Part 2: The pokegods
Learned I may not have internet for the day tomorrow, so I might as well post it an hour until tomorrow, close enough!
02: The pokegods
Well, the whole game crashing from not having pokemon thing was fun and all, but we really do need to get out Pallet Town, or else I'll be forced to keep going south and most likely crash 50 percent of the time.
Yeah I'm not exactly an expert on this whole nicknaming pokemon thing. Not like it matters for what we're going to get, what CAN you nickname something that is mostly just glitch block garbage anyway?
I'll man up and say that I've actually lost this fight before when I was a wee lad. I don't remember HOW, I just DID. Whatever, I get my money, Oak sends me to do whatever (what was the point of giving the player character a pokemon in gen 1 anyway?) and I might as well go beat up some critters.
Well hey that was fast.
Guh? I've seen plenty of critters in my life and that is NOT A CRITTER. It Is an abomination of god that has random cries that can send chills up your spine, but at the same time is one of the safest glitches you can catch. Therefore, I must own it.
Ah, shit. Unfortunately there's no shark code that I know of that DOESN'T require you to get balls from a pokemart. Guess we're gonna have to grab Oak's Parcel real quick. Might as well faint the thing for giggles.
Well Fooie I can't even TOUCH the damn thing. It also knows confuse ray, one of the worst moves ever invented by Gamefreak and I don't care if it's the man that thought up of the idea of pokemon himself I want whoever thought of that move die in a fire. All we can do is run away, and even THEN I had to spam Run because I had several "Can't escape" messages. This thing is faster than my level 6 starter pokemon and it's only at level 2. This must be in my possession.
Okay so I might as well explain for the people who haven't played the first gen pokemon games/forgot how they go. When you get your starter pokemon you can walk from pallet to Viridian City just fine but there's an old dude blocking your way. (He will be VERY important later) To the west of Pallet is the Indigo Plateau which is kind of out of reach at the moment, and the only way to pass the old man is to give Oak his Parcel which was delivered to the Viridian Mart instead of Oak himself. Until you give Oak that Parcel, the mart refuses to sell any type of pokeball to you. It's an annoying method gamefreak put in to prevent the player from catching pokemon before getting the pokedex, because it is only after you give Oak his Parcel that he gives his pokedex to you.
Yeah sure I could just walk across the ocean south to Cinnabar Island and go there but that takes long and I'll most likely run into something that'll destroy my squirtle and then I would have to start over and it's just annoying okay.
REGARDLESS; after doing all that I now can buy pokeballs from the pokemart. In my case I can buy free master balls! You may also notice that I have an obscene amount of money, I just have a code on in case I have to buy a bunch of hyper potions or some shit.
YOU ARE MINE
Oh hey it even has its own pokedex entry. It doesn't have any generalization (Where those ellipses are... I guess that's its generalization?), it's pretty tall, and check out how FAT at it is. Over 8000 pounds, and it can run faster than my squirtle at level 3! This thing is fucked up, let's check out the description.
Oh, well that's not normal.
OH GOD MY POKEDEX IS BREAKING THE TEXT IS EATING ME FUCKFUCKFUCK
Have a video with sounds and everything (NMS? I dunno): http://www.viddler.com/explore/Metroixer/videos/61/
Okay, so when you try to view the pokedex data for "H poke" (That is the official name for this guy) the game will pretty much lock up playing these random distorted tunes and cries until you turn off the gameboy. This happens for almost every glitched pokemon because of their cries. Ya see, H poke and friends have different cries almost every time they're released/stat viewed/faint/etc. because of this-if I understand my sources correctly-the pokedex can't properly play H poke's cry causing it to go nuts, which explains the strange text. (Weird how "ROCKET" appears twice) (Here's a thing, try identifying all the tunes/cries played! You won't get anything out of it but if you're REALLY bored one day)
However there is a remedy to this! In the pokedex H poke is identified as "Number 94" out of the 151 pokemon. When playing the game regularly, 94 is Gengar, a ghost/psychic pokemon. This explains why Wurtle wasn't able to hit H poke earlier, why H poke has moves like Confuse Ray, and why it has impressive stats for a pokemon at such a low level. It also means that if we get our hands on a gengar, then view its pokedex data normally, we have the ability to skip H poke's data, giving us safe position of the delicate creature.
Luckily with a gameshark and emulator such a task is easy to do. Yeah Gengar's looking a bit goofy on the battle screen but he's completely normal by the time you see his pokedex entry. Notice how its height and weight is completely different to H poke's, I have no idea why it's like that and it makes me wonder where the game got such huge numbers from.
Either way, we now own H Poke without having the game poop itself! Since the pokedex can't give us a good definition for this dude, I'll give myself the honor! (actually this is more or less gonna be a c/p from the glitch dex in trsrockin.com I will give my own definition but all the numbers and date and stuff I haven't arranged myself.)
h Poke
Pokemon #94
Type 1/Ghost, Type 2/Poison
Hex Value: C3
Starting Moves: Lick, Confuse Ray, Night Shade
Base and Max Stats
HP: 60, Atk: 65, Def: 60, Spd: 110, Spl: 130
HP: 323, Atk: 228, Def: 218, Spd: 318, Spl: 358
Learned Moves: HM02 (Lv.8), Conversion (Lv.17)
Learned Moves after level 100: Pound (Lv. 104), TM24 (Lv. 175), Tackle (Lv. 186), Pound (Lv. 195), <freezes game when learned> (Lv. 205)
TM Moves: Strength, Mega Punch, Mega Kick, Toxic, Body Slam, Take Down, Double-Edge, Hyper Beam, Submission, Counter, Seismic Toss, Rage, Mega Drain, Thunderbolt, Thunder, Psychic, Mimic, Double Team, Bide, Metronome, Selfdestruct, Skull Bash, Dream Eater, Rest, Psywave, Explosion, Substitute
H poke is probably the safest Pokegod (more on why I'm calling it this later) you can catch in Red and Blue. Besides screwing up your pokedex and crashing your game this dude is harmless. H poke also has the same behavior as another famous glitch in that it might scramble up battle sprites a bit or mirror them, as well as messing with the hall of fame. Encountering apparently saves your game automatically (Which explains why before you fight him there is a long black pause before the battle screen shows up) and it apparently evolves into a gloom at level 224 (good luck!). If you're wondering, I made H poke with the gameshark code "01cd8cf".
Note: I'm gonna explain the following the best I can through my understanding, if anyone with a decent knowledge of gameboy coding can explain this better go right ahead, but I think I got the basics of it down.
Finally, I guess I should tell you why H poke is one of many "Pokegods". What is a pokegod you may ask? Welp, back before internet became widely used some smart dudes that did know how to use it decided to spread some rumors on "Pokegods" around the internet. Somehow, these rumors just fucking blew up, anyone who was anyone knew what a pokegod was, and if you owned a Pokegod, you were the king of the playground.
Trouble is, there was no such things as pokegods, at least not that ones the internet originally spread around. No one knew EXACTLY how to get a pokegod, so of course crazy rumors came up, and even more pokegods were made up as well. At first you had only mewthree or pikablu (AKA marill), but then shit like "Charcoat" "Karusu" "Primator" popped up and it just got ridiculous. Eventually the fad died down as the internet rose in popularity and everyone wised up. There was an acceptance that there was no pokemon over the pokedex number 151 in the Gen 1 games. (note: I remember seeing a page that is full of GIFs of pokegod pokedex entries that was really cool if anyone knows a link to that please show it off cause I can't find it)
However, to the surprise of many, pokegods did, in fact, exist. Now this is going to get confusing so just try to stick with me here, math is involved. You see, in most gameboy games at the time there were variables where you could insert in data ranging from 0 to 256 (or HEX 00 to FF). In pokemon Red/Blue/Yellow, these data slots were used to insert pokemon information, however only 151 of those slots were used. This means that there are (shit 256-151 equals.... Um...) 105 unused slots! The programmers need to fill that space in with something, and that's where the glitches come in.
See H poke and others aren't exactly "Pokegods" in that they're super powerful or are versions of future gen pokemon, they are pokegods in the fact that if they were legitimate data they would have a pokedex number of over 151, which was the original appeal of the Pokegod. This explanation applies for pretty much every glitch we fight in battle, and now you know why it happens.
tl;dr pokegods are placeholders
IF YOU WANT A MORE EXPERIENCED EXPLANATION, SA USER STARKCLAMP HAS YOU COVERED
quote:
Oh, hey, I've programmed gameboy before. I can field this one. Although it's actually a general programming thing, really.
There's a defined start of the "pokemon" data, and each pokemon's data is in there, in a very organized fashion, one after another. As it needs to be accessed, the game looks (pokemon number) * (size of one pokemon's data) past the start of the pokemon data, and it finds the information it needs.
Trouble is, the game is on an 8-bit, so the highest number is 255, not 151. And when you're loading from something that wasn't supposed to be used to load this data, there's no guarantee it'll be in the range 1 to 151. So often, it's just... Not. As is the case here. But data for things that aren't pokemon is what's after the pokemon data. Not looking at the code, I couldn't tell you what that data is, but it's not pokemon data. So the game looks for pokemon data well past where it actually exists, and as a result gets data that is for all intents and purposes completely random. Predictable, but useless data.
So they're not "placeholders," exactly, they're just... There. It's like if you had a book that was so many pages long, and you tried to see what was in the book a few pages more than that in. That's part of the hardcover, which isn't paper and doesn't have text. But if you could somehow look at that part... Say, you cut open the cover... You'd see all the not-text that was there. And then Pokemon Blue takes a look at it, says "that looks about right," and declares that not-text to in fact be text and reads it, declares it a pokemon, and shoves it on to your screen. And then your game boy (/ emulator) responds with a "What the hell did you just put in me" and spazzes out.
Okay maybe it wasn't so hard to explain, but now we have a true "Pokegod" in our group, and there will only be more!
Let's try this dude out!
Since H poke is part ghost it is literally a MONSTER at this point of the game. Barely anything can hurt it, and it has Night shade for an attack. Even when it does get hurt, H poke seems to be able to take a beating, it has one fatal flaw though...
This was in a fight against Gary's bulbasaur on the E4 route, I wanted H poke to gain some levels to learn an interesting move and he was doing... ok I guess until this guy. Basically all that damage done to the bulbasaur before H poke died? Yeah that was from him being confused and hurting himself, I don't know why, but when I tried to use lick on bulbasaur it only hit... Twice out of 15 times. H poke has shitty accuracy, I don't remember how accuracy works in gen 1, but if it's based on the pokemon then H poke has it VERY bad. I couldn't use night shade because I was out of PP (PP for pokegod moves tend to fluctuate) and the bulbasaur eventually leech seeded poor H poke to death.
Despite those shortcomings, I was able to get H poke to level 8. A special level, since it learns a very unique move, HM 02! Including placeholder pokemon there are also placeholder moves and even placeholder items! In H poke's case he has the placeholder move HM 02.
HM 02 is just a really weird type, I mean I can explain types that are named after trainers (and I will!) but this is just beyond me. From some limited experimenting this typing doesn't seem to be super effective/not effective against normal, bug, rock, and ground types. Also accuracy is probably determined by moves (editor's note: it is) because this thing has TERRIBLE accuracy, something that I can beautifully demonstrate soon. Also when H poke learns HM 02 the PP isn't filled all the way up, and after going to the Pokemon Center the Max PP can sometimes double the original amount!
The attack itself is pretty rad. There's no animation for it, the enemy's lifebar just drops. It acts like any absorb/drain attack in which the enemy loses health while the user gains some. I like to think H poke sucks in the rattata with some powerful force, and as the rattata enters the glitch mass, its bones slowly desolve in painful anguish. Pokes for the Pokegod
I think we have a decent enough moveset and level to fight Brock now, on the way to Pewter City you can see something neat using the Walk Through Walls code.
You can completely skip Viridian forest! In the southern entrance you can see a cutable tree using the code, but cutting it does nothing (Why is it there?). At the northern entrance there's actually a small patch of grass just out of view when playing normally. All I've found here are rats and pidgeys, but it makes me think why it's there. Was gamefreak planning to have Viridian Forest be part of the route and not a completely separate area? Why weren't there more rumors on that grass patch, I mean not only can you take an easy screenshot of it but you can walk and encounter pokemon in it, I find it weird.
With these questions left unanswered, I go and fight shirtless creepy Brock. Shouldn't be too hard.
It wouldn't be hard if it wasn't for the fact that I tried using HM02 on Geodude like 20 times, and it didn't hit ONCE. I am not kidding you, HM02 did not hit this Geodude once, I eventually gave up and Confuse ray'd/Night shaded it, as well as the Onix that followed, but God how disappointing for a glitched move.
STARKCHAMP HAS THE ANSWERS
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Because it's not supposed to be move data. Why would it have 100% accuracy? That would be very unlikely, since it's effectively random. In this case, while HM02 does have 177 power, its accuracy is a mere 6%. Actually, every glitch move is terrible with the exception of TM05, which in Red/Blue increases the user's evasion three stages (use it once and everything's chance of hitting you is halved, twice and it's reduced to 1/3 its normal value), but is only learned in Yellow (where it has the different, less beneficial effect of freezing the game.) If you want to hack it on to one of your pokemon, its move ID is CD, or 205.
Okay, we're done for now. Perhaps not as crazy as last time but I like working my way up from the stable to the insane (first update is like a teaser). Next time I will blow everyone's mind, I won't say how, but it will be mind blowing. (You probably saw a youtube video of it anyway but I can only hope)
EXTRA:
You can actually get into Viridian Gym early with the WTW code by entering the door from any direction that is not south...
...But I wouldn't recommend it.