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My Review of Pokémon Rumble Blast for Nintendo 3DS

By Dana Aarons on December 13, 2011

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This past Thanksgiving, my husband and I were preparing for our annual trip to his family's house - which consists of packing the car with food, clothes, our ten-year-old son, our 8-year-old daughter and our golden retriever Humphry to drive the seven plus hours from Los Angeles to San Francisco.

The stress of this road trip has become one of the most dreaded parts of my holiday season. So this year, I decided to take charge and make sure I was totally prepared for the ride by loading up the car with tons of toys and entertainment for the kids.

Since my son is a big video game fan, I thought I'd bring along the Pokémon Rumble Blast for Nintendo 3DS as a surprise.

Wow.

Let's just say I was quite the Mom Hero at this year's Thanksgiving dinner. My son played his new game the whole way up, and raved about it to all his cousins as soon as we arrived. And my daughter was actually interested enough that she sat quietly and watched him play while we were in the car. I heard her offering suggestions, "Why don't you pick this one?" and encouragement, "Yeah! You totally got him!"

They loved the game and I loved the silence! It was a win-win.. Thank you Nintendo and Pokémon!

Anyway, when they finally came up for air, I asked them what they thought about the game.

First of all, the 3D graphics were a huge hit. They said it looked really cool and I have to agree. It was also simple enough for them to jump right in and start playing.

Here's a basic overview:

First you pick which wind-up toy Pokémon you want to be. My son (a fan of the cartoon series) was rattling off all the different names - there are seriously SO many characters. Then you travel around from place to place and challenge other Pokémon to competitions. If you win, you keep going until you finally beat them all and become the Battle Royale Champion.

Although my son liked the ongoing mission, his very favorite part was the team battle, where players get to choose two other Pokémon to fight along side them. Apparently there's a good bit of strategy involved here because you should choose other characters with powers that complement and balance out your own.

So even though in an ideal world, we'd never need to distract our kids with video games - if you're trying to balance all the chaos, this game may be just the thing you need in those emergency situations where a little peace and quiet will make all the difference!

A copy of this game was provided by Nintendo for review purposes only. I did not receive any monetary compensation for this review.