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Hey You, Pikachu! gameplayThe hook behind Hey You, Pikachu! was that it allowed you to communicate with Nintendo’s latest mascot with a bulky microphone that attached to the N64 controller. This technology was called the Voice Recognition Unit (VRU) and was meant to recognize the human voice. You were able to talk to Pikachu and build a relationship with the digital sprite, taking on different tasks as its friend.However, the game is mostly remembered as an example of Nintendo abandoning their most interesting technology, with Hey You, Pikachu! being only one of two titles that utilized the VRU. (The other was Densha de Go! 64, a train-driving simulation ported over from a popular arcade game concerning the country’s railways. Only in Japan.) It also ran into problems as Pokémon garnered worldwide attention, with international localization efforts taking longer than expected.Despite receiving a Japanese release months before the Dreamcast’s similarly themed Seaman and a rise of console games reliant on voice-recognition software, Hey You, Pikachu! and the VRU soon lapsed quietly out of the public memory.
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