News Archive - August 2004

PokemonCenter.com has updated their shop with some brand new Charizard and Venusaur GBA:SP's! The Venasaur edition comes in green with an outline on the inside and outside of the system of Venasaur. The Charizard system is red and has an outline in the inside and outside of Charizard. The systems cost $99.99 each and are exclusive to Pokemon Center. You can pre-order the special GameBoy Advance SP systems now and they will ship on October 1st. Pokemon Center has also released quite a few new products, so stop by to check them out.

The price of the Game Boy Advance SP is dropping to $79.99 in
the United States later this week, with a cut in Europe expected to follow in the coming months.

Australian Pokémon fans are about to be a whole lot happier. Not only are we anticiapting the release of pokémon leaf green and fire red (due around Sept. 18 @ EB). But Now out with MacDonalds happy meals are pokémon toys ^____^ there are a total of 8. including mudkip, torchic, pikachu and treecko. I am unaware if this is happening in Macca's restuarants across the globe or just in Oz.

The next batch of GBA Videos will be released on September 27, 2004. They are much better in quality than the original videos.

Pokemon GBA Video: Series 2, Video 1:

It contains "Pokemon - I Choose You" and "Here Comes The Squirtle Squad".

Pokemon GBA Video: Series 2, Video 2:

It contains "Beach Blackout Blastoise" and "Go West Young Meowth".

Click the bold to pre-order.

For those of you itching for Emerald information, there is a new commercial on the Japanese Pokemon website. It shows new in-game footage and more!

Check it out: http://www.pokemon.co.jp/game/cf/emerald.html

Hasbro introduced all new Pokemon toys, with new products in almost every category! New plushies include Pikachu, Mudkip, Torchic and Treecko. Action figures include Rayquaza, Swello and Metagross. In addition, there are new Battle Packs, and information on Pokemon Advanced Beanies. All of this and more located at the Hasbro website, and they do have an online store if anybody gets Poke-fever!

After many hours of hard work, I finally have Pokemon #001-151 completely recoded in the new PokeDex. The other PokeDex pages of Pokemon #152-386 are still up, except they are all part of the old PokeDex with the old layout. The new PokeDex has new FireRed/LeafGreen sprites, additional information, corrected errors, and a better layout. I'm sorry to inform those who want more information in the PokeDex (which is about everyone), but I really don't have the time to add more content to each Pokemon, as it'll probably take me a year and a half to complete everything. By that time, new games and new information will come out, resulting in more updates that'll loop on forever. Thus, it's not feasible for me to add any additional content. I know it's a bit disappointing, but hey, Pokemon Dream still has the best walkthroughs on the net!

The DS has discovered to posess an extra socket next to the headphone socket. Apparently designed for connecting a special headset, whose connector would include both audio in and out plugs. This makes sense with rumours that a number of games are planning to support voice chat in their multiplayer modes. It is not certain at this stage if this will include pokemon games (this could possibly be an extention of the chat rooms featured in FR and LG, but this is only a guess.).

The Pokemon Center in New York is holding a special party on August 28th from 12:00 noon to 6:00 p.m. During this event, Pokemon fans will be able to meet Pokemon characters in person, play carnival games to win prizes, and best of all, buy Pokemon FireRed and LeafGreen 11 days before they're released everywhere in the US. This is a good chance to start playing before everyone else, only if you can get to the Pokemon Center.

Now for Pokemon Dream news. I have completed the recoding of the website, except for sections having different layouts (PokeDex, PokeMart, and PPA), which will be converted to PHP soon. The downtime should be fixed already. Pokemon Dream's finally back in business!

Today while I was watching my Saturday moring cartoons on Kids WB, I stumbled upon something very interesting: The name of the 7th season of Pokemon. It will be titled Pokemon Advanced Challenge and will air on Saturday, September 11. (About two weeks from now.)

Well, as we know pokemon ruby and sapphire have a particular glitch, that can be fixed if you own pokemon coloseum or if you pop into a nintendo event which is american! That glitch is the Berry glitch that freezes berrys and stops them from growing after a year. Anyway, once Pokemon fire red and leaf green are released rumour has it that a trade between either of these games and ruby or sapphire will repair the berry glitch!

Lycos top 50 update [Week ending August 14]: Pokémon holds position number 34. a drop from last weeks number 21 position.

Recoding the site is truly a great pain. However, I've already recoded most of the site. The only sections left are the TCG section and Fan Section. There currently should be no broken links if you navigate inside the site, meaning that you didn't reach it from a search engine. If you do spot an error page, please e-mail me ASAP. Please hang in here with me as I continue to work...

I'm very sorry for not posting any news lately, I was on a trip. Anyway, I started school yesterday, and boy do I have a lot of homework. I probably won't be able to post news as often or post on the PD Forums. So..now on to the real News Update!

On September 27, two new Pokemon GBA Videos will be released. The episodes featured on the videos will be: "Pokémon I Choose You" and "Here Comes the Squirtle Squad." The other video will feature: "Beach Blank-out Blastoise" and "Go West Young Meowth." Each will cost about $19.00. (USA Dollars)

Pokemon Dream's hits have plummeted after getting an all-time high of over 4,000 unique visitors on August 3rd. Unique hits have been dropping at a rate of around 300-400 a day. This has a lot to do with a lot server downtime, and possibly the loss of the keyword "Pokemon Emerald" in the Google database for PD. For the past few days, I have been very angry, frustrated, and sad. We reached a point that stood Pokemon Dream as one of the top three best English Pokemon websites. I guess the higher you climb, the harder you'll fall.

For the past few days, along with feeling emotionally upset and continuing to build the new PokeDex, I have started to recode the entire website in PHP. This allows for unique titles on every page in the future, unlike now, where every page shows the same title. I will be recoding it differently than the majority of the larger Pokemon sites out there; it's a better way, of course. I've already finished a few sections (large and small sections), and can be detected by you, the visitor, if you see different titles on every page. I still have thousands of files to go through, so I guess you can say it's hard work!

I also want to point out to everyone that none of the news posters are posting news, except for two of them who have proper excuses. I've been real busy with all the recoding work with both the PokeDex and the site, and have absolutely no time to search for news. I apologize to all visitors; everything should be back to normal by next month.

As you might notice, I've modified the look of this page a bit, adding a "Featured Section" section to let visitors know the current best section on Pokemon Dream, or at least what I think is the best section. Right now, it's the section on Pokemon Emerald, which currently isn't too large, but will be large as time goes on and I collect more information. This "Featured Section" will change once in a while, according to visitor interest (or my interest).

After hours and hours of reading a PHP (a computer programming language) book and trying to figure out what on Earth it means, I finally took some more hours (all of which consisted of headaches) to write up a new PokeDex, in PHP, of course. This PokeDex is very similar in appearance to the previous PokeDex, which is still and will be in operation for a long time, but very different in coding and organization. This new PokeDex won't have too much of an effect on visitors, but will have an huge impact on managing and updating the PokeDex. For the next couple of weeks, or even couple of months, I will be recoding the PokeDex in its new form: written in PHP.

For those of you who don't know about PHP, this won't effect you much. For those of you who do know PHP, well, it won't effect you anyway. I've already coded the pages for the first three Pokemon: Bulbasaur, Ivysaur, and Venusaur. This PokeDex is far from finished, ad-free (for now, at least), looks better, and contains only three pages. You can take a look at it by clicking here, which takes you to the Bulbasaur page. Please post any comments and suggestions below, including what extra things you want to see in the PokeDex. Happy browsing!

Toys "R" Us stores all over the U.S. will be holding a Pokemon FunDay on August 28th! Pokemon FunDay is a 4 1/2 hour event held all over the country, starting at 9:30 AM and ending at 2:00 PM. During this event, Pokemon fans will be able to get a demo of the not-yet-released EX FireRed & LeafGreen, receive a free TCG playmat, get free Pokemon stickers and a Pokemon Fan Book, and even catch a sneak peek of Pokemon FireRed and LeafGreen! For more information, click here.

I have added a FireRed/LeafGreen Move Tutor Guide. It contains valueable information about where to learn moves that used to be TMs in the original Red/Blue games. This is another addition to PD's ever growing section on the soon-to-be-released FireRed and LeafGreen, set for release on September 7th in the U.S. I would like to thank ButtonBasher for writing the whole thing, coding it in HTML, and doing a great job!

Apparently, some needles were found in Pokemon dolls a while ago. The company that made these dolls recalled all Pokemon Dolls to inspect them. About 12 out of the 120,000 dolls that have been inspected were found to have needles in them. The needles seem to have come from the sewing-machines in a plant in Quingdao City, China that produces the Pokemon Dolls. For all you that own some, be careful.

According to a list by Nintendo.com, a total of 64 Nintendo DS games are currently being developed by some 32 Japanese companies. There are over 120 Nintendo DS games in development around the world. The list doesn't include any Pokemon games, but I'm sure there will be soon. The list can be found here.

As many of you may know, there are a total of 9 new islands in FireRed and LeafGreen. They used to be refered to as the "Rainbow Islands", or the "Mystery Islands". However, the islands aren't a mystery anymore.

We now know that the first 7 islands are called the Sevii Islands in the English version of FireRed/LeafGreen, and that the first island is called Knot Island. Pokemon Dream's FireRed/LeafGreen Walkthrough has been updated to reflect those newly announced names.

The Nintendo DS, originally the project name of a hand-held video game system that featured two screens, has been announced to be the official name. Since its first appearance at the E3 this year, the Nintendo DS has been changed for the better. To your left is a picture from IGN, showing the final design of the Nintendo DS. Compared to the one at the E3, I would say that I like this one more.

In other news (which isn't really news), I have added the news for July, which can be found here.