Gold or Silver?
This section compares the Gold and Silver versions to give you the basic idea of which you should get if you're planning to get one. First off, we need to make note of the differences:
In Gold, you can catch different Pokémon than in Silver. In Silver, the levels of Ho-oh and Lugia are different from Gold. Then Gold has different sprites from Silver.
Different Pokémon
In Gold, you can catch Growlithe, Mankey, Sandshrew, Teddiursa, Spinarak, Mantine and Gligar.
In Silver, you can catch Ekans, Vulpix, Meowth, Skarmory, Ledyba, Delibird and Phanpy.
Overall I'd say Silver has the more useful Pokémon - Meowth and Skarmory especially stand out, as Meowth/Persian can be nice to have in-game with Pay Day, and Skarmory is simply one of the most competitively used Pokémon around.
Silver: 1 - Gold: 0
Ho-oh and Lugia
We all know in Silver, Lugia is level 40 and Ho-oh is level 70, and in Gold, it's the other way around. Well, you should also know that the level 40 Gold Ho-oh is better than the level 70 Silver one, and the level 40 Silver Lugia is better than the level 70 Gold one because at level 70, they've forgotten their best moves.
Now, let's think about it. A Ho-oh with Sacred fire is great, but a Ho-oh with Fire blast is not that bad. A little worse, but it's okay.
On the other hand, a Lugia with Aeroblast is great, but a Lugia with Hydro pump... I mean, how CAN Lugia be stupid enough to forget the best Flying attack for the second best Water attack? Most people prefer Surf over Hydro Pump. I haven't seen a single Lugia in a serious team with Hydro pump. And Lugia gets STAB for Aeroblast, but not for Hydro pump. If you also count the high Critical hit ratio for Aeroblast, you'll find out that Aeroblast is much better than Hydro pump on Lugia. For short, Lugia is just plain stupid with Hydro pump compared to Aeroblast.
So, Gold gets a great Ho-oh and a terrible Lugia, and Silver gets an okay Ho-oh and a great Lugia. Figure out by yourself where this round's point goes.
Silver: 2 - Gold: 0
Sprites
I think the Gold ones are better. When I first saw the Silver Pokémon sprites, they somehow all appeared upside-down. Some of the Silver sprites are much better than the Gold ones, though. And I think the Yellow graphics are the best out of all the games - if you count out the fact that the colors are not good, of course. But my opinion that the Gold graphics are better might just be because my version is Gold so I'm used to them. I don't really know whether I should put the point to Gold or just don't count this part since it's so opinionated, but it doesn't really matter. Silver wins either way.
That does not mean Gold is a bad game. Silver simply has the edge if we want to be technical.
Page last modified March 16 2007 at 18:18 GMT
