Hey You, Pikachu!

"Cute and charming is not enough to save this game from being average"

PROS: Cute, innocent, and charming; fun minigames; interaction works pretty well; enough variety; it isn't as bad as Pokemon Channel

CONS: Shorter than the short end of the stick; repetitive; no Thunderstones; sometimes the technology doesn't work

Pikachu, come here! Pikachu, pick it up. No, don't sleep! Pick the apple up! Don't walk away from me! Pick up the [expletive]-ing apple! PICK IT UP!!!!!

Oh, sorry... pardon my French. That Pikachu is annoying.

The entire premise of Hey, You, Pikachu! for the Nintendo 64 is to own a Pikachu and play with it day after day. At least you don't have school here because then it'd be a piece of crap. And it already is pretty average.

The game is centered around this Pikachu that starts coming to your house and you befriend it. Eventually, it becomes your Pokemon and you can do whatever you want with it. Unfortunately, you can't evolve it into an ass-kicking Raichu because there aren't any Thunderstones. This makes the game sound horrible, but it's really different. The game comes packaged with a microphone unit in which you can talk to the little yellow rat. This is what makes the game stand out. Unfortunately, the voice recognition is not as great as it could've been. Of course, this is 1998 we're talking about. The game was released in 1998 in Japan, when Pokemon was all the rage. By the time it reached the US in 2000, the microphone technology was already dated.

Setting up the microphone to your N64 controller can be somewhat… difficult. Plug this there and that there and that one goes there… then you're good to go. And getting Pikachu to listen to you isn't easy. Sometimes you'll have to yell. There are only a handful of places to go to, which means that this game is short. Short like one of the Seven Dwarves from Snow White. There are only like 5 different areas to explore, and there really isn't that much to do. The game's best scene is when you get to fry a wild Haunter with Thunderbolt. The rest of the game's sequences are pretty childish and underdeveloped. Gathering fruit for a picnic with a Bulbasaur, helping a Squirtle with something… stuff like that. All you do in the missions is help others. No battling. That blows. The only thing that's really fun here is the fishing mode. That's right, you can fish… well, Pikachu can. All you have to do is tell him to PULL when something is on the hook. You can catch any one of the original 151 Pokemon that live in the water. Even Dratini. However, some of them are really rare, and there are three fishing holes to cover all of the Pokemon that you can capture. You can't use them, they just set records for size. It is fun for a while, though, but eventually gets extremely repetitive. Don't bother taking too much time trying to get a rare one because doing so will take quite a while.

Pikachu may be cute and charming, but it's not enough to save this game from the average entertainment it is. Since the technology can jam up every once in a while and Pikachu won't hear you, it can get frustrating. But, for its time, it works pretty well. The game is decent, but it won't be winning awards. It's short, repetitive, but not exactly boring… so I give Hey, You, Pikachu! a 6 out of 10. Don't expect to see any more games like this… the developers, Ambrella, trashed the Pokemon interaction franchise with Pokemon Channel and likely won't have any more games like it.

Reviewer's Score: 6/10, Originally Posted: 09/29/06