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The Big One. Pokémon Sword & Pokémon Shield Review

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It feels like it's been a lifetime folks, and in the games industry it is, but  Pokémon Sword & Pokémon Shield have been out for just under four months and it's time for us to put this review out there. In case you've missed the last ten years of TGAM, we're big pokémon fans so on the one hand we're heavily invested in this ship. On the other hand we're in the guts of this series so we're bringing our big guns to bear in this review. Fuck All That Bullshit It might be poison in the lucky charms or Minamata disease but these games have been particularly surrounded by an especially stinky wall of bullshit this time by the loose collection of flotsam and jetsam that's the pokémon community online and the solids floating on the top of the septic tank that's the wider gaming community online. The recent announcement of the expansion, an astonishing helping of STFU to entitled fans, which by any normal standard would silence would-be whingers

Shadowlands is Classic+

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For 15 or so years I have found myself fantasizing about whatever the next WoW patch or next WoW expansion will be. E ven now in the midst of this nostalgia fest that is WoW classic I am wondering, "what's next?" . We have reached a halfway point of sorts with WoW classic we are about to hit phase 4 of 6 in the WoW classic journey. Phase 5 and 6 are beefy phases of new raids AQ20/40 and Naxxramas, which may be quite lengthy, and after Phase 6 this is where vanilla stopped back-in-the-day.  But what comes after?  There is a general consensus that we will just get The Burning Crusade: Classic, the expansion that followed on from the original. I however, have another theory, hinted at from the announcement of the next expansion for current (retail) WoW: Shadowlands. It's unpopular but I have a wild theory... Since we haven't had an announcement and it's not confirmed perhaps there will not be a TBC-Classic. But instead what if there is some plan to brin

What Have Pokémon Sword and Pokémon Shield Done For Rock Types?

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If you're one of the three bots that occasionally crawls past this website, you'll know that Team TGAM are huge Pokémon fans and this half of Team TGAM is a self styled rock type connoisseur. Now the dust has settled, well barely , following  Pokémon Sword and Pokémon Shield 's (SW/SH) launch it's a good time to look at what this game has done for rock type pokémon. Sir Not Appearing In This Game Well, making no bones about it, the decision to not include all of the known pokémon species from previous games in SW/SH  has been pretty rough for the rocky bastards. Of the 62 rock type pokémon available in  Pokémon Ultra Sun and  Pokémon Ultra Moon, as measly 22 made it through the Thanos snap. That means, at the time of writing, there's no Geodude line, none of the 'true' fossils, Magcargo, Nosepass line, Aggron line, Relicanth, Regirock, Carbink, Diancie, Rockruff line, Minior or the two ultra beasts. Soooo not a great start. Teaser/trailer stuff for t

OCD*, Pokémon Home and a Race Against Time

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Despite Pokémon Home 's rough launch and mixed feature set, the launch of the app for mobile and game(?) for the Nintendo Switch now means we can view the fruits of our decades of monster collecting with the greates of ease and abandon. As soon as was feasible, launch week bugs be damned (don't save in Lumiose City), we shifted everything over to Home and basked in the glory of our work. It was complete. Or was it? Nestled within the innocuous pokédex feature on  Pokémon Home is a search filter for 'unregistered'. Out of curiosity we ran a few searches on pokémon, moves and abilities to see BLANK ENTRIES. On top of that, the mobile app has a s eries of challenges that award next to pointless stickers for your profile for completion. The challenges range from making specific 'theme' trades but also for registering pokémon from different games, from different regions and forms etc. To our further shock and horror. We didn't have them all(tm). The Chal

It's A Great Time To Be A Pokémon Fan

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The World is an incredibly scary and unjust place at the minute and we've certainly found ourselves squandering our privilege by running to pastures digital to escape it all. Pokémon has been a staple franchise for us and arguably at the heart of the relationship of team TGAM and now feels like one of the best times to be a Pokémon player/fan. We're truly spoiled, despite what the very vocal minority has to say about the direction of the franchise. Here's a run down of just the last few months! Pokémon Sword & Pokémon Shield Despite being less than four months old it's been a whirlwind of events and activities that even daily checking of serebii.net  has meant it's been difficult to keep up. Since launch we've been treated to a whole series of raid den events, we got shiny Magikarp galore to celebrate the new year, a trickle of new gigantamax forms in Snorlax and Toxtricity, crazy weather for the leap day, a steady flow of mystery gifts, two online int

I'm a cookie cutter in a cookie cutter world (of warcraft)...

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...is the name of the resource expensive youtube music video parody of Aqua's Barbie girl I would make if I had (in no particular order): 1. Time 2. Software 3. Skills 4. Talent 5. Personality In it's stead I would like to offer another ham-fisted squat in the blogosphere: Lvl 60 brings an odd responsibility, Maintaining and gearing yourself up to get "Best in Slot" or "BiS" pronounced "biss" which as an acronym is now noun, adjective, verb and expletive. BiS is a concept whereby we (the WoW community) realized that the itemization and sets we were chasing back in the day were not optimal. It was generally believed that the tier sets were the best you could get, but that some of them were just shit. Now we know better, thanks to all the years, and all the private server time, for all sorts of reasons that there are more specific items that are more advantageous to chase. As there is a limited number of items in the game, the databa

Level 60: The Road Ahead

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So WoW Classic came out ages ago, and I have finally reached the pinnacle of lvl 60, which is less of a pinnacle than a plateau before you continue to hike up that mountain. Having debated what I wanna do at 60 with my little Paladin I have decided I would like to get into at least a couple of raids and have been doing my attunements. As well as this I have been picking up that all important gear! But as a Paladin I have many options open to me, the go to is healing, but you can also Tank, or create soloing builds, or even RET-LOL, I have decided to take this further and dive into a niche retadin build! The Spelladin What is a Spelladin? Spelladin is essentially a ret-pala, with very similar talent setup, however rather than using Seal of Casino, it uses Seal of Righteousness and is with buffed spell power. The benefit thereof is that SoR is straight damage applied to every hit, and SoR is boosted by spellpower. As such the difference between Ret and Spelladin is Gear/enchants