noo why pokemons :D please try out the games, you should love them, although I'm just guessing, I'd say it's a amazing experience, it's pretty much the best middle ground between reading a book and watching a movie, you can act in a virtual space, you can see stories come alive in front of you, kind of :D

Usually it depends on the games, but I gotta say there were some amazing ones made in the past decade, not so well known I suppose, the Assasins Creed kind of got washed away by the constant iteration...

I used to watch play-troughs since that was saving some time and investment, then I got into 3D and there was not much time to game, although it comes around every so often :)