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Games

Someone Made a Playable Clone of Pokemon For the Pebble Smartwatch (gizmodo.com) 19

Developer Harrison Allen has developed a playable clone of Pokemon for the Pebble smartwatch, which was officially discontinued in late 2016 after the company was sold to Fitbit. Gizmodo reports: According to the game's developer, Harrison Allen, Pebblemon uses a graphics library they created that replicates Pokémon Yellow, which was the first version of the popular game series to take advantage of the Game Boy Color's limited color palette. As a result, while Pebblemon appears to be playable using the Pebble smartwatch's buttons (the wearable lacked a touchscreen), it's a smaller version of the original game featuring "various areas within the Johto region" but players will still "Encounter all 251 Pokemon from the Game Boy Color games" and will still be able to find items to help them out during gameplay.

Pebblemon is currently available through the Rebble.io repository, which was created shortly after the company died as a place to continue to allow users to maintain their smart wearables, and to give developers a way to distribute new apps. If you don't already use it, you'll have to jump through a few hoops to get it to play nice with your Pebble watch, but it doesn't appear terribly difficult. Alternately, Allen has provided all of his source code through GitHub, if you're in the mood to compile or adapt it into something else yourself. There are two things to keep in mind if you want to try Pebblemon out: it's only compatible with the Pebble Time, Pebble Time Round, and Pebble 2 models -- not the original version of the wearable -- and you're going to want to jump on this as soon as possible because there's a very good chance Nintendo's eager lawyers are already aware of the game, and are already working to wipe it off the face of the Earth.

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Someone Made a Playable Clone of Pokemon For the Pebble Smartwatch

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  • I know it's in style to play your old C64 and stuff like that. However, a smartwatch discontinued 5 years ago, for playing a kids game in a dulled down version ? I don't see a really huge financial loss for Nintendo here.

    • That's not the point. The point is defending their IP.

      • You don't have to "defend" your IP; if you choose to allow certain use, or choose to ignore an infringement, you do not lose the right to your IP nor the right to bring other infringements to court. Do trademarks counts as IP? Because those you do have to defend.
        • Do trademarks counts as IP? Because those you do have to defend.

          They do, in fact, count as IP. And as you say, you have to defend them. The closest thing to losing your IP if you don't defend it is estoppel, which is not the same thing obviously (losing rights to some profits vs. losing ownership) but is relevant.

      • You defend TRADEMARKS you idiot.

  • Developers of the free monster-fighting RPG Tuxemon [github.com] have created their own original monsters and setting to avoid Nintendo's copyright. Why don't projects like Tuxemon get more attention from fan game developers?

    • Because it's about the IP, not the tech.
      There's a certain nostalgia factor of these big commercial IPs that simply will not be present even if you were to make a very well made clone. Was Tuxemon on every morning before school? Were they trading Tuxemon cards at school?
      It's also why non-official merchandise is rarely an actual threat to IPs... The vast majority of people want the *real* deal, not an imitation when it comes to an entertainment IP. It's not the same situation as with technology IPs such a
    • Because nobody wants to play Free Monster-Fighting RPG, they want to play Pokemon.

      You said it yourself, 'fan game,' not 'indie game.'

  • Pok Ãf © mon

    Nintendo would probably like a word.

    For anyone that can't see it, the accent character degeneration on desktop includes a copyright symbol.
    • Could be a good alternative name for a Pokémon clone, though. "PokAfAcmon" has a nice ring to it, don't you think?

  • I hope somebody is archiving this on servers in countries Nintendo's lawyers can't reach.

    • I will likely never use it, but I downloaded a copy of the repository to protect Nintendo from completely eliminating all copies of this. I suggest others do the same when something like this comes along so it cannot just up and disappear forever.

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