The BBS Magazine

Pokémon has always been one of those games where players have access to cheat codes and devices, going all the way back to the first two generations. The Game Shark and Action Replay were staples and made you the cool kid of any school playground. After all, what kid wasn’t amused by the idea of a Sunkern with 999 stats and moves like Flamethrower? 

But there’s the other side of it. People don’t exactly like it when you beat them up with hacked Pokémon, and that can be a fair enough viewpoint. Throw in a recent event in this year’s Pokémon VGCs (Video Game Competition) in America, and you get an interesting topic of discussion. Here we look at both sides of the debate on how ‘right’ it may be to use the newest of the external devices – the Power Save – to help you prepare for a Pokémon competition, and let you weigh up both sides of the debate. Warning – a few battling terms exist in this article.

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Every so often, Pokémon tournaments have been run by fans and officials, and they’ve even picked up in frequency ever since generation five started. Some have been hosted online, and a slew of those are expected to start over the coming months as well for Pokémon X&Y.

But there’s the other sort of tournament, where you go out and battle people in the flesh with your 3DSs. …No, not by whacking each other, you still just fight via Pokémon battles. But what is such an event like, and what sort of people go to these events? And how many, for that matter? Recently a few of us had the chance to go and check out a VGC event ourselves in Sydney, Australia.

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