Gen IV is honestly my favorite Gen, if only because it represents the absolute pinnacle of my love for Pokémon. It started before I even had a DS to play them on, and I got over halfway through Diamond on a choppy, miserable DS emulator running on an old Windows XP computer. I was a member on here before I could even play through an actual Pokémon game. I finally got my first DS, a cobalt blue DS Lite, for my 10th birthday in 2008 and got Diamond that same month. Diamond was an experience, even with all the complaints in hindsite, I played the hell out of that game. My starter was a Chimchar, and my team (or the only notable members) were that Chimchar which would become an Infernape, and a Typhlosion that I received as an egg from a member on here (whose name has been lost in my head after all these years). I logged over 300 hours on that game before I slowed down, eventually to make things interesting I bought an Action Replay, which was nice just to be able to use the event items that never made it to the game. My best friend at the time was super into Pokémon (we had matching vintage Gameboy carrying cases, the ones with different Pokémon on them), and I remember being so excited to break the news about Platinum's announcement it him, it was amazing. That was the first time that I was there for every single info leak and low quality scan. When Platinum eventually did come out, a different friend was at my house and I legit left to go get it with my mom while he was still asleep at my house, I could not wait at all to get it. That time around I picked Turtwig as my starter, and now it's a level 80 Torterra that stays in my Pokémon Bank. I beat Platinum in (I wanna say) 10 days, I couldn't put it down. It was everything I loved about Diamond version but even better. Summer of 2009 was when I got my first ever shiny in the wild, it was a Graveler on the route right after Veilstone, I was so scared of it self-destructing that I used a Master Ball but it was 100% worth it. Moving forward, I remember being here on Pokécommunity when that first five second video of HGSS was released, I wanted to scream so loudly because Johto was my other favorite region, at that point I had given up hope on a remake, there was endless speculation and dissection pertaining to every aspect of that video. I put way too much time into my copy of HeartGold, and it was the first game where I really strove to have a balanced team, all I remember at the moment though was I had a Typhlosion, Ampharos, and Dragonite for sure, I'll have to dig out my copy and check for my full team. HGSS was also the first release where I bought both games, though I ended up using SoulSilver as a copy to mess around in, and eventually just used it to download event Pokémon. At first I really tried to get a SR shiny, but 12 year old me really did not have the patience for that, so I kinda gave up pretty quickly. All in all I probably sunk well over 800 hours into Gen 4 and the worlds of Sinnoh and Johto were practically a defining aspect of my pre-teen years.