While there are normally plenty of tournaments for Pokemon in Japan, and quite a few in America, rarely are ANY set up in the UK. Well, that's gonna start changing.

Organised by us at Pokecharms.com, a new UK Pokemon Tournament is starting up this summer and you can be a part of it!

Being hosted by HMV's Gamerbase, we'll be looking for upwards of 24 competitors from the UK to make their way to Manchester for the first tournament with their DSs and copies of Diamond or Pearl at the start of the summer to take part - with the battles being conducted on large, widescreen HD screens in 3D through Pokemon Battle Revolution.

If the event is a hit, we'll then be aiming for a London tournament either later in the summer or later on in the year.

Costs haven't yet been completely sorted out - so there is a possibility you may have to pay £3 to enter to cover the cost of the event, but we will avoid this if possible and will let you know as soon as possible when the costs have been confirmed.

The event will likely take place at the end of May or early June, but dates have yet to be nailed down. If you have any ideal weekend available around then, now would be a good time to post it so we have a good idea of what would be best for most people.

If you'd like to take part, please post here to show your interest. Similarly, any questions you may have are welcome.

The release has already slipped by for North America, but Pokemon Platinum is here. And apparently, according to online retailers, it'll be out in Australia May 14th, 2009. That's a little more than a week before Europe sees it on May 22nd. Not bad.

I personally haven't played too far into the game yet due to preparatory team building, but the little I have seen is promising. The plot differs from Diamond & Pearl's right from the get-go in subtle, yet notable, ways, and you encounter one of the new characters for the first time early on. The environmental changes are also a nice touch - snow in Twinleaf town was pretty fun to see. But these are just my random thoughts. What are the opinions of the rest of you now playing it?

I wanted to take a poke at the Rotom insert in the Platinum game boxes, too. Each Platinum box (at least inside the NA-releases) contains a small insert that talks about Rotom and its various new forms, as well as explaining how to set up Mystery Gifting in order to later receive the Secret Key over the Nintendo WFC. There's also 1 of 5 secret codes given at the bottom of the page that reveal artwork of Rotom's various forms on the Pokemon Platinum NA sub-site for Rotom. Input all 5 and you can download a special desktop program - but you'll need Adobe Air installed to run it.

So, anyone interested who doesn't already have the 5 codes? Then here you go:
Fan Rotom: 9N4A4F8
Frost Rotom: 6TS8ORF
Heat Rotom: T8A6EH7
Mow Rotom: 7W6O3M5
Wash Rotom: H8S3A5W

And I guess that's all I have to ramble about now. Enjoy your Platinum guys =)

Sorry for being a bit late again, but Ralts said he had a way of speeding up the Internet and I foolishly let him try it... only for our entire connection to explode.

So, by stealing Wi-Fi from the nearby Blastoise family I've managed to get online to post up the scores. The answers will have to wait - I don't want to have to hang around too long, just in case they figure out I'm leeching their interwebz...

Anyways, considering the difficulty of the quiz, there wasn't much surprise that there werent too many entrants this time around - but well done to those that tried. You all still sucked (mostly) anyway, but at least YOU tried. You get a cookie.

Princess Sapphire: 14 pts
Samarai 222: 16 pts
Phoenix: 31 pts
Xatu: 30 pts

But the winner with 41 points out of 55, once again, is:

Jet!

More later on, but gotta run now, I can hear the clunking of big shellfish water types heading my way!

The Pokecharms Day quiz will now run throughout the rest of the weekend, replacing this week's normal quiz. You have until Sunday to get your answers in and the normal quiz will resume next weekend.

Remember, this week's quiz still counts towards your season score - so make sure you put in SOME response if you want to stand a chance of being towards the top at the end of the season!

Pikachu Thunder!
Go Destroy Team Rocket Now
Your powers are Hax

The poetry mastery of our very own Doctor Oak. Profound, isn't it?

This year for Pokecharms Day we'd like to celebrate things in a way that everyone can participate... and what could be easier than writing simple haiku-like poetry? In the spirit of Professor Oak (the master of Pokemon senryū), we'd like to hear some Pokemon poems from you guys. Whether it be about a specific Pokemon or an aspect of Pokemon in general, the choice is yours.

The guidelines are as simple as they sound. Write a Pokemon-related haiku-like poem consisting of three lines and up to 17 syllables. Then, PM your poem to me with the subject title "Pokecharms Day Haiku Contest".

The contest will run for a week, ending at Midnight GMT on March 24th. Once all of the entries have been collected, a voting process will be set up for the community itself to determine the best poems. Prizes will be announced at a later time.

So, show us your own mastery of words and drop us a poem - but only one poem per member please. Even if you don't feel creative, give it a few minutes of thought and take a shot

Well, after kicking my feet up for the weekend, I'm back with a double dose of quiz fun this week. Today's special Pokecharms Day quiz will run through until Friday, and on Friday the scores and answers will be posted just before this weekend's quiz goes up.

Even though this is a special quiz, it still counts towards this season's scores - so be sure to give it a go!

You may or may not know this, but the roots of this quiz itself go all the way back to the very first Pokecharms Day celebrations in 2004, where the two main competitions were Who's That Pokemon and the Pokequiz.

Two years later in 2006, those two competitions returned once again, and now they live on in the Weekly quiz.

Well, 3 years later, I've hunted those two competitions out of the Pokecharms Archive room and am posing them to you again. Unfortunately, the original competitions from 2004 are long since lost, but 2006's are still available.

There are 30 points available from the Who's That Pokemon category - no bonus points this time. And 25 points for the PokeQuiz - meaning that you could pick yourself up a potential 55 season points if you got full marks - more than enough to throw you waist deep into the running even if you haven't played before.

As usual, all answers must be PM'd to me and you have until Friday evening GMT to get them in.

Hey guys, kind of an unusual request here - but I need your mothers. I'm working on my University Web Design project and need to do some usability testing on the website I have to re-design - but I need a target audience's input on it.

Obviously, only having ONE mum, that rather limits my field of immediate access - but thousands of people visit here every day, and pure maths has got to dictate that they have at least one mum each too.

If you could ask, very kindly on my behalf, for your mum to take just 10 minutes or so to fill in a quick questionnaire as she uses the website I have to redesign, that would be extremely helpful. You can help them in so far as explaining their actions if they need to, but please don't help them with the actual questions/tasks and make sure they're honest in their responses!

The e-mail address to return them to is in the document, and you can attach that and do it for them if they don't know how.

The only thing is, I need a really quick turnaround on this - so if you could do it within the day, that'd be extremely helpful.

A major thank you to anyone who helps me out here - and to their parents as well.

You can download the document here: http://www.pokecharms.com/random/alexwintonusabilitytesting.doc

You may be wondering what this is, but this new program I have been working on is tailored to the needs of players looking for help on Pokémon movesets. The Attack Effectiveness Table shows stats about Pokémon that exist, but no one had the time or though to put into a nice, organized layout.

This document will have four helpful options out for users to use. As of right now, it has three operating, with the fourth one still in progress.

This is also part of the Pokécharms Day festivities, so other things might pop up later.

Follow the comment jump for more specific details.

Hi folks, as you may have noticed, no Blaziken today. We've decided that instead of the normal weekend quiz this week, we'll have a special Pokecharms Day quiz on Tuesday - so make sure to check back on Pokecharms day for that and much more.

I know Blaziken hasn't gotten around to posting LAST week's answers yet either, but he left me in charge of it and I've been really busy. I'll try and get them up tomorrow instead.

Okay, so, judging by my bland news icon I should never be allowed near Photoshop again. But that's besides the point.

A while back, a few people may have noticed a particular post made by Midnight Shadows in the Pokecharms Staff Openings - Auditions! thread (which, by the way, is still open if people are interested in applying). Midnight Shadows, who's become known as the resident shiny Pokemon hunter around these parts (and for good reason), did an audition piece on how she personally hunts them down via PokeRadar chaining. Now, as I mentioned above, only a handful of people probably read this, so we'd now like to bring it to a wider audience.

Due to length, you'll find the article itself in the comment jump. If you're an up and coming radar-chaining shiny hunter, give it a read. You might learn a thing or two you hadn't previously considered. If you're a player who's thought about trying but isn't quite sure on the basics, be sure to check out our step by step explanation on How to Chain as well.

Thanks once again go to Midnight Shadows herself for writing the article and allowing it to be re-posted. Hope you enjoy reading and feel free to comment. =)