Nice to see the Patent Arcade blog getting blogosphere love after we linking it last week - and we note that it's posted another Nintendo-related patent, this one for Pokemon, believe it or not.

Lawyer blogger Ross Dannenberg notes: "Nintendo describes the multi-player, portable version of its Pokemon game in this patent. In the pokemon game, each player collects and trains pokemon. When another player is encountered, the pokemon battle each other and the winner captures the loser’s pokemon. Capturing a pokemon includes transferring information about its appearance, strength, etc. to the wining player’s game machine."

He further notes: "The patent also describes a system for allowing players of different versions of the game to battle each other: Whatever information about a captured pokemon is unavailable from the old version of the game gets made up (assigned randomly) at the time of data transfer." Forgive my ignorance - is this feature used extensively in existing versions of Pokemon?