Recently watched the RetroPals play through the entire library of the Pokemon Mini and I had the strangest case of deja vu hearing the various blips and bleeps from this strange little device, and then I realized that I'd played a bunch of them because the Gamecube game Pokemon Channel had a Pokemon Mini emulator that you could discover, and it even had an original title added just for that release. At the time, I didn't even realize the Mini was a real product, I thought it was just a fictional framing mechanism to put in some little minigames!
But nope, Nintendo made an entire handheld, specifically themed around Pokemon, released around the same time as the Gamecube, and with half the colors and even less resolution than the original Gameboy. And the weirdest part of all is that it kind of rules? It's not entirely surprising that it wasn't a great success and that it has an official library of ten titles, five of which were only in Japan, but just watch a bit of these games and I think you'll agree it's quite impressive how much they are able to do with so little, especially since playing this on the actual hardware would have the additional novelty of being portable and having the shake control inputs. They go for around $150 on ebay and Dos had to race to put an emulator for it on the 3DS so that I didn't just go buy one outright.
