Pokémon Channel (GameCube) Review

Even after many mind numbing hours of labouring our way though this title we still fail to find a point to it. Who in their right mind would make a game with such a lack of meaning, of interest and of excitement? The basic premise is you, sitting there watching TV in a stupid Pokémon world before getting so bored you go and tidy the loft or water the Bougainvillea. In all honesty this isn't a game, its interactive boredom, and we don't want to have to pay forty pounds for something that we can easily get from daytime television.

You just sit there and watch TV with an electronic rat watching stupid Pokémon buggering about on the screen. There are various shows, all just as pointless as the one that proceeds and follows it, if not more so. We fail to understand why anyone would want to play a game that involves watching TV. To our minds the better option is to just watch TV and scrap the pricey game, and if you like to divulge in such things with yellow and white satanic rats, then buy a stuffed toy from Woolworths.

There are quite a lot of programmes; from Psyduck and Meowth doing the news to Smoochum fronting keep fit items. At first it is vaguely amusing, but soon any normal person will either get bored or deeply disturbed by what is on show. You can even paint pictures of your favourite scenes, or even make amusing posters showing your outrage at how dull and pointless the game is.

Annoyingly, if you try and prize the aforementioned Pokémon away from his beloved television entertainment unit before he is full entertained, the little bastard starts to get all annoyed with you. Give him enough TV to keep him happy and you will be ‘privileged’ with the excitement of going outside to play. The point of this? You guessed it, there really isn’t one. You just wonder about getting bored, meet a few Pokémon and then have a breakdown.

The fact of the matter is this game is so dull and so boring that we can’t actually think of anything more to say about it. You sit down, watch TV, get bored of it, go outside, meet some Pokémon, get bored of that, and so the never ending cycle of pain continues forever and ever. There is probably a total of about five minutes of entertainment on offer here, now if our Maths is any good we work that out as £8 per minute of fun, more expensive than buying a match of football off Sky.

On that note what in real life could we suggest would give you the same sort of pleasures as Pokémon Channel? Well how about sitting there flicking through all the TV channels, whilst pummelling yourself in the groin, surrounded by people pointing and laughing at you, with someone taking your wallet and passing it through an industrial shredder. If gaming is fun, and this is gaming, we have lost the will to live.