ShoddyBattle

Well, I've been playing ShoddyBattle a lot recently, and I fucking love it, which means I'm now doing competitive battling again. If you don't know what I'm talking about, ShoddyBattle is a "battling simulator" for Pokemon Diamond/Pearl/Platinum, and it is just fucking awesome. Instead of having to endlessly add random friend codes or do all of that EV training, you can create your own team and have it ready in less than an hour, 30 minutes if you're fast, and you can instantly challenge other users to a battle. However, pretty much all of the users that use ShoddyBattle have some degree of skill in the game, and if you have no idea on how to play competitively, you're pretty much screwed. However, there are some websites such as Serebii and Smogon which can help you learn how to play competitively (it helped me). ShoddyBattle is a very awesome program to use, and although it doesn't have all of the animations and stuff like the actual Pokemon games, you'll find that it's probably better worth it to use ShoddyBattle for all of your competitive battling needs rather than using the actual Pokemon game because of how easy it is to create and edit your team and how easy it is to just battle other people. It also has a chatroom which functions a lot like IRC and a leaderboard system as well.

If you're interested in using ShoddyBattle, Click Here to go to the download page, and if you want to battle me sometime, I'll be on Smogon's server (trust me, you'll want to use that server).