Secret Shame - Pokemon

I'm a 31 year old married man and two weeks ago I started playing Pokemon. I'd never touched one of the games before, but was looking for a game for my DS and some people on some forums suggested it. I was skeptical, but figured I didn't have anything to lose.

It turns out I was wrong about that. What I lost was all of my free time, and I'm pretty sure I lost a bit of dignity, too. I play the stupid game all the time now. I even stay up way past the point I should be asleep because I'm in bed playing Pokemon.

For being a "kid" game, Pokemon is surprisingly deep and full of strategy. For example, Pokemon are of a certain type, like a fire pokemon. Each type is strong against another type and weak against some other type. This plays out a lot like Rock-Paper-Scissors, except there are more than three type of pokemon. This is information I was unaware of going into this. So when I first faced off against a rock pokemon, my fire monkey didn't do any good for the first time. After much searching, I found that I needed a plant pokemon, which I had to go find, then level up until he was around the level of the rest of my party.

And then the pokemon learn new moves, which can be attacks or defensive in nature. But the thing is, each pokemon can only know four moves at the same time. That means if your pokemon already knows four moves, but levels up and has access to a new move, you have to decide whether to forget an existing move or never learn the new one.

Of course, there's the famous need to "catch 'em all". I don't even want to know how much time I've spent wandering the same patch of wilderness trying to get a different pokemon to appear. In the past, I've played Magic the Gathering, HeroClix, and other games of that nature, so I'm a collector at my core. That means this game is going to eat my soul and leave me an empty shell unless I can find each and every pokemon.

So there it is. I've publicly admitted that I'm playing Pokemon, a fact that I (unsuccessfully) tried to hide from my wife for two weeks. If ever there were a secret gaming shame, this would be it.