This weekend (specifically, Saturday 27th February) marks the 20th Anniversary of the original Pokemon games, and we all knew Nintendo would never let it pass without announcing something big. In fact, there'll likely be several pokemon-related announcements coming from the Big N over the weekend, with the company announcing a special "Pokemon Direct" online broadcast is set to go out at 3pm GMT on Friday. What we perhaps didn't realise was that at least one of their big announcements would leak before the show has even started, as today, logos for Pokemon Sun and Pokemon Moon have showed up on a European trademark site, all but officially confirming each game's existence.
Here's a shot of the logos again, in all their reddish and blueish glory:
Pretty cool, right?
While we have literally nothing else to go on about Pokemon Sun and Moon, it's expected that they'll both be 3DS games along the usual lines - catch Pokemon, raise Pokemon, battle Pokemon, and eventually collect 'em all - although we're hoping there'll be something rather special to take advantage of the 20th Anniversary.
Of course, while two brand new Pokemon games are pretty huge news, it won't be all Nintendo have to talk about tomorrow, which is where our speculation hats come in handy. As usual, Nintendo have been keeping schtum about what they actually plan to feature, but there are at least a few things we can expect a few more details about.
First up: The re-release of the original set, Pokemon Red/Blue/Yellow on the 3DS Virtual Console. While they've already been announced - and will actually be launching over the weekend - it's a pretty safe bet Nintendo will be showing more footage of the new 3DS download versions of these to get the retro juices flowing. As the internal batteries on the old cartridges apparently only have a 15 year life span (mine's still going! - Ed), it's likely the saves on the original games will be packing up sometime soon - but the 3DS version will let you keep playing forever!
Next up: Pokemon Go. This title was announced some time ago in a previous Nintendo Direct video, and for those of you that missed it, this is a global scale Pokemon hunting game on your mobile phone. The idea is that you actually leave your house and go out into the world to find Pokemon through you're mobile phone's GPS. This is going to include catching wild Pokemon, battling and trading as well as events. The event featured previously shows a mass battle against Mewtwo in Times Square. While the game was previously rumoured for a launch on Saturday, it's now looking likely that it'll actually show up at some point later this year - so we can expect some more info, including more footage, and details of how it works, in the Pokemon Direct.
We do have to emphasise that all of this is just rumours for now - but there's not long to go before we'll know what Nintendo have up their sleeve! All we can say for certain is Nintendo has a lot of love for their games, and they're bound to give us something special to mark the 20th anniversary.
