Soul Scything.

With the 1-2 punch arrival of a Dreamcast & a Genesis into my life (& heart), 1 can imagine I spent some considerable free time in front the of teevee. However, none of my Genesis games have save options, & for the Dreamcast all I have is Space Channel 5, which I'm slightly paranoid of playing too quickly. The sum result is I've returned to Pokemon FireRed on my darling pink pearl GBA SP.

My momentum in FireRed became stalled several months ago, when I started slogging through the 'dungeon-crawl' of the Silph Co. Tower in Saffron City¹, which had a nasty infestation of Team Rocket. After finally slogging through all 11 floors of the tower, I had one of those 'levee breaks' moments you experience in video games - the long stall followed by several successive moments of progress, capped off by reaching the remote settlement on Cinnabar Island.

To the eternal credit of the Pokemon franchise, one its greatest strengths, & greatest evils, is that goddamn concept of gotta catch 'em all. Instead of continuing my onward march to Pokemon dominion, I got sidetracked getting several of my higher-level Pokemon to evolve &, even worse, somehow ended back at the Safari Zone...

The Safari Zone is located on the northern outskirts of Fuschia City. You pay like 300 yua & get 30 specialized 'Safari Balls' & can wander the safari grounds for a 600 'steps.' When you encounter Pokemon you can catch them, but not in the usual beat-them-to-an-inch-of-thier-life, then-throw-a-capture-ball method, but by throwing either bait or a rock or a combination thereof at them, then throwing 1 of the aforementioned safari balls. This is fine & all but there's a collection of rarer Pokemon in the Zone, including... Scyther.²


For the life of me, I cannot fucking figure out what the combination of bait & rocks is to catch this motherfucker!! Even more maddening, 1 Scyther's behavior isn't even consistent w/ the behavior of another's!!!

Are you fucking kidding me!? Scyther A eats yr bait, but Scyther B flees the scene?!! WTF?!

Jesus, now I'm going to have to go massacre some Psyducks to calm myself down.³

-d.d.

¹ LOVE those colour-themed town names in the Pokemon series.
² Also Tauros, which also, I cannot catch. But haven't really made the effort I have to catch Scyther, the effin' tease.
³ "How many Psyducks must die?" I pondered as I explored the caves of the Seafoam islands. Poor little fuckers just kept coming at me, like migrained sheep to the slaughter.