played, instead of confining you to an alternate-reality version of where you already were.

swiftyshq

tkarispe we're of one mind about that, i think! checking my phone while i walk is annoying; i much prefer when the pokewalker would beep if it needed something, but otherwise just be a companion that i can check on if i want..... whereas pokemon go you kinda have to check in frequently to log your travels (at least it feels like), and the focus is more grand-scale than just taking care of your single pokemon. i dunno. i think the pokewalker did it better.... LOL

BlueArticuno

I have a Pocket Pikachu 2 Color and noticed that the screen was becoming hard to see. I think the polarizer glue is slowly stripping. I managed to fix a GBA by changing the polarizer and about to do it with a donor Japanese Pocket Pikachu Color 2.

Anyone do this before and how did it work out?

Darren

BlueArticuno Have you tried adjusting the brightness? It could be the capacitor which needs replacing.

My childhood device is having this problem sadly, which is why I've been using another for my current million steps, but even that seems to be having some problems.

Sadly, with age all of these devices will eventually stop working, just like us 😅

tkarispe

Darren Which is why they really need to re-release them, or release new versions! There's a whole demographic of retro digital pet lovers who are pining over their aged electronics, here! 🙂

Slix

I got mine at release with my HeartGold game. I love it! I actually maxed out the step count in my copy of HeartGold+Pokewalker years back at 9,999,999 steps, and discovered that it uses the (Current Steps - New Steps = Exp. Gained) calculation, meaning I could no longer get any Exp. on Pokemon I walked with without resetting the Pokewalker link to the game. 😛 But, I actually moved my Pokewalker to my Japanese game when I started that a few years ago and was using it for that game for a while, which was fun!

I actually really mainly used mine as a passive way to level up Pokemon to level 100 in my Diamond game. I'd trade a Pokemon to myself in HG, then put it in the walker, walk a day at school or work, and then send it back to see it level up. This was most practical at higher levels, where it would take over 9,000 Exp. to level up a single time. You could only level up 1 level at a time, so the higher the level the Pokemon was when you'd go on long walks, the better!

I enjoyed linking with my friends' Pokewalkers and seeing their parties in the Trainer House too!

Darren

Slix I must try to do this at some point. I know you can capture Pokémon using the pokewalker so I wonder how many I could capture in the Pokédex alone? I'm sure there's a specific list somewhere.

bluemooncinco

Darren This is not really an answer to how many Pokemon you can catch on your Pokewalker, but I filled boxes and boxes in my PC with Pokemon I caught on mine. I am a runner, I used to work as a stocker at a grocery store, and I was walking all over campus for classes when I was in college, so I was putting in an absolutely disgusting amount of steps. I remember getting a Dragonair before I even had a badge because I was walking so much and too busy to actually play the game itself! I still use the Wii Fit U meter to this day, since Pokewalkers are pricey to replace if something were to happen to mine.

trubbishguts

yay!! i miss my pokewalker so badly, i lost it in high school at some point and was super heartbroken over it. i used it a lot (incl bringing it on backpacking trips)! every time im at a game store i keep my eye out for one, but I cant afford what they usually go for these days so getting a new one is just a daydream really </3

i don't even know if i ever unlocked all the routes or anything, i was a kind of stupid kid and didn't navigate games very well. but i just really loved having my typhlosion with me everywhere, and making the Number Go Up, lol