Don't get me wrong. I love the first generation of Pokemon, Pokemon Blue was the very first game I actually played and liked. It made me a gamer. However, with Black/White only a couple months away from coming out in Japan, the inevitable whining comes out.

"Red/Blue were the best!"

"I don't recognize any of the pokemon past the first 150!"

"You don't need to play any other games than the first gen"

However, when you get past the nostalgia, I have a whole list of reasons why Pokemon Red, Blue and Yellow were *not* as great as you think they were.

Follow up:

The Graphics were Awful

I don't mean in the sense that it was pixelly and whatnot, I mean, compared to the official character designs, 99% of the pokemon looked NOTHING like themselves. Pikachu, bulbasaur, rhyhorn, onix look entirely different from their appearances in the anime, the comic or even the instruction booklet that came in the game! Yellow improved somewhat, but for every pokemon that looked closer to the official design, another pokemon looked *less* like its real form, like Jigglypuff. This isn't because of the limited graphics of the Gameboy, because Gold and Silver's pokemon designs were just fine.

Psychics were Invincible

The original game was seriously imbalanced: psychics were nearly immortal. Only ghost type moves could affect them seriously, but Gastly, Haunter and Gengar were part poison type, weak against Psychic, and with psychic's notarity for speed, the only ghost types of the game were next to useless. Fighting Sabrina was at times harder than fighting the Elite Four. This of course was remedied with the introduction of Dark, balancing out the pokemon in such a way that all types had a weakness and a strength.

After the Elite Four, you were done

As the title suggests. After fighting the Elite Four and catching Mewtwo, you were done. There was nothing left to do in the game. No more battles to fight, no more trainers to face. If you had missing pokemon in your Pokedex, you were separated by low level monsters delivering next to no experience and rechallenging the Elites with their level 50+ murderers. Completing the Pokedex became tedious, and without close friends, impossible.

Completing the Pokedex was impossible

I don't mean that if you were alone with no friends you couldn't get other pokemon from other versions of the game. I mean that you needed at least two other friends with alternate starters that you had to guarantee would not evolve their pokemon until everyone in the group got the Pokedex data. I don't know about the kids you knew, but none of my friends or family were that reliable.

Bills PC

Wanna know what's worse that facing a rare pokemon/legendary and not having any pokeballs? Facing a legendary, whittling done its lifepoints to next to nothing, throwing the Ultraball and seeing the words 'the PC box is full' appear on the screen. In the original versions of the game when the PC box was full it had to be changed manually. That meant that if you went to a place like the Safari zone you would have to change boxes to avoid any problems. Of course, that meant you would have some boxes that are only half full, or almost, but not quite, full. And organizing the boxes was a NIGHTMARE. You would have to withdraw the pokemon, deposit, save the game switch the box, repeat. You could easily waste 2 hours just trying to make sure you didn't run out of box space.

Cheats Galore!

While I admit I took advantage of the Missingno cheat for masterballs, I know lots of people who would do the same trick for Rare Candies, thus raising pokemon would have no challenge whatsoever, and wasn't much fun to battle against with friends. Thus in the end the game would be either too hard without cheats and far too easy with them.