Hello, PoJo! Since you guys didn’t have any news about the Pokemon League Stadium Tour "East vs. West Coast Ultimate Showdown", I thought I’d give you guys all the inside info.

I myself competed in the competition in Los Angeles, California. Myself, my brother, and my mom all took a 1 ½ hour drive from San Diego and got there at 7:00, 4 hours early, to make sure we would make it into the first 100 who would qualify for the Exhibition Tournament. After waiting a long time, our teams were visually checked, and we (the first 100) were each given certificates with a number on them. At the front, every third number had been chosen (1,4,7,10,13,16, etc.) to participate. I was the only one in my family to go.

First we headed down to an 11:00 appointment at the Prime Cup (the normal competition). I arrived, where, I battled and won the Boulder and Cascade Badges (they were on a chain that hooked through the hole in the upper-left corner of your Game Boy Color; so that’s what that’s for!). However, in between the rounds, to my dismay, they picked ONE of the thirty-two people there at random to go to the gym; no qualifications necessary. This ticked me off, especially because it was worse than last year (which I didn’t like) where they drew 4 or 5 names out of the winners of both badges. This often made for matchups where the players shouldn’t have even been considered for such high level competition.

Anyhow, after this let-down, I went to meet up at 11:40 for the Exhibition Tour. I was shocked when I was handed a piece of paper telling how to play the Stadium games at the Kid’s Club! This "championship tour" was going to have 2 rounds of kiddie games!

Well, we were hooked up where we played 4 player matches, the best 2 going on. Most of the games were rather fun, except there were two I didn’t really like: the Clefairy game (basically Simon says; VERY hard, but I did win in) and the Lickitung game (called Sushi-go-Round; you have to collect similarly colored sushi of different point values to win). Well, I won first in my team in the first round (4 games won out of 9, to 3, 2, and 0), and I moved on. However, they mixed people up, and I ended up being paired up incorrectly for the second round; playing a single game of Sushi-Go-Round! Well, this was VERY stupid, basing this all on a one-on-one mini-game. In fact, I was paired up with a kid who owned the Japanese version, so he knew everything about the point values and stuff; I barely had 15 seconds to look it over! Though I scored better than both of the players in the adjacent booth, I couldn’t compare at all to this kid’s score, and was eliminated without ever fighting a real battle. The little kid got whooped the next round because he couldn’t play the real game for beans. Well, at least I got to try out Stadium; the graphics were awesome, though it was a big free-for-all and I think a couple people might have been trampled in the rush (J/K). I got to try a 4-player mode, which was cool, and I got to curse the Lickitung game a couple times. Anyhow that’s about all that happened; the next day people came back to play-off in the real game, but I didn’t bother coming back. I truly hope Nintendo would create a fairer competition, and I’ve learned one big lesson: always order the Japanese version