I’ve never considered myself the biggest mobile gamer. Sure, I’d jump into a few reliable titles while reviewing a phone, but I just hadn’t found a game that made me come back over and over. Or, if I did, I’d play it to death right up until I hit a paywall and then put it down, never to be touched again.
Then, Pokemon TCG Pocket came along, and like my colleague Nick Fernandez, I was hooked. Not necessarily hooked on the gameplay itself, but on the nostalgia that opening packs of Pokemon cards brought and the want to catch ’em all — or, rather, pull ’em all. It was the same type of nostalgia I remembered getting each time I went home for the holidays and dusted off my slowly dying GameBoy Advance to play titles from when I was ten.