New Pokemon game needs thousand mile walk
These boots were made for walking, thankfully
The latest Pokemon games HeartGold and SoulSilver come packaged with a Pokewalker accessory, which is a pedometer to track your real life walking and deliver in-game bonuses for certain milestones.
Be wirelessly transferring a critter to the pocket-sized device, you can walk a Pokemon through virtual routes as you hotfoot it in real life. You earn one watt for every 20 steps, which you can then trade to find rare Pokemon and search out items.
You can also find new areas by walking certain distances. Walk 1,000 steps, for example, and you'll unlock the Rugged Road trek back in the game. Pokemon Wiki Bulbapedia, however, did the math and found out just how much walking Nintendo expects a Pokemon Master to be doing.
"In order to unlock all the routes," the Wiki says, "one would need to walk 1000 miles, assuming 2000 steps per mile, with the assumption that no watts are spent or received as gifts." If you set off from Lands End to John o' Groats, then turn around and come back to Dundee, you'll have nabbed all the bonus routes. As long as your battery isn't dead.
The Wiki also calculates that if you do the recommended 10,000 steps a day, it would take 200 days to unlock everything.
Pokemon HeartGold and SoulSilver will be released on March 26th, exclusive to Nintendo DS.
The Escapist