As my age states, I am 36, and that is no typo. Been married 15 years. Have three terrific sons. Former Marine. Enjoy football and basketball, and currently coach Pee Wee Football. I really enjoy war-time strategic games and never realized the great strategy within the game of Pokemon until my oldest son brought home the Blue version all those years ago.
My family has been hooked ever since. Myself and each of my 3 sons (19 oldest and 9 youngest) have our own GBA and all the games betweens all of us. My oldest son goes to the University of Utah and he is still into Pokemon. We used to have tournaments and get-togethers in our old neighborhood with the other kids/adults in the area. My coworkers know that I enjoy the game and think it is funny that someone like me would like it. Doesn't matter to me. It is something our family enjoys and it keeps me involved with my kids.
We don't like the cartoon or the in-game much. For us, it is all about breeding and competitive battling. Getting the right IVs on that one Pokemon so we can add it to our team and get the advantage over the others. None of us cheat either. The closest I ever got to cheating was using the cloning trick in Emerald so that me and each of my sons could have our own verstion of Deoxys.
I was extremely active in this group a few years ago. I really enjoy helping out new trainers and correcting some of the bad strategic habits that the weak in-game play seems to breed (like putting HM moves not called Surf on your Pokemon instead of an HM slave). That is until DP came out and ruined it for me. There was so much potential in moving from the GBA to the DS. Game Freak could have done so much more. Added ALL regions. Added a difficulty level that would have made the in-game even remotely interesting. Have the Pokemon walk with you, like Yellow. But, they only care about the mighty dollar. They put out the same boring product each time, knowing that we will buy it all up. Then they messed up the battling structure to boot. It's a shame. I think I would enjoy the Wi-Fi feature a lot.
As you can see in this very thread, there are many fans that aren't exactly 6 anymore. It would be nice for Game Freak to recognize those of us that have been around from the beginning, putting up with the same in-game monotonous because the strategy behind breeding and competitive battling is (before DP) so great. A game with an actually challenging Ai, along with a good storyline and an actual tournament at the end of the game instead of the lame "Elite" 4 would be an incredible game, as I am sure most of you guys would agree.
