The same way my barely legible high school handwriting has devolved over 25 years of PC word processing, so too have my instincts to pause and save a game. I blame the advent of autosave, checkpoints, Xbox Quick Resume, and games with such high stakes that I can’t help but save every two seconds in case things blow in my face. (Thank you, Baldur’s Gate 3). But I’m not perfect. I get lazy. And this week, I learned an important lesson eight hours into the newly ported Pokémon FireRed for Nintendo Switch: you still gotta smash that save button.

It had been years since I picked up one of the 2D Pokémon games — having missed the boat on the Game Boy Advance, 2000’s Pokémon Gold and Silver may have been the last mainline Poké-title I played. So I was pumped to pony up $19.99 for the nostalgic return to the Kanto region and a run collecting those original 151 pocket monsters, and I immediately snapped back to the glory days. Over a few successive evenings, I was catching bugs, picked up an early Pikachu, knocked out Brock on my first turn, gambled on buying the Magikarp from the Man at........

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