Shoddy Battle is a nigh-perfect simulation of the battles in Pokémon Diamond/Pearl/Platinum, free from any percieved tedium of raising Pokémon in the videogames themselves. For those who still play Pokémon in real life, such as I, it's an excellent tool for testing the capabilities of a team before committing to making it.
For those of you who have never given Pokémon much thought, it is an extremely strategically deep game. You build a team of six Pokémon of your choosing, each one heavily customized to give different stat distributions, possibly different abilities, and different movesets and items. The sheer number of possibilities is ridiculously large, and the number of strategically viable ones is still quite high. After crafting such a team, in battle itself, each turn you have a number of possible options from what move to use or what you want to switch to. It is primarily a mind game, attempting to predict your opponent's move and counter in kind, moving to set yourself up for power plays, and breaking down your opponent's attempts to set up. See
Smogon for more details. Smogon is also an excellent strategic resource. It's cool like that.
So yeah, Shoddy is pretty awesome and you should all play it. If the server registry is down (it often is) you can get to Smogon's server at shoddybattle.smogon.com on port 50000.
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