Pokémon Trainer Mission

Pokemon Trainer Mission is a screen-free electronic game from Ultra PRO Entertainment. The player holds a talking, motion-detecting Poke Ball that calls out where a Pokemon is hiding, then moves to follow it - reaching, searching, jumping, climbing and crawling until the ball registers the catch. There are 40 missions that get harder as they go and 65 Kanto-region Pokemon to find; each Pokemon caught is added to the ball's electronic collection along with a fact about it, and the Trainer Map is checked off as each mission is completed.

What the ball reads is movement, not speech. Reach toward the sky and you are hunting Flying Pokemon; search along the floor and you are after Crawling ones, with voices, music and lights carrying the rest of the game and no screen anywhere in it. That is the line between this and Ultra Pro's Pokemon Trainer Guess games, which are built on voice recognition and ask the player to say a name out loud.

The box holds the interactive Poke Ball, the Trainer Map and an instruction manual, and the ball runs on three AAA batteries. Ultra Pro rates it for ages 5 and up and puts a session at about 15 minutes. It is an officially licensed Pokemon product from Ultra PRO Entertainment - a toy rather than a Pokemon Trading Card Game item, with no cards in the box.