A Pokemon Primer for Parents

I remember the Pokemon craze when it first hit back in the mid 90's and I had assumed that, like most of these types of toy and game fads, it had fizzled out but imagine my surprise when my kids came home recently and asked for some Pokemon trading cards because a bunch of their friends at school had them. It turns out that this fad never died out and is in fact probably even more popular now that in was back in what I thought was it's heyday.

The Pokemon (meaning "Pocket Monsters) franchise is owned by gaming giants Nintendo who have taken it from a game that was originally played on connected Game-Boys to a huge brand incorporating movies, DVD's, game cards, video games, cartoon series and much, much more. To hear kid's talking about Pokemon is like listening to a foreign language so I thought it might be a good idea to fill all the parents in on some of the terminology so that you won't feel like a complete moron when your kid is rambling on about it to you (something, I must confess I went through at the start).

There are 4 different generations of Pokemon, the latest of which is Diamond and Pearl and each generation introduces a host of new characters. At this current time there are just fewer than 500 different characters to collect and add to your Pokedex (which is a fictional electronic device that records the info of each character that you have captured). The basic idea is to capture the best and strongest Pokemon and train them so that they can battle against others. What most parents will find really frustrating is that just when you think you have a handle on the characters you then find out that they actually evolve 1-4 times to become different, stronger characters. It's amazing though how kids can rhyme off these names and their evolutions like it were nothing.