My sister and I have been working together these past few weeks and we were finally able to beat Round 2 of Pokemon Stadium. The game remained untouched for years until my sister decided to get the surfing Pikachu and beat the Prime cup and as a result all we had left was Master Ball Poke Cup, Petit Cup and Pika Cup. Poke Cup was fairly easy. I had an old team which smashed Blue version from about a year ago and I was able to beat Master Ball on a lucky run with it. Pika Cup and Little Cup required a little more effort and to beat them we had to play through the game twice to make teams for them.
We decided that to use a level 20 Kadabra for Pika Cup supported by an Arcanine with Dragon Rage and a Starmie with Thunderbolt, Surf, and Ice Beam. We used rentals for the other slots and the rental Exeggutor came in handy for a couple of the battles. On the winning run Kadabra was a complete beast and pretty much always got a critical hit when we needed him to. We also discovered that the key to winning the last match was that if the opponent had Alakazam as one of his three, keep Kadabra away from it to avoid Thunderwave. Arcanine was the weakest of the three we raised because his speed wasn't that good so most pokemon would got first and 2HKO him, but he did help out a lot when we needed to kill the Alakazam.
Making a team for the Petit cup was more difficult. Your options are severely limited and a lot of the really good pokemon are cut out due to the restrictions. You can't rely on a single pokemon like a Starmie or Mewtwo to sweep because of the rules of the little cup cut out most of the sweepers. Abra is probably the best choice, but even then his special falls short of the OHKO power Alakazam has. We ended up using a more balanced team of Horsea, Ghastly, Magnemite, Machop, Bulbasaur, and Abra. The levels were split so that all of the pokemon had 26 except for Gastly and Bulbasaur who were level 27 (Ghastly learns Hypnosis and Bulbasaur learns Razor Leaf at level 27). If I were going to do it again I probably would have given the extra level to Abra, Bulbasaur almost never got used. Ghastly, Abra, and Machop were the ones who got used the most, although Horsea and Magnemite both had their moments. There were a suprising number of opponents who only had normal type attacks so Ghastly was especially useful there although Abra was probably the MVP for his sweeping ability.
It was also in this run that we learned that the rental pokemon aren't that bad statwise. The rental Bulbasaur beat my Bulbasaur in every stat except speed despite being two levels lower. The rental pokemon generally had better stats than mine until I gave them stat boosting items and even then they only had a small lead over the rentals. If the rentals actually had good movesets there would really be no reason to train up your own. This does make me wonder though, if the rental pokemon had such good stats, how did the opponents manage to get stats that were much better than the rentals?
The playthroughs to make the team were probably the best part especially the run through for the Petit cup. We decided to use a lot of pokemon we hadn't used before so our final team was Poliwrath, Gyarados, Dodrio, Flareon, Hitmonlee, and Electabuzz. Physical STAB was really good ingame in the 1st generation. I was always suprised by how much each hit of Hitmonlee's double kicks would do. Hitmonlee is also much better than Hitmonchan since Hitmonlee actually gets good attacks and has the stats to use them. Dodrio was also extremely effective. Gyarados was overpowered pretty much throughout although at the end the others started to catch up with him. Electabuzz was also a lot of fun. His attacks weren't overpowering but they were usually enough to get the job done and he was the fastest in a team of fast pokemon. Flareon also surpised me because his special stat was really good. It was the best in the team and was never that far behind his attack. He was awesome early one because you get a Double Edge TM right after getting Eevee so you could use his attack. He lagged until he got Flamethrower, but once he did he was really effective against most of the E4. Poliwrath was the disappointment since Gyarados mostly did his job except better. However, Lance's pokemon didn't seem to like attacking him so he had use there and water is an awesome type so it never hurts to have two of them.
The original pokemon games still hold up really well and are a lot of fun to play. The pacing is excellent and once you get past Celadon you have a lot of freedom to do things in the order you choose. Silph Tower also stands out as the best dungeon in all of the games for me. The AI is bad, but that just gives you more freedom in your pokemon choices. Overall, it just shows how solid the concept of Pokemon was that the original game is as fun as when I first played it.
