How To Make Your Cat a Pokémon Trainer - March 22nd, 2010

Oddly enough, this isn’t purely sarcasm.

First thing’s first, you’ve got to get your hands on one of the newest iterations of the Pokémon game franchise — either Soulsilver or Heartgold. They’re basically revved-up, remixed and rebuilt DS-platform releases of the now ancient Gold and Silver versions of the game from about a decade ago.

These two versions of the game come with an added bonus: The Pokéwalker. This nifty little egg-shaped gadget is what you get when you mix a Tamagotchi with a pedometer, and build it for Pokémon. It’s fairly hilarious as a concept, but also fairly awesome if you really think about it.

The Pokéwalker trailer from Nintendo:

The next step’s the hard part

Now that you’ve got yourself a new Pokémon game for your DS and a Pokéwalker to go with it, you’ll need a cat. Assuming you have such an animal (and a Nintendo DS), the second step in this process can be a bit tricky. Get your cat to wear a harness.

Once the cat stops hating you and gets comfortable wearing the harness, you’ve got yourself a platform for all sorts of hilarity; but we’re keeping this post to strictly Pokémon-related shenanigans — so build special cat-borne beer coolers on your own time.

The Pokéwalker comes with a pretty solid little belt-clip on its backside, so all you have to do is clip it on securely, and make sure you have it centered on the harness so the cat has less of a chance of getting annoyed by it — and putting a fang through its tiny screen. If your cat isn’t harness-trained already, this entire step may actually take a few days to complete.

That’s it! Your cat may now carry around a pokémon in its Pokéwalker.

The really funny part about this, aside from the ridiculous sight of a cat running around with a pokémon backpack, is that cats are exceptionally good at accumulating pedometer distance. They’re always running around the house, rolling around to play, or being otherwise active in some way that activates the meter, and that means more is getting done on your Pokéwalker than would be the case were it still sitting on your desk.

The first night that I loaded a pokémon onto mine, I managed to accumulate 180 steps of pedometer distance in a couple of hours. My cat managed twice that in less time. While I slept, she added a further 1120 steps, even while fitting in a healthy amount of napping. Is this cheating? Psh. It’s Pokémon.

She’s quite used to wearing her Pokéwalker now; it really has become like her little cat backpack. Now the real fun will be taking her for a walk around Seattle — for everyone to see how ridiculously awesome my cat is. Especially being that she’s a pokémon trainer and all.