Playing Anything But A Real Pokemon Game – A Pokemon Clicker Thing?
These days, most people use things like Discord or Steam to chat. If they don’t, they use something like Reddit. Either way, these platforms generally have a rather one-way discussion. Sure, you get threads on Reddit, but the ones you see are heavily curated by everyone else. By default, you only see the most popular threads, and conversations travel in one direction. More importantly though, aside from maybe a profile picture, there’s very little customization. You have one font, images as links and a handful of emoji and that’s it.
This is a stark contrast to the old days of forums and boards. To be fair, SPUF never had signatures, but it did allow custom colours and things like that. On most forums, you’d have a signature so you can give flair to your posts. And, for a while, it was somewhat popular to have little pets, which grew over time. How? You’d feed them “views and clicks”.
Lots of various sites popped up, and I’ve probably mentioned one before, Dragon Cave. Turns out though, there’s a similar site for Pokemon. One I actually forgot I had an account for, until I stumbled across it in someone’s signature on the Dragon Cave forums.
Not that you can naturally find it.
Global Pokedex Plus is a website where you catch eggs and hatch them by, uh, viewing and clicking on them. The name though is not something you’d naturally stumble across. It’s shortened to GPX.Plus, which isn’t that obvious. Probably for the best though because this site is chock full of Pokemon goodness.
The premise of the site is a bit like Dragon Cave, except more active. You have to interact with eggs to hatch them, and feed Pokemon berries to level up. It can take a long time however unless you’re… kinda active on the website. But, on the plus side, GPX.Plus does have a lot to do on it. You can either pick up fresh eggs from the lab or adopt eggs from the daycare. If you can’t be bothered to hatch them, you can adopt Pokemon from the Shelter as well. Leveling up takes time and is mostly reliant on other users feeding your Pokemon.
It’s not all just hatching and leveling up Pokemon, there’s fully fledged Pokemon battles, NPC battles and quests which unlock legendary Pokemon.
There’s a ton of cool “novelty” Pokemon as well.
It’s not just normal Pokemon though. Sure, like Pixelmon, it’s got pretty much every Pokemon under one roof. But, also like Pixelmon, there’s a bunch of custom Pokemon as well. GPX.Plus’s custom Pokemon are called Novelty Pokemon and have their own egg type. They are all also pretty cool and, unlike Pixelmon, not stupidly rare. There’s a LOT of novelty Pokemon though and they’re all very varied in themes. There’s a lot of obvious event ones (like a Tentacool and a Caterpie with hearts) but there’s some interesting ones as well. “Deinobot”, “Lunar Larvitar” and “Slime Slugma” are just a handful of the custom ones. But there are also fan favourites like Missingno. and Crystal Onix to collect as well.
You can grab a ton of them just from the Shelter, where other people’s released Pokemon go. If you want to, you can breed novelty Pokemon yourself as well.
That being said, there’s a huge amount of released Pokemon. Both eggs and hatched Pokemon. But when you can only take one egg and your Pokemon can breed like 30 eggs at once, of course there’s going to be a constant heavy flood of fresh eggs.
For a free site, it’s pretty fricking neat.
Considering the whole site is based on a platform that is swiftly dying out, GPX.Plus is a very feature-rich site. Uniquely, it’s also very self-contained. I don’t think it ever was completely reliant on forums, and has a dedicated fan base that keeps the site chugging along.
Still, GPX.Plus is a relic of the past. A reminder of the old days where niches weren’t all crammed onto one platform, but scattered across multiple forums and platforms across the web. Back when everything was very much DIY, a world that no longer exists.
Just goes to show though that I’ll play anything except an actual Pokemon game…