As 2005 begins to come to a close, we get to Volume 197 (November 2005), featuring Pokémon XD: Gale of Darkness (apparently the "XD" stood for "eXtra Dimension", though it was the only game, Pokémon or otherwise, to have such a title). Note that the cover promises coverage on Lost in Blue. I'm not sure if this was just a mix-up with the coverage appearing last month, but there's nothing here inside this issue except the review of the game. (Gail Tilden-era Nintendo Power would've never allowed this.)

Pulse this month covers a variety of topics, including cope that the Xbox and GameCube were on any way equal standing, wishing for a Mario-Sonic crossover title (sorry, the best you'll get is Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Games and its sequels and that's STILL two years, no love for Boston terriers in Nintendogs¹, a reference to the ""Priceless" MasterCard ads when that was reaching full pitch, asking about if Jump Super Stars was going to be localized (which it was not)² and thinking that they changed the Orange Star Army to the Red Star Army in Advance Wars: Dual Strike (the Orange Star was the localized version).

Next, sales listings show that the Fantastic Four game was beating Super Smash Bros. Melee in sales at that point for the GameCube, and its Game Boy Advance counterpart was second place to Pokémon Emerald. Despite being forgotten today, Meteos was third place on the DS list, behind #2 Super Mario 64 DS and Kirby: Canvas Curse. (#3 for the GameCube and GBA were Pokémon Colosseum and Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones, respectively).

The News section is headlined by a DS-enhanced version of Resident Evil. At this point, the GameCube had already received a remake, what is colloquially known as the "REmake", when it received a wider HD re-release on modern consoles in the late 2010s, but the DS version of Resident Evil (which would soon be announced to be released as Resident Evil: Deadly Silence), was closer to the original PlayStation release. There's also news of new colors of the GBA SP, the Game Boy Micro, and a new lower price for the Nintendo DS. I never got the Game Boy Micro, not just in a "not having it" sense, but it's not a good console. It wasn't a budget version of the GBA SP...it was $20 more expensive...and it didn't even play Game Boy/Game Boy Color games! No wonder it underperformed at retail.

There's a joke article about Mario prepping for Dance Dance Revolution: Mario Mix, the very definition of "too little, too late" as by this time the DDR craze had passed...and don't expect to hear any 1980s classics or Top 40 either, it's just remixes of public domain classical music and Mario music.

In fact, "too little, too late" describe many of the games in the Previews section as well. Tony Hawk's American Wasteland was Neversoft's "complete overhaul" on the series but by that time the Tony Hawk franchise was declining fast, especially with the extreme sports fad that brought the THPS franchise to success dying off (it was one reason why Nickelodeon had pulled the plug on Rocket Power). There was also a multiplayer beat 'em up spin-off of Viewtiful Joe (Viewtiful Joe: Red Hot Rumble), and a Game Boy Advance port of Donkey Kong Country 3, with its GBA release being in the shadows of a newer console, much like how the original game was released for the SNES in the shadows of the Nintendo 64.

After that, it's seven pages of Pokémon XD: Gale of Darkness coverage (more describing the game than anything else) and I still have no idea who the one-armed protagonist is or what happened to said arm. Then there's three pages of ads (Yu-Gi-Oh! Nightmare Troubadour gets one, and Ultimate Spider-Man gets two) before "Fantastic Voyage" (Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance). There's a poster for Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance but you can't really see it without tearing it out of the magazine and it's really not exciting either.

A two-page ad for Trauma Center: Under the Knife precedes Inside Zelda Part 6 featuring an interview with Keisuke Nishimori, then it's the NP Top 200, which continues from last issue. As we get further up the list, a lot of the choices seem kind of arbitrary. Sure, they explain a few like Feel the Magic: XY/XX, but why is Duck Hunt better than Final Fight, or why Skate or Die is better than Harvest Moon: Friends of Mineral Town?³ They also list the "Five Best Peripherals", three of which were for the GameCube (such as the WaveBird) and two of those recent gimmicks (DK. The other two were ROB and the Game Boy Camera. So no love for the SNES Mouse, the Zapper, the Super Game Boy, or the NES Advantage. Check out the list here.

"The Bad Girls of Nemesis" is a vertical pin-up style article featuring Marvel Nemesis: Rise of the Imperfects (but to be honest Lethe from the Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance article was hotter), and an "An Army of 1" (taking from the slogan of the U.S. Army at the time) covered Spartan: Total Warrior.

The Player's Poll Sweepstakes is another trip. This time, the grand prize being a Game Boy Micro, a trip to New York City where you got a "$1,000 shopping spree to coordinate your wardrobe with your fave micro faceplate" and then another $1,000 to spend at Nintendo World. Five winners just won a Game Boy Micro. The winner, as revealed a few issues from here, was an older woman...I'm not sure she appreciated the video game stuff as much as the magazine's target demographic would, but at the time New York City still had some of the best shopping around, with Saks Fifth Avenue and Lord & Taylor operating their flagship stores, as well as other stores in the area like Toys R Us or Takashimaya.

Things pick up afterward with actual strategy for the largely forgotten Battalion Wars, a GameCube spin-off of Advance Wars, though it was released in Japan as Assault!! Famicom Wars, paying homage to its original franchise. Battalion Wars was also different from the rest of the Famicom/Advance Wars series by being developed by UK-based Kuju Entertainment (which also developed Battalion Wars 2 for the Wii), as well as a very basic walkthrough (very few spoilers) for Trace Memory, as well "Dead of the Dawn", a feature for Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow⁴. This one actually DOES include a map overview of the game with bosses and save points, with the following pages describing the bosses with the recommended souls to use. Wow!

Before the reviews, we get another Classified Info, with two pages on Geist...probably trying to drum up sales...in fact, later on in Reviews Chris Sheppard admitted that he was harsh on Geist (mostly because it was in development for 2+ years and couldn't come up with a good product, back when a 2+ year delay was seen as unusual).

The way games reviews are written now is that everything less than a 8.0 is a bad game, so 9.0+ reviews are handed out like candy, and in 2005 this was already underway. Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow for Nintendo DS gets a 9.0, FIFA Soccer 06 for the GameCube gets a 9.0, Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance (GCN) gets 9.5, Tiger Woods PGA Tour 06 for GameCube gets 9.0. Going down the rest of list we have for the GameCube Pokémon XD: Gale of Darkness (Nintendo...it only ranked 8.5), Marvel Nemesis: Rise of the Imperfects (Electronic Arts), WWE: Day of Reckoning 2 (THQ), One Piece: Grand Battle (Bandai), Spartan: Total Warrior (Sega), Midway Arcade Treasures 3 (Midway), Namco Museum 50th Anniversary Arcade Collection (Namco), Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six: Lockdown (Ubisoft), Tak: The Great Ju-Ju Challenge (THQ), Battalion Wars (Nintendo), Frogger: Ancient Shadow (Konami), and Scooby-Doo! Unmasked (THQ). Moving onto Nintendo DS (besides previously mentioned), we have a number of heavy hitters like Trace Memory (Nintendo) and Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney (Capcom), but also Zoo Tycoon DS (THQ), Lost in Blue (Konami), Lunar: Dragon Song (Ubisoft), with Activision Value's Whac-a-Mole mentioned at the end. For Game Boy Advance, they start with the "Destination Compilations", ten titles by DSI that were mostly based after Atari Games/Atari/Hasbro properties.⁵ (You can see the list of DSI's titles here, and they're not quite what Nintendo Power calls them, so "KLAX Compilation" is actually listed as Marble Madness / Klax in the list). Moving on, there's Rebelstar: Tactical Command (Namco), Namco Museum 50th Anniversary Arcade Collection (Namco), Pac-Man World 2 (Namco—Pete Michaud is annoyed that it uses a password instead of a proper a save feature), One Piece (Bandai—a beat 'em up based after the anime...well, it's better than the dub if that's saying anything), Tak: The Great Ju-Ju Challenge (THQ—review-wise, it rates substantially worse than its GameCube counterpart), and DK: King of Swing (Nintendo), along with a host of shovelware titles that get mentioned anyway. There's Board Game Classics (Destination Software), Lizzie McGuire 3: Homecoming Havoc (Disney Interactive), Backyard Football 2006 (Atari), Barbie and the Magic of Pegasus (Vivendi Universal Games), Danny Phantom: The Ultimate Enemy (THQ), W.I.T.C.H. (Buena Vista Games), The Berenstain Bears and the Spooky Old Tree (Namco, see it's not "Berenstein"), and The Bible Game (Crave Entertainment...probably gave off Wisdom Tree vibes). Board Game Classics, as mentioned in the list, is in the same vein of the "compilations" but it's just checkers, chess, and backgammon. Finally, the reviewer board is asked for their favorite Pokémon spin-off, but it's all worthless because nobody answered the best and closest to correct answer, Pokémon Trading Card Game, released in 2000 for the Game Boy.

Oh, and I almost forgot—in the Reviews section, there's an ad for US Youth Soccer, which I find amusing because not only is this one of the first times non-chubby Pikachu shows up (likely this is taken from Pokémon Trozei!, which came out around that time and featured somewhat stylized versions of existing Pokémon), but when it comes to Ash as the comparison to strive for, even by 2005 he was a total failure who learned nothing in seven years, caught or otherwise acquired very few (I'd say with evolutions, around 40 in his Pokédex...from a total of 386), and the problem would get worse later on.

Under Community, there's two pages that talk about PAX, which was relatively new at the time but a fast growing success, the previous year's event (Penny Arcade Expo) drew 3,000 and 2005's drew three times that number. It didn't help that by 2005 Penny Arcade was Internet royalty and the artwork was near its peak (before it started to decline FAST around the early 2010s). This was an example of the "new" Nintendo Power, the design of Nintendo Power from previous eras probably would've frowned upon the webcomic, which was often vulgar. There was a brief wrapup of the events of Camp Hyrule, artwork and cosplay, and a blurb of the end of the Game Counselor hotline, which had no doubt seen numbers plummet in recent years, especially as Counselor's Corner had been cut a few years earlier. The magazine stated that "Nintendo is working with many of the game databases that guided counselors for two decades available to the public via nintendo.com". That never happened, we just got leaked binders instead, and no complete scans of that either. (Major bummer.)

There's also a corrections note printed that Pikmin Link is female, something I speculated on two issues ago.

The Power Quiz in the back features Pokémon, with Pokémon Trading Card Game being in "Name That Screenshot" (maybe that's why they didn't name it in Reviews). And speaking of printing mistakes, they printed the wrong name of last month's screenshot, saying it was from Puyo Pop, rather than the correct answer of ChuChu Rocket!.

Finally, there are a few things to note...the last time we checked in with available Player's Guides, there was Fire Emblem: The Sacred Stones back in Volume 195 and Advance Wars: Dual Strike in Volume 196. Now, we also have guides for Battalion Wars (yes, they printed a whole Player's Guide) and Pokémon XD: Gale of Darkness. As this review was first written back when I was working through the 1994 issues sequentially, I do want to make a note for future-proofing version of how many guides they've published so far...I guess that would be #87, #88, and #89.⁶

There's also an ad (the 2003-2005 "Who Are You?" campaign) for DK: King of Swing, which aside from the review got NO coverage. We know that some games got stiffed like that, but it's unusual for a Nintendo game to get that treatment.

FOOTNOTES
1. Boston terriers are ugly, weird-looking dogs, and I'm glad Nintendo Power tends to agree. Unless it's my aunt reading this, and that case Boston terriers are cute.
2. Certainly not when at the time, the One Piece localization was handled by 4Kids Entertainment and all the changes they made to the characters. Plus, if you played the game it was a bit of a spoiler that Nico Robin would join the crew. At this point in time, American audiences (to the anime, anyway) only knew her as the second-in-command to the arc's main villain.
3. I'm not picking on the NES specifically, but the choices are a bit strange.
4. As you may have noticed, most of the DS games in a series incorporate "DS" somehow in their subtitle, like "Dual Strike", "Dawn of Sorrows", and later "Deadly Silence" for the Resident Evil example above. There were more as well...
5. At this point, the former Hasbro Interactive and pre-1984 Atari IPs are owned by the "new" Atari, while the post-1984 Atari Games games were owned by Midway Games. (Hasbro still has IPs to their own games, of course).
6. According to Fandom's list. As of this writing, they do not list guides for Advance Wars: Dual Strike, Fire Emblem: The Secret Stones, or Pokémon XD: Gale of Darkness, so it's possible others are missing as well. I'm not counting the "Funtography" guide as an official Player's Guide and definitely not their Nintendogs book.

Written October 28, 2026, though some parts were made back in April

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