Pokemon Pedometer Pals - THE POKEWALKER!!

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!

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...

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