Okay, now I’m caught up with all the news I missed while I was on vacation! Along with new stories, too! Merry Christmas! Also, a big thank-you goes to Xous for drawing the Pokemon in the new banner!

Thanks to site reader Shad, an employee at a popular gaming store, we now have a scan of the display boxes for Black and White; click the thumbnail below for a much larger image. As you can see in the triple battle screenshot on the back of the Pokemon Black box, the U.S names for the elemental monkey trio are shown: Grass-type Yanappu will be named Pansage, Fire-type Baoppu is to be named Pansear, and Water-type Hiyappu will be named Panpour. The boxes also confirm that N and Team Plasma will keep their Japanese names.

According to Gamestop employee information, Black and White will be released on Sunday, April 17th. However, Gamestop is notorious for guessing the release dates of games, so we cannot say with any certainty that this will be the actual date. However, Pokemon games have been released on Sundays before and these display boxes are now out, so perhaps Gamestop finally did receive the official date from Nintendo. Still, what are the two dates that the TPCi holiday card is highlighting in the news story below? Regardless of the date, we’ll get the games sometime this spring!