Last week I picked up Pokémon White, my first purchase in the series since Sapphire on the GBA. Like anyone whose age was under about 15 circa 1998, I was obsessed with Red/Blue, and although I enjoyed both, Gold/Silver and Ruby/Sapphire represented diminishing returns to me. By the time the enhanced remakes and so on started coming out with some regularity I was happy to leave it alone, but Black and White seemed like a good chance to see what has changed in the better part of a decade.

Not an awful lot, it turns out.

Back in 1998, I can actually remember looking at Pokémon and, having salivated at how gloriously Zelda had recently transformed from top-down 2D adventure to epic 3D quest, my friends and I were giddy at how good it would be when Pokémon did the same thing. Now, several generations later, the series’ latest and greatest is… a top-down 2D adventure. Even the battles have the same largely static, pixellated characters in place of some nice high-res art. They have polygonal buildings these days, though, so that’s something.

I know, I know. The DS never was a powerhouse and couldn’t reasonably be expected to do too much more than this. But the lack of ambition in the design extends to the gameplay as well: all of these games are essentially identical. Your character comes of age and gets his first Pokémon from a choice of three, goes on a quest to defeat the Gym Leaders while fighting off attacks from terrorist groups, and becomes the greatest of all time. Then collect and train your critters until you lose the will to live. Flavour has been added over time through features like the day/night cycle and some impenetrable network connectivity, but the basics are unchanged.

Why haven’t we had a proper Pokémon RPG for one of Nintendo’s consoles? It must be a budget concern or something – lots of monsters to model and animate, most of which, in my opinion, can’t beat the original 151 for personality – because there can’t be concerns over whether or not it would sell.

I can only assume that the fact that these games are ultimately aimed at children is how gameplay that is so painfully repetitive, in an RPG without much of a story to hold the interest, can maintain such popularity. Given the huge amount of innovative, clever stuff on the DS, I just can’t see the appeal any more.

What a shame. I’ll play it into double figures to give it a fair shake and happily retract this if it turns into something brilliant in that time, but sadly, I don’t think it’s going to happen.

This might seem like a strange thing to say, but playing GTA: Chinatown Wars on the DS has allowed me to understand where people are coming from when they talk about how bad for kids the likes of Pokémon are. After all, it’s essentially drug dealing.

Let’s say you’re at a convention where Nintendo is unlocking Mew for players – you’ll have to excuse the outdated example since I haven’t properly played a Pokémon game since about 2002. Your Mew is near worthless in a trade there because everyone has them, but if you take it back to the school playground – this is 2002, remember; I don’t still hang around playgrounds with Pokémon to trade – it becomes invaluable.

In Chinatown Wars, you can, say, pick up some cheap weed where the Jamaican gangs are prevalent and sell it at a premium to college students. Or you might get an email from someone looking to offload some heroin cheaply, so you can take up the offer and stash it at your safehouse until someone finds themselves short of skag and will pay over the odds for some of your collection. Basic supply and demand, only here your deals will occasionally be raided by the cops. It’s also a nifty method of investment, tying up a chunk of your money in cheap drugs that you can sell for thousands in profit when demand goes up.

I’ll stop talking about that aspect of the game there for fear of scaring off the children – this site had already been blocked as pornography once by a major filtering company, incidentally – and just say that I love Chinatown Wars, and living out fantasies of making millions in a particular brand of Pocket Monster is just one reason why. The odd thing, considering the lengths I’ll go to to defend GTA IV against its detractors, is that I really don’t like the old GTA games. I bought the first when it came out out of some feeling of obligation – the playground rumours that it was imminently to be banned helped – and it was cool while the novelty was there, but I just didn’t find them that much fun. It wasn’t until I could get immersed in the city and Rockstar’s humour in GTA III that the series really became something important to me.

That’s why I’d been wary of this one, but you can’t ignore reviews like these forever and it’s been absolutely ages since I’ve played anything on the DS. In fact, the last two games that I bought, Apollo Justice and Chrono Trigger, haven’t been played at all. My hoarding mentality strikes again…

Pokémon for the less innocent aside, Chinatown Wars is a huge amount of fun. While it may lack the radio stations and the portable version of GTA IV’s Liberty City is more right-angled than you might remember, Rockstar Leeds has done a great job of cramming the experience into a DS cartridge. It looks remarkable considering the usual standard of 3D on the DS, the touch-screen minigames are yet to get annoying, and the slightly bizarre humour has made it intact. I mean, when was the last game on any system, let alone a DS game, that mentioned coked-out midgets and injecting heroin into your eyeball… in the same sentence? Genius.