Part 12: Superhuman timing

Oh my god

10: Superhuman timing

Well I held this update up for way too long, let's continue!



With Sabrina defeated we have only one gym leader left, Giovanni. You may notice that I have changed my name back to normal, kinda. I had to put in a bunch of spaces after Met or else I would have ended up with "Metsies". Couldn't really find a way to better remedy the problem but hey, we got missingno. out of it so I shouldn't complain.

Giovanni's gym is all the way in Viridian. To do that we need to go all the way back through Cerulean City and Pewter, on the way



...



On the way there I'll show off what I consider to be the last interesting glitches/pokegods you can encounter in Pokemon Blue and Red. These dudes can affect not only your graphics but your team itself, like a virus, one of them can transform pokemon into clones of themselves if they are found as the same pc box as it. Sounds interesting right? We're gonna look for these monsters west of Cerulean, not in the cave but at that semi large grass patch where most people would train for the nugget bridge in a normal playthrough.



A wild cueball? That's not supposed to pop up.

Ah, well fuck I don't know what that i























Well, that was quite the knock on the head.



Coincidentally, everything looks quite updated and advanced and in-color again. Let me take this opportunity to say welcome to the second (and last) special update of Let's horribly break pokemon blue: 2nd Gen! Due to the continuous success of pokemon it's no wonder that gamefreak was able to up the ante a bit on their bug testing. As a matter of fact, they even have failsaves of all things to make sure things don't get too out of wack in case something that isn't supposed to happen happens. I can think of at least one that can be showed off, and coincidentally it was the first thing I planned to try out when booting up the game. Getting into a battle with no pokemon!



I walk through the tree west of petalburg, doing so won't have anyone stop you. Get into the grass and... Going into a battle brings up a white flash and then nothing? That's right, when you're trying to battle with no pokemon, the game won't LET you battle. It'll be programmed to say you automatically win and you're thrown back into the overworld. There is no glitch pokemon nor game resetting, you just win. It's kind of like Earthbound when you get so powerful that you can fight weak enemies and automatically get experience. To further show this off, let's try battling with a trainer.



You can get a better view of what happens here. Even during the overworld fight scene between this kid and JOEY'S RATTATA he will gladly stop midfight to battle you. Except since you don't have pokemon you just automatically win after the little pixelation effect. You don't get any of the benefits either, such as reward money. It's pretty dull, but it's not like gamefreak was gonna let a new game get all confused from a strange encounter after the shitstorm that happened in first gen. Also in case you were wondering...



Impressive. What isn't impressive is that this is just a recolored rhydon sprite. B+ for gamefreak. Now one interesting thing you can do with walk through wall dickery is getting the pokedex before getting your first pokemon. As a matter of fact, as I was playing I kinda began to improvise and thought "What if you thought your rival without picking out your starter?" Not only is it possible but it is simple and easy to do with the power at hand. So began a short quest of "What if?" questions. First of all, what if you got your pokedex before getting a pokemon? This is possible if you skip the intro sequence and go straight into Mr. Pokemon's house, which is located north of the second town not too far away.



Coincidentally, Oak is there, and he kinda hands you a pokedex simply because you have a pokemon (except... I don't have a pokemon?).



If you try to open up the pokedex at this point, it won't.



Going to Violet City, the third town, you get a call from your Mom whining about how you didn't tell her you're going on an adventure, despite the fact that you haven't even talked to Elm (who calls you after you get the pokedex whether or not you get your starter). Between Violet City and the route leading up to it is a gatehouse. In case you don't know, these are the buildings that separated Saffron City from all four sides in gen 1, you can go inside and through them willy nilly if you want, but skipping them completely brings out interesting results...



By skipping through gatehouses, a significant number of sprites change into your character. Not just human NPCs either, the third picture actually shows a sudowoodo being turned into a green gold. If you press A he does a little shake dance



This is just creepy, at least it is if you know what these orange sudowoodo sprites replaced  Twins, which looked like loli monsters in gen 2 . Looking back I probably should have encountered them just to see how they walked. North of here is Ecruteak City, which normally you can't access until you get 3 badges, but skipping through the sudowoodo allows you to get there no problem. In there is a pokemon center where you meet someone special.



Gen 2 is what I think gave Bill his creepy nerd persona. However he is very important in two aspects. One is that he builds a "Time Machine" in this game. This time machine is a trade system that allows you to trade pokemon back and forth from gen 1 to gen 2 and vice versa (but you can't trade any Gen 2 pokemon or moves into gen 1). If I can ever get a certain emulator to work correctly we may be able to... Experiment with this. Until then we'll live it alone for now. Secondly, after installing the time machines Bill goes back to his house in Goldrenrod City, the obligatory big city pokemon area of gen 2. We want to visit him there.



If you enter goldenrod city by skipping the gatehouse the golden tiles end up being replaced with this funky set. It's definitely a rad trill new look for the developing city. Hell, I probably should have messed around with all the gatehouses in the game, this stuff is neat.



aaaand this is what made people give crazy ideas. Not only does Bill give a pokemon to you because he doesn't like to go outside (supernerd persona developed) but he gives you and eevee of all things (pokefreak persona developed! I swear to god if you guys being to expand on this I will close this thread SO HARD). Anyway, with this Eevee we now have a pokemon that isn't a starter as our first pokemon, which is... Neat? The main thing nagging at my head at this point is what pokemon your rival will have, as getting a pokedex will make a certain spot in the game a fighting spot where you are forced to face your rival on the way back to your hometown.



Saw this on my way back, rhydons replaced with me. Yes, if you talk to Joey they tackle each other, it's pretty funny.



And this is where you're supposed to fight... Um... Yourself?



Well actually this is your Rival, except he isn't since he turned into an exact replica of you. Can only imagine what the old dude is thinking of right now.



I'm/He's also a dick, and likes to - as someone in the thread most eloquently put it - beat his pokemon with a tire iron. It's quite accurate until the endgame.



Fighting him with no starters... Makes him fight with a totodile.





yep.



Ugh, not really. You're boring, I expected something interesting. Let's do something more interesting, like explore the unfilled hexadecimals in this game, AKA encounter the very little pokegods that are present in this game!


So since Gen 2 has 251 pokemon, gamefreak had a bit of an easier job in keeping the pokegod glitches in check. There are only 4 unfilled HEX slots (251 out of 255. Actually that's a lie, there's only 3 unfilled ones, as one of them is filled by a special "Pokemon", and that is the pokemon egg, which occupies the hex FD (#253).



In pokemon games, egg data have their own entry in the same area as other pokemon. When indicating a pokemon species, there are two values that determine one when in a trainer's party. The first value indicates how the stats will grow and what its battle sprite will be. The second value decides what sprite will show in the pokemon menu screen, but if the pokemon is in an egg, this value will be 253, an egg. Of course, to see this in action we need to actually CATCH the egg.



With the use of gameshark the egg is easily caught with the masterball. In case you were curious, in battle the egg uses struggle. This is the only way you can see what move(s) the egg has (it's always struggle) and I'll show why in a sec.



Strangely, the pokedex entry is quite normal. Note how the egg has a paw print, despite being number 253, which is an egg value. Which means there shouldn't be any print there at all. The pokedex entry is predictable, and don't even get me started on the weight. dats a hevy egg



You can't see the egg's moves out of battle because it's... Well an egg. It'll only show you how long it'll be until you hatch it. Something fun about this egg, it takes over THIRTY THOUSAND STEPS to hatch this thing. What does it hatch to?



Well, the egg turns into an egg. Note that I stole this image because forget walking like 30,000 steps. No amount of turbo can help me with that. The egg will be stuck as an egg, forever. Also, I should mention that this is NOT the bad egg of 3rd gen on. A bad egg exists as gamefreak saying "Fuck you for cheating" and is meant to screw you over in every way possible. This glitch egg... Is just an egg that you can store in a box and forget about. However, this egg isn't exactly useful, as it can't even be used in battle. This is another failsafe that gamefreak implemented, and is the most annoying one I had to experience. For if you try to have an egg fight for you...



and then the game resets... With a twist



The color scheme gets seriously funky, this happens whenever the game seems to notice something really wrong happening which causes an automatic reset. For example, you probably shouldn't be fighting with an egg (then again you should never be able to fight an egg either) so the game notices this, goes "Don't do that" and resets the game like this. It's not just eggs that this happens to, as the pokegods also suffer from this failsafe.


The pokegods of Gen 2 are more like one pokegod. You can activate it through 3 different hex values (FC, FD, and FF). However, all three of them are essentially the same, except for their color.



This is it, ?????, the pokegod of Pokemon Gen 2. It has no cry, it has no attacks besides struggle (at least... Until you catch it), and it appears at level 0. Sadly, it's battle sprite is obviously just a bunch of overworld tiles mashed togethers, along with some text like "poke" "mart" and.... "'M"? (there's no connections don't start spewing out theories).



Killing... Um... I don't want to keep typing out ?????.....Killing "?" nets you a whopping 0 experience. This is after hitting it like 10 times because apparently it has a monster defense and took forever to get down to orange health. Having a level 20 eevee with only tackle might have something to do with it. Unfortunately, killing "?" in THIS area makes the failsafe go off.



Well that stinks, we almost got too... Wait a minute.



This is what the title screen originally looks like, with Ho-Oh being all shadowed out. Yet, when the failsafe occurs and the colors get all messy, the Ho-Oh is colored in! Now I may be wrong here, because my gen 2 game was crystal so maybe the silhouette gets colored in after catching Ho-oh in Gold, but is the title screen ITSELF involved in a glitch that gamefreak couldn't bother to fix? I demand answers. Anyway, let's see what happens when instead of fainting it, we try to catch "?".



Catching "?" is kinda weird, when you throw a ball at it, even a master ball, it bounces back as if you were trying to catch a trainer's pokemon. The sprite... Changes, but you still end up catching the pokemon. Except its sprite is still there, and you don't battle after viewing its pokedex, speaking of that...




What is it with pokegods being horrible fatties? Again, it has it's own paw print, which bulbapedia says is that of the Donphan (yet it doesn't say anything about the egg pawprint... Which looks a lot like this one). Notice how the pokedex entry contains a certain phrase, PKrus aka the pokerus, a virus that helps in EV training (yes it existed in this game and it even existed in gen 1 so all you retro whores that complain about it can be quiet).





and then the game resets after nicknaming "?".

Besides the pokegods, there are also glitch trainers present in the Gen 2 games, there's not much point to them though...



Slowpoke Lance. I don't know about you, but that sounds pretty funny. Unfortunately I have had no luck in fighting these things, as they always seem to release their own "?".



Unlike the wild ones, glitch trainer owned "?" freeze your game upon encounter. Well, not really freeze. Your trainer sends out a pokemon, and the text box will remain blank while the battle music continues to play, you are pretty much forced to restart the game.

Yeah, you might be thinking that this is all pretty much lame. It doesn't seem like we can do much with these glitches right? That's what I thought too, but after some experimenting, I learned that for "?", whether the game restarts or not determines on where you encounter it.



We'll use this grass patch, barely south of the sudowoodo tree, as an example. What I did was encounter a "?" and just beat it up, instead of the game resetting, we are transported to... here.



Welcome the Glitch City of G/S/C! It's not really a glitch city as it is the tiles of the overworld area you were in messing up. Not only that but the trainers and items get switched around in attitudes as well. For example, if I were able to go to a glitch city that was based off an area with an antidote in it, that antidote could transform into a Max revive. That trainer there?



When he saw me, distorted team rocket music started playing. Normally this trainer is a school kid, unfortunately, the game freezes after encounter. I don't mean failsafe freezing, I mean:



There ARE trainers in glitch city that you can fight however, let's try using the grass patch that goes up to Ekruteak after the sudowoodo.



This patch to be exact! Encountering a "?" in this area nets you to a somewhat blank glitch city with berry trees and a trainer to interact with. Trying to get a berry from the trees freezing the game, talking to the trainer, who also plays rocket music upon encounter...



I think this is an error code of some sort, as I've seen this particular message appear from other glitch trainers in 2nd gen games through video. Regardless...



We ACTUALLY get into a battle!



We're fighting ourselves? Again? What is it with this game?



Clone number 9999999999999999 also has a level 42 Umbreon. Despite my Eevee being level 50 (Sharked rare candies when no one was looking), this still isn't exactly a favorable battle for me. An interesting thing to note is that when eevee fainted the fight didn't end, I HAD to release the egg to fight, which made the game reset.



Curious, I decided to steroid up my eevee (which eventually evolved into Espeon, at level 69 no less *GIGGLE*).



I also finally snagged a cyndaquil from Elm and rare candied it to a typhlosion, since by the time eevee evolved it couldn't even learn any useful moves, and it was at a severe type disadvantage anyway. Tell me what you notice about the pokemon this guy used:




All of these pokemon are dark type. All of these pokemon are also used by the dark type user elite 4... Karen I think her name is? It seems like trainers in the glitch city borrow trainer sets from others, however when you beat them something kinda weird happens.



The trainer does not say anything instead a really strange victory jingle plays and then the game resets

HERE'S A VIDEO OF THE BATTLE


Finally, we've never seen what it looks like when you actually catch "?" without the game freezing/resetting. Well we can do just that in this very area!



Here it is, I really like the overworld sprite as it seems to be pretty exclusive to glitches... Or at least, it resembles the glitches you can encounter in Gen 1, so gamefreak did their job in accuracy! By accident of course.



Looking at the basic info, "?" has the same stats any level 0 pokemon would. It contains 2 moves, Horn Drill and foresight. You can see it has an interesting... Typing. As well how many exp points it has. And the OT is messed up and only says T, and it says RED..... I guess my reign lived on? (also below the experience points bar is some weird code? Also the hp bar is all broken. Also....)

Of course, level 0 is quite bad for fighting, so let's powerlevel him up a bit?



Oh wait, it even EVOLVES? I didn't see a mention of that anywhere I wonder if it wi



...












"?" does not learn any new attacks, maybe it can get some TMs learned or something, but I didn't bother. What is interesting, Is that it has some MONSTER special Defense. Look at that holy fuck. You want a tank then you can use "?" right there. The only issue is that encountering "?" will always net you in glitch city, which I'm pretty sure is impossible to get out of unless you have something with fly or teleport or something.



And just to show off, this is what "?" looks like in battle. Since it has no defined sprite, "?" borrows the last back sprite that has been shown on screen. So you can have your trainer sprite using Horn Drill and imagine how hilariously horrifying that will look in real life! (Horn Drill is a OHKO attack that literally drills a horn into your opponent, gruesome)





Other than that, glitch city and "?" in this game have no more uses. That doesn't mean there aren't any other glitches however, as a matter of fact there's one particular glitch that is possible to do without gameshark, and not only can it give us a special pokemon (singular), it can give us special pokemon (Plural)!

To do this glitch without a gameshark you need to have at least beat the elite 4, because it requires you to catch a pokemon that is unobtainable until after the E4...



Sneasel to be exact! Normally sneasel is only encountered in the kanto region of gen 2, so you can't find them wild in Johto unless you have an encounter code put in.



Nickname sneasel this but NOT after you catch it. Nickname it via the namerater, apparently not doing so won't make this trick work. Make sure to put in those 5 C's! (CAN YOU GUESS WHAT WE'RE GOING TO GET YET?)



Now here is where I hope you have a bunch of rare candies or something like that stocked, because you want to level up this guy (or gal) all the way up to level 57. Where it will learn the move "Beat Up".



It is imperative that Beat Up is in the third move slot, if not then you will NOT get the pokemon you want.



This is the trickiest part, the glitch within the glitch. The famous duplication glitch of G/S/C, it's the same concept as the trick in gen 1 where you reset the game as it saves in between switching boxes, except the timing is FAR easier (although it's a bit trickier in crystal version, your timing needs to be better). If you did it right, you'll end up with a sneasel in your party with one still being in the PC, clones! Make sure to make 4 clones in all, your party should look like this:



Now time for the ridiculously fuck you hard part, you have to make a BAD clone. Now you would think that making a bad clone would be easier than making a good clone, it's not. In all Gen 2 games, if you don't have a pokemon stadium 2 emulator for cloning good fucking luck because you have to be MILLISECOND precise. I DID DO IT but um I forgot to take screenshots so instead we're gonna have to use expert artist renditions of the following events.


So if you succesfully made a bad clone it should look something like this:



The sneasel should be level 0 and a bunch of question marks surrounding it. Note, if the pokemon is not Level 0 then it is NOT a bad clone, try again. So withdraw the bad clone and give it to the old couple for raising.





Then get the bad clone back, don't take a step or anything. It should be viewed as a garbage sprite on the overworld screen now.



It should look something like this I guess. It's pretty much the same as "?" looked.

Now, move the clone to the top of the party, the game doesn't read the bad clone when it's on top, and as a result it reads as you not even having any pokemon. Now you want to insert a pokemon to the front of the party, make sure you use something you don't care for because the data for this pokemon will be wiped from existence.



This is kinda what it will look like, just stick the pokemon in there. Now you should have 7 pokemon in your party, wacky! Now go back to the daycare people and give them your bad clone again. While it's with them, deposit the pokemon that will be erased as well as the 4 sneasel clones into your PC box.



Some sneasel may have mail attached to them for some reason, you're gonna have to get it off them because you can't deposit pokemon holding mail in your party. As you depost the Sneasel, you'll notice the first letter of their nickname will disappear until they are simply "Celebi" stop depositing here and take back the bad clone from the daycare. It should have grown by 99 levels, and will cost NOTHING to get back. This also changes the levels of your sneasel, one might end up being level 146. Give these Sneasels to the daycare people and then take them back immediately. If done right, the sneasel will turn into their respective pokemon depending on their third move. Some clones might have screwed up move set with beat up not being the third move, but there will always be one that isn't screwed up, and doing so...

GETS YOU A CELEBI!!!!11!!1!



So... Why does this work?

Well, the move Beat Up has the same Hex value as Celebi (FB), and apparently having it as the third move while doing this glitch, transforms the original pokemon in accordance to the hex value of it's third move. That's the jist of it. By the way, make sure you delete any glitched pokemon that have occured from the trick, as they can mess up your game a bit.

GOOD FUCKING LUCK DOING IT THOUGH. I have no idea how this shit was discovered, I mean, if it's impossible to do on an emulator how do you figure this out? Do you just fuck around with the game saves until you go "HEY WELP I FOUND SOMETHING" it's fucking ridiculous I swear one da



















Huh what?




Oh I got the Earthbadge woohoo, I don't even know what I'm doing here. Guess I'll just, walk out and go to the E4 I guess. Later, um, gym leader. You look like a good guy.


EXTRA:



_{image stolen from trsrocking}


Pokemon G/S/C does in fact have a Safari Zone area in it's coding. You can see traces of this in-game in Fu...Fuck it I can't spell it city, where the safari zone entrance building is THERE, but it has no entrance. From what I read, the glitch city in gen 1 had something to do with it, and either gamefreak didn't know how to fix it at the time, or didn't have the time to code it in. You can access this area from hacking somehow, but I dunno how to do it, so here's a nice pretty tiled picture of it instead.

Also, here's a video of the celebi glitch in action: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BIz1RAg25yM