Pokémon Vending Cards: TCG2 Omissions, Exclusives & The Rest
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- Опубліковано 1 жов 2024
- / paraspectre
/ paraspectre
paraspectre@gmail.com
Back in 1998, there were sets of Pokémon cards released in Japan that were sold on sheets in vending machines: Blue, Red, & Green. I'm going to be looking at every single one of these cards one set at a time starting with the Blue Series. Most of these cards all appear in Pokémon Trading Card Game 2, also a Japan-only release. But there were some that they chose to leave out and it's time to speculate as to why. Also, we'll be looking at all of the TCG2 exclusives AND the Bill's PC Campaign cards.
Part 1 (Blue) is here: • Pokémon Vending Cards:...
Part 2 (Red) is here: • Pokémon Vending Cards:...
Part 3 (Green) is here: • Pokémon Vending Cards:...
Intro, Background, Pallet Town Remix by Joshua C. Griffin.
Music used from Pokémon Red & Blue, Pokémon Trading Card Game and Pokémon Card GB2: Here Comes Team GR!
Credits vocals by Milton McShade
#pokemon #pokemoncards #pokemontcg2
it's sad that they opted out of cards needing non damage counters to work, as Hungry Hungry Snorlax and its food counters were included in GB2, but none of the others
Yeah I guess only have one type was enough
That vending mew. When I was a kid I saw that card in one of the magazines my mom would buy me (Beckett’s maybe?), and I knew I had to have it. My mom and I searched high and low to track that card down in Kentucky in the late 90s/early 2000s. It took FOREVER but my mom finally found one on eBay and got it for $20-something. It’s also a glossy card which is kind of cool. I have it double sleeved in my Pokémon card binder to this day. :)
That’s awesome. And kinda true to what Mew is. It probably wasn’t easy then to know exactly how to get it
I have to tell you, I absolutely loved this series. I can feel the love you’ve put into every one of these. Thank you for the effort and content.
Why thank you! Like I said, I was also learning about them as I went, so they were really cool to analyze.
I love how the Koffing has an attack that disables abilities when the regional variant would go on to have an ability that disables abilities.
Koffing was ahead of its time
For electrode, they could have made 7 unobtainable cards that look like Base Electrode, but functioned as double energies of each type in game. Just swap them around when the situation calls for it.
They could have, but that’s a lot of resources for one gimmicky card
I kinda wonder if on base set electrode if they just couldn't get the art looking right with the limited color palette available. I think you get a maximum of 7 colors including white and black. It really doesn't seem that complicated to implement buzzap
It's weird that they don't include the Electabuzz and Marowak Cards considering that there is a card in the game that puts a special Counter: Snorlax, if I remember correctly it puts a Cookie counter or something like that and puts a cherry symbol.
And the truth is that I have been thinking that maybe the reason that many of these cards are not there is because they ran out of time, after all this was the last game that came out on the Gameboy Color
Yeah maybe one type of special counter was enough?
I'd LOVE a video about those bootleg holographic Japanese cards a bunch of those sticker vending machines in the front of grocery stores and restaurants had here in the US in the 90s and early 2000s. I actually have a photo of some,s till!
Bootleg Pokémon cards sound really fun to learn about. Like a video Phelous would make
I would LOVE a combined 2 hour long frankenvideo of all of these parts mashed together. I hope you do make it!
I really didn’t expect people to want it but maybe I will ☺️
Small correction about Pokemon Tower:
Stadium cards were introduced to the TCG in the Leaders' Stadium set (called Gym Heroes in English), which was the next set after Team Rocket. So it wasn't that ahead of its time.
In fact, while the blue vending machine cards were released in March 1998, before stadium cards were introduced, by the time the green series with Pokemon Tower was released in November 1998, Leaders' Stadium and its stadium cards were already available.
But I am sure that you are correct that Pokemon Tower wasn't included in GB2 at least partially because it would have been the only stadium card.
And I guess stadium cards are kind of like MTG's enchantments, if there could only be one enchantment in play at a time, and it affected both players. Really, they're most like Yugioh's field spells, but I know you've said that you don't know Yugioh, so that doesn't mean much to you. And they predate Yugioh anyway.
Thank you for clearing that up. Even the gym leader sets are after my time, so I’m not familiar with stadium cards. And you are correct in me knowing nothing about Yugioh 😅
No surprise that alakazam and gengar were the most popular. The art on the least favorite 3 are absolute garbage, you valiantly stayed non offensive but they are just bad.
That Golem one is rough. Especially compared to how great Gengar looks. It should’ve been the same artist doing the 5 cards
This whole series made me so nostalgic for that era of the TCG. I'll have to boot up the TCG2 game and do another playthrough; there's some kind of magic in those pixels. And I'm grateful to you for helping me to remember some of the best times of my childhood. Keep on making great content!
To be fair without Gym series cards there was only one stadium card in the entirity of the sets they did include so i cant be too surprised they disnt botherimplimenting stadiums
They probably didn’t include Koffing with Division because I believe it would be the only instance of requiring input during your opponents turn. You’d have to interrupt the opponents turn after they deal damage to pick a Koffing.
This is backed up by the fact that when you play “Challenge!” The AI will ALWAYS choose to let you draw rather than both fill your benches. They probably hard coded the draw into the card and just added text to make it seem like the AI made a choice
I just wanna hear you talk about Pokémon Card facts and opinions for… ever.
Haha well luckily there’s a lot of content to discuss
Something to keep in mind is that the programming cost of a card isn't just getting the card to literally function but also getting the AI to understand how to play against it. For example, Fossil Ditto: you need to get the switch AI to understand that the card currently in your active spot isn't really the one that will be there after the switch. The AI might bench their fire type to bring in a water type against your fire type Ditto, and then suddenly realize that Ditto has an electric weakness now and bring in their electric type, and so on. Something like that would instantly lay bare the artifice of the game. Likewise, Guard Spec requires the AI to have specific decision-making processes for if you've played the card - otherwise you get stuff like Base Gyarados using bubblebeam instead of dragon rage into an active Guard Spec. (I suspect they had to do similarly specific programming to let the enemy AI use pluspower, but that card was powerful and iconic, and Guard Spec looks pretty weak and was a vending machine card.)
9:33 The slow blade penetrates the shield.
You have made my day oh Great Paraspectre!
I am glad to hear it ☺️
I like how most of them are just hard to impliment on a gbc
“Caterpie makes it so you can’t retreat for a turn? Uh…. Just take it out of the game entirely”
I think Machamp wasn't attacking the other pokemon with those rocks. It looks like he was juggling the rocks while the other pokemon spectated.
A more wholesome approach
I'd recommend stitching these vending card videos together for one huge video and saving it for a time when you have a long gap between videos. The UA-cam algorithm seems to favor really long videos.
I can certainly do that! It would be simply just taking out the intros and outros
I would have been so disappointed trading in for that golem. The artwork is certainly not my taste.
Yeah that Golem is easily the least enticing of the 5 cards for me
Yes! Been waiting for this episode!
did you cover Dark Ivysaur / Dark Venusaur in an earlier vid?
Those actually DID get an English release, so they didn’t match anything I was talking about in these (Vending, exclusive or omissions).
29:35 The early promo/Fossil Mew's Devolution Beam attack can be used on your own Pokemon and returns the evolution card to hand. Campaign Gengar is the PERFECT Pokemon card to abuse with it.
It's funny how they opted out of doing many of these very special effects. Reminds me of Yugioh The Sacred Cards, where something rather similar happened (though the Pokemon games did come first). I like that they added GB exclusive cards with fun random effects though. I remember in the first game, I loved GB Pidgeot in my whirlwind centric deck (basically gusting and whirlwinding everything with the Pidgey line, then use Fossil Gengar's pokepower and Dark Mind to pick off multiple mons at once) and GB Marowak was a really fun pokemon in a Wigglytuff Do The Wave deck.
This series was great! As someone who used the first Pokemon TCG game to learn about pixel art (dithering and how certain artstyles are translated into pixels mostly) GB2's sometimes very flat and even shoddy-looking pixel art was a letdown and a surprise. But, seeing the cards (mostly vending and promos apparently) in their real form, I understand. Some of these artstyles are hard to translate into pixelart without looking goofy. Just learning about that made this series a blast.
I also really appreciate just how diverse the art for these cards is.
Thanks for the series! Pretty cool to see all the Pokémon that didn't make the cut, and the exclusives. I think the counters would have needed to be programmed in so you can see a list of all counters on a Pokémon, which would probably have been tedious. Especially if you retain counters when you retreat. I think the moves that completely prevent retreat didn't make it because they would have to allow some parts of card effects but not others. That probably made executing the sequence of steps for a card more complicated and needed changes to how cards execute in general. I'm guessing the Koffing that didn't make it was because it disturbed the flow of the turns. Pokémon doesn't allow for the non-turn player to make any actions out of turn, so even just allowing the player to search their deck for a Koffing was probably too much.
A lot of this comes down to effort and space/performance. These old games were often very limited on physical space for data on the cartridge, so a large part of the programming process was about using the limited resources as efficiently as possible. Also, the processing speed and RAM constraints meant that storing extra data like counters may have been seen as unnecessarily expensive.
I'm just glad that these kinds of constraints aren't as bad now! It still helps to consider the balance between how much RAM you need and how much processing is required, but it's not as big a deal as it used to be.
Yeah it seemed like it wasn’t worth the trouble for some of these. At least they chose to replace them with some exclusive ideas though
@@Paraspectre That's true. I think the random aspect is great for GB exclusives. Taking advantage of the fact that the randomization can be done quickly in game, whereas IRL would need explicit instructions on how to randomize, like who receives random damage, and how much, etc.
Also, you know the Mew card that deals random damage and status? I only got it in GB2 (I think bought from GR game center), but the "random" damage is always 10 before weakness and resistance! I think it wasn't programmed correctly. Not sure about the card pop for TCG though. Random status works though.
Gengar line only run? I'd like to see that. Love your videos!
I think his Halloween one last year was ghost only gen 1 aka gengar line only. So it might be up your alley!
Yeah, what Legion said 😊. I did a ghosts only run in October on the original game. Maybe I’ll do the sequel this October…
Pokemon Tower is actually pretty similar to Yu-gi-oh's Necrovalley, which was released fairy early on for that game but still many years after the Pokemon vending machine cards. Necrovalley is notorious for receiving an insane number of errata to its effect, including different changes in different regions, and just generally being a pain in the ass whenever it's used. Perhaps not unsurprising, even back then there were more different ways to interact with the GY in Yu-gi-oh than discarded cards in Pokemon.
I was stunned by how many of these cards i had gotten (only like 5 + a couple of the ones that got released in NA really) despite not knowing they existed or trying to get them but just by my siblings and i hoovering up every Pokémon card we could find and afford at garage sales around our town over the course of a couple summers. We have a pretty decent number of Japanese students in our town every year through one of those exchange programs plus it's a college town so maybe that helped.
I feel as though many of these cards could have been partly implemented by excluding or possibly modifying the problematic move.
Why was the Lugia weakness psychic
That’s something I didn’t even mention. This Lugia is all sorts of wonky.
I can imagine the programmers begging the card game designers to please stop making cards with their own special markers and counters
I don't think that Machamp is throwing rocks, I think it's juggling them.
I think the move Pain Split was inspired by that Alakazam's Trance Damage as it's functionally the same thing except the division of damage.
Ah I wasn’t thinking of that
"Stadium cards" like Lavender Tower became a normal thing in the TCG in the Gym Heroes expansion, which is what came right after the Rocket Expansion, so just a little too late to be a thing in TCG2
Kinda cool to see a prototype stadium card here then. Even though it didn’t make the cut in the end
Whaaaaat were those vocals at the end Hahahaha
A Milton McShade original
I dont blame them for not putting jungle ditto in the games. That card had a like 20 page compendium ruling section dedicated to it lmao
I remember using that Dark Fearow on a run in GB2! It kinda hard carried me because I just couldn’t get my hands on good colorless options. Can get massive damage really quickly
It’s a pretty sweet card. It’s cool they put the spotlight on Fearow for once
Nice
Yes the Gengar can win you the game by bouncing your opponent's only Pokemon. Pidgeot's Whriliwind has a similar effect, and I did pull it off once as a kid.
If you're really after another GBC TCG RPG, there is an SNK vs. Capcom Card game on the Neo Geo Pocket. It's actually even on Switch now too. It's decent, but not quite as good as Pokemon TCG.
I have never heard of that.. interesting
That promo vending Mew really gives off Pokémon Snap vibes. Like it looks straight out of Rainbow Cloud.
I was actually going to say that too, but I didn’t. If only Mew looked more 3D
I feel like the “markers” would work like counters in many other card games. I think they could’ve programmed similarly to how status conditions work…
Aye the grimer party illustration is so cool! I want to be in their grimy gang! Poor Koffin looks like they left its pokeball upside down or something…
Yeah, even just some generic marker rather than it being a specific lightning rod or something
Gotta make a TCG2 Exclusive Cards run now, just for fun since the cards seem like they would be fun to play with.
Hmm that could be an idea. I would need to customize it though because I think you get them in the second half if I remember right?
I'm still tickled by the fact that Omastar was one of Bill's PC trade evolution. I'd love to know the reasoning behind that decision.
Nothing about it makes sense to me other than they picked Omastar out of a hat
Haha wasn't Blastoise a bad example for explaining why the bounce effect from the Gengar is powerful? Blastoise has that rain dance ability so you can just play all of the 6 energies down again straight away when it comes into play
Yeah but there’s the whole hassle of starting over with Squirtle. But yeah, any three part evolution would work
Any plans for Diamond/Pearl paraspective any time soon? Such a banger of a series.
Every time I think about continuing the Paraspective, I have other video ideas I want to do first. There are still an bunch of Gen 3 ones left..
Great work! Probably one of your best video yet! Apart from those Matthew love videos
Wow! Thank you for that.
ditto would have been easy to program, they could have just made the pokemon power only activate once whenever ditto becomes the active pokemon
It’s like they couldn’t really figure out Ditto in card form
Lavender Tower is just straight up Yugioh's Gravekeeper's Valley XD
I do not know what this is, but heck yes ☺️
@@Paraspectre a yugioh field spell card that prevents either player from doing anything involving the graveyard(except for cards that specifically get around it) and has become one of the most frequently eratta'd card, as well one of the ones with the most rulings.
I'm a simple person. I see a Paraspectre video, I click the Paraspectre video.
Appreciations abound
Thanks for the video. I appreciate all your hard work.
Thank you for watching them 😊
21:55 im sorry did you just dis the GOAT, Tomokazu Komiya?
😬😬
10:24, you’re wrong pal. The artwork is minimalistic, has interesting use of space and negative space, and I find it’s colors bold and sharp.
Some cards being less busy, and more serene and introspective, I think this variety is what makes Pokémon cards great. Unlike other games they aren’t always meant to look cool, sometimes they are simply more laid back aesthetics
Not saying the art is necessarily good, I’m saying it went for something with a unique style and therefore isn’t lame
Just kidding,something more like 28:52 tho
Instead of Omanyte and Omastar, maybe they could've done just any mysterious fossil to get an Aerodactyl card. That way it's a lone fossil that can be added without its missing pair, even if it's a one/ two stage mon instead of two/ three stage.
Yeah this would’ve made more sense than Omastar
@@Paraspectre Plenty would've made more sense than Omastar lol.
Blue, red, green
This should be colorless
A fantastic journey from start to finish. It's so strange to see that only 3 Gen 2 cards made it in. However I found that the card style and ideas they went with were quite unique. I really do wish they had continued the TCG series. They had something golden here that they simply let rot.
Yugioh pushed a yearly World Championship games + unrelated side games all during the gba era
There was definitely a market for card game simulation videogames at the time and on their own console,crazy how they let that one go
I didn’t realize how long Gold and Silver were out in Japan by the time TCG2 came out. Gen 2 was nothing new at that point.
Kadabara was definitely stopped because of Uri Gellar and his bananas lawsuit. It may have been printed before Uri and then they couldnt include it in the gameboy game because of him. Not 100% sure though
Kadabara cards were not allowed to be printed and distrubuted for years because Gellar threw a fit saying Pokemon/nintendo copied his likeness or some crap. He is a fraud psychic.
Nm I think other kadabaras are in the game but Uri Gellar did do that at some point
Yeah the other vending Kadabra being there made me thing it had nothing to do with Uri.
@@Paraspectre yeah for years in the card game abra had ways of super or warp ebolving to get past kadabra.
Babe wake up, new Paraspectre video just dropped
😎
Awe man I've been super excited for this one
Thanks for sticking with the series
Absolutely loved this mini series, keep up the good work. ❤
Dark Pokémon only challenges when?
Could be fun!
Thanks again for all the work and another great video
Thanks for watching!
Oh hey they actually spelled Ninetales correctly
So embarrassing for them…
Awesome work on this series. Completed my vending collection and it’s probably my favorite set. So cool
I think the Machamp is juggling the rocks, not throwing them. Y'know, performing a show for the other 'mons.
This was a really fun series. Good stuff!
Why thanks! Machamp is up to interpretation I guess
For the Electabuzz and others, there are rare occasions in later sets where “markers” of various types were used as with these cards; probably the most prominent was Delta Species Tyranitar ex from Dragon Frontiers and its Shock-wave markers.
So they did make a return. I like the idea though
Good night when I see this in my subs
I sure hope it was a good night
I have that physical mew
I’ve never checked the value but I can see that being a gem 💎
@@Paraspectre I should do a video on the promo cards I have and link it to you explaining them. Because I got mine working at a Japanese comic and card store
About "special counters" in TCG 2, there actually is already one of those that I know of in the game. Hungry Snorlax can use "food counters" to do more damage iirc. I guess they wanted to stop there and didn't want too many cards to have these counters?
I wasn’t even thinking of Hungry Snorlax. I’ve never used one so I didn’t necessarily realize it used counters