Funny, how useful in-game movesets are different from useful competitive battling and battle tower movesets. Has anyone else noticed this?

Right now 'King Boo' has this:
~Hypnosis
~Dream Eater
~Shadow Ball
~Dark Pulse

Competitively, who would leave a sleeping Pokemon in with Gengar? It's too risky to use Dream eater, because it will most likely fail. Coverage isn't great on this set, but each offensive move has 15PP, so it will take a while before this ghost runs out of those moves.
In-game? Dream eater is useful for HP restoration, hypnosis is half decent for sleeping things to more easily capture them... Dark pulse is to have a reliable way to hit things that are immune to Shadow ball. I'd replace something with Thunderbolt if I didn't mind wasting the TM, but since I plan to try the below set later on it will be a wasted T-Bolt...

When I use it in the battle tower, it will look like this:

~Shadow Ball
~Focus Blast
~Substitute
~Pain Split

Pain split isn't a reliable way to heal in-game, because most times wild pokes are low level or have terrible HP anyway. Why substitute in the wild when I can faint the foe or flee it?

Battle Tower is another story. Ghost/Fighting isn't resisted by anything. Sub is quick to get up, provides Gengar with a safety blanket against Pursit users, and makes Pain Split more effective against those who would attempt to wall me. The nice thing about this set is that it can handle a variety of foes, and in the Tower or competitively it will meet these foes in spades. In-game, something with a larger amount of PP for offensive moves does much better. Focus blast, while providing great coverage, has only 5PP. Not a good thing in-game. Pain Split might make up for it just a little...

Pain Split and Sunstitute allow this thing to out stall Blissey, which is also kinda cool.

I dunno--I do not have much issues using Competitive movesets in game.

But then--I have everything I need caught on my Pearl Cartridge, save Mewtwo, Lati@s and Heatran.

Though, I will admit--there I times that I cannot even risk using Trick Room... as my Slowking out speeds the in game Pokemon too much to use it.

I dunno I am not bothering with catching much for now. I can get stuff on my PokeWalker no problem, and once my Pearl Cartridge has is Master Ball won... I can move over my Lottomon to my Heart [of] Gold card.

Though, considering most wild Pokemon are level ten to twenty--with only a rare few that are near level thirty... I do not waste that many moves killing them getting from place to place. I do not think anything I have used has gotten into anywhere near red levels of HP in Heart [of] Gold.

in DPPl, FRLG, RSE, RYGB, hell yeah, this will happen.HGSS seems to not require the Pokemon get that overly powerful, the farther away from home I am.

As per Pain Split not working to restore HP: usually, there are trainers you can latch onto for that. Well--unless you are only EV training... in which case, I have been having an ingame pokemen fight, with EXP Shares on my other guys, until they have leveled up to take care of themselves. 

But competitive battle moves are not that bad ingame... for HGSS at least.