On Serebii.net they have posted the new starters and trainers for Pokemon Black and White, as well as several screenshots. I have to say I'm pretty impressed with what I see so far. The starters are really cute, all of them, and the trainer designs are nice. I really like the girl trainer, she's darling. The graphics are big step up too, finally looking 3D, and taking advantage of the DS's power. I won't be fooled though, when Ruby/Sapphire came out I thought it was going to be a great game--until I actually started playing it. I will eventually give a full blog on why I hate the 3rd Gen games so much, but all I'll say for now is these things need to happen for the next gen of Pokemon Black/White:

Follow up:

*No more Water, Flying or Normal types. Of the 493 pokemon, almost half are water types. Water types aren't particularly strong, but they are a plague in the game's system. And flying has been combined with every type from ground to dark to dragon--the only exception I've found is fighting type, and a fighting/flying is ridiculous. Same thing with Normal types. Instead there should be more fire, dragon, and steel types, and even a new type added to the mix. Really, in the 4th gen there were only 5 fire types added to the game: the fire starter Chimchar and its evos, an evo of Magmar, and Heatran.

*More interesting type combos. Fighting against the weird type mixes like dark/poison, fighting/psychic and dark/ghost were always a challenge, and I liked it. Some I recommend are ground/electric, ice/dragon and steel/dark.

*No more monkey or cat based pokemon. Meowth, Persian, Skitty, Delcatty, Glameow, Purgugly, Stunky, Skutank, Primeape, Mankey, Aipom, Ambipom-etc, etc, etc. With all the really cool animals and plants that exist in the world you can really expand past just these animals.

*No more event-only legendaries. There are already tons and tons of event only legendaries, and if you live in a rural area or miss an event, you can almost never complete your pokedex, which I find unfair and frustrating. Mew, Celebi, Jirachi, Deoxys, Shaymin, Darkrai, Manaphy and Arceus--that's 8. 8 pokemon that are near impossible to own.

*More Masterballs. I'm not saying you should be able to buy them, necessarily, but with the massive amounts of Legendaries in the games, you need at least 1 for every four, especially if more than 2 are above level 70. And depending on the internal lottery system is unrealistic--the odds are worse than Powerball's

*Fully animated battles. I've seen what a DS can do in terms of graphics, content, sound and animation. After Pokemon Stadium and all the other 3D pokemon games there really is no reason why we can't have fully animated battles with pokemon and trainers. To have stills even after FireRed and LeafGreen is just shameful and lazy.

*No more contests. Or at least seriously revamp them. While the 4th gen contests are less annoying than the 3rd gen, contests still require lots of time, effort and money to produce a pokemon that can't battle to save its life because of its attack set, to get ribbons that don't effect the game whatsoever. Badges are required to access content and moves. If I had a reason to get all those stupid ribbons I might be more motivated to do them.

*More post-Elite Four content. Platinum/Pearl/Diamond did a decent job of this, but Gold/Silver/Crystal were the champions in terms of convincing you to play the game after beating the Elite Four--a snag that has seriously effected the game since the first gen. A new set of gyms, or a new quest would be really awesome. The battle frontier is *okay*, but I really would love a second story. Maybe tie it in with the Ranger games, or try to start your own gym--THAT would be AWESOME.

*Dark type gym. We've had 3 water gyms, 3 rock gyms and 3 fighting gyms--but not one Dark type gym, which I've never understood. Dark types have some really wicked moves and are totally immune against Psychic, but there has never been a gym for this type.

*Simple, cute pokemon designs. What I genuinely disliked about the 3rd gen pokemon is that most of them didn't look like pokemon to me. Their designs were too elaborate and detailed, and too harsh looking--more like Digimon. The 4th gen did a much better job, though the legendaries still look way too overdone to me.

These are my hopes for the next set of games, but in the meantime I'll just keep checking the updates.