Part 11: Coin CACE Trainer

No promises there.

Apologies for taking so long with this update! I needed something of a break from my quest to corrupy and destroy the world, so I took some time off to figure how how to more efficiently corrupt and destroy the world. And you know what I found out?

The Pokémon glitch community...HAS FIGURED OUT A NEW TRICK.

It's the year 2016 and they're STILL FINDING THESE TRICKS. This one's even CRAZIER than the Q glitch in my opinion.



Okay, here's what you do. First, get the Itemfinder from this guy. You don't need the item, what you need is to set the event flag. Which unfortunately means you need to catch 30 Pokémon, killing any hope this trick has in speedrunning, but I digress.

Next, we need to have certain trainers defeated on Route 11. Here's a map I stole from GameFAQs and scribbled over:



Now this probably looks like some whacko rumor, but stay with me. See the left-most circled trainer?



We're setting him up for a Mew Glitch on Route 11. He's the only one that can be used, so thank goodness he's there.



So you know the drill, Fly away, battle someone else, shove a boulder, etc. And then you want to come over to this sign and read it. Don't worry about what an American is doing in Japan, just read it.



In Red/Blue however you would want to read this sign instead. Same setup otherwise.

Then head back to Route 11, and what do we find?



HELLO THERE. What have we done now?

Okay, this is just crazy. You'll recall that I've stated you should not talk to NPCs between starting the Mew Glitch and getting the resulting encounter, because the game recalls the most recent text box ID, and if that ID doesn't exist in the current map, bad things happen.

You'll also recall that ANYTHING out of the ordinary in this game can be put to your advantage. ANYTHING. Reading that sign and getting a glitch encounter on Route 11 makes the game point to the Trainer flags for that map and read that as text - which is why certain Trainers had to be defeated, so we could fool the game into loading a PokéMart screen here. I'm dead serious. The Itemfinder flag needed to be set in order to actually make the shop have items, because it'd have zero items without it.

And what are those items, you ask?



Oh yes, MANY items can appear here, and the best part is, most items not normally sold cost absolutely nothing. 99 Master Balls, more Fossils, the Surfboard...



I also tried selling Jack's item, which you can't always do, but look at that payout!



Exiting WOULD have started the battle...but see, in order to resolve the glitch, I had pushed a Strength boulder - you don't encounter anything in the process of that, so the game tries to have you encounter nothing. Has quite the effect on Pikachu! I've heard that if you're doing this in Red/Blue, you can only do this trick one time unless you lose the actual encounter, though I imagine if you wind up not getting an encounter at all, you can do it as much as you like!



What a glitch. What a game. New stuff always getting discovered...the ride never ends for Generation 1 players. Ah, but sometimes you just gotta take a break.



Pikachu falls in love with Clefairy. I'll be in the corner pacing while he does that.



Hey, where'd everybody go? What happen--



AAAAAAAAAAAAH NOT AGAIN! GET OUTTA THERE!



Who? What? Where am I? Don't tell me I glitched the game so hard we're in an entirely different generation.

Nah, I'm bullshitting. Welcome to Generation 2! Can't have a glitch LP without giving this one some attention, now can we? Sure, they fixed a lot, but we'll see if we can't get anything to slip through the cracks!



Here's a bug already: If you toggle Daylight Savings Time in rapid succession you'll suddenly get lots and lots of calls from your contacts.

So don't do that. Nobody likes them.



Now, this game makes a strong case for the Fire starter, unlike the previous generation, but Water is still the best, as it always has been and always will be. The thought of the Rival putting in the effort to steal a frigging Grass starter alone is well worth it.



GRASS. STARTER.



See? Now he gets it.



So how many people out there actually entered "???" as his name because of this? Not the best idea, Game Freak.

Okay, onto some actual glitching. Most of Generation 2's actual problems are either formulaic errors (Custom PokéBalls are frigging useless, thanks Kurt) or have something to do with the battle system (Marowak can overflow its Attack with a Thick Club and Swords Dance, resulting in Earthquake doing like 10 damage) but there's not really any glaring errors - they did a much better job bug-checking this game. The real glitching in this playthrough doesn't start until Goldenrod City.

In the English versions, anyways. In the Japanese versions, the Bug Catching Contest has...well, a BUG that lets you clone your Pokémon without save corruption, but they fixed it so I can't show it.

Here's another funny one: If you miss with an OHKO move in any version, the enemy can Counter it! Even though they fixed it in Crystal version, they were forced to revert back to Gold/Silver's behavior so Link Battles wouldn't desync. That is sad!



In preparation for that, you must at least see a Bellsprout or Machop. Bellsprout is very easy, and a trainer somewhere uses Machop. You must also catch Wooper. This'll be important later.



Ladies and gentlemen, the most broken item in Generation 2: THE COIN CASE!

Now, you may wonder how the Coin Case of all things broke Generation 2. Well, the setup is lengthy and annoying if you aren't speedrunning, but let's have a look.



Evolve Wooper into Quagsire and teach it Sleep Talk. Sleep Talk must be the FIRST move on its move list, don't forget!



Next, have Quagsire hold an HP UP.



Arrange the party like so: Quagsire should be fourth, and the other three should be Pokémon that are fresh catches you don't care about.



The absolute worst part of the setup is the items that need to be in your PC. As you can imagine just by seeing two TM27s, it may take awhile to actually get the items you need. I like to say I'm not hacking at all to demonstrate these tricks, but in this instance I hacked my PC items to save myself a lot of time. I hope you don't mind. Can you tell what's going on yet, though?



Stand at this location in the Goldenrod Pokémon Center, save, reset, and continue.



Upon continuing, move down one tile and right four tiles, then open the menu.



View the PokéDex entry of Bellsprout or Machop, then use the Coin Case!



Bingo!

...Wait, no, that's not supposed to happen...

Okay, what I'm actually trying to do here is - I kid you not - use the Coin Case for Arbitrary Code Execution. Yep! ACE is in Generation 2, but ONLY due to a translation error: In the English versions, the Coin Case code is glitched. If Bellsprout, Machop or Machoke's cry is the last cry to occur, it's possible for the Coin Case to interpret your party as ASM code. People first discovered the Coin Case glitch when they tried using it after talking to the Machoke in Vermillion City, but it was YEARS before anything practical was found.

What speedrunners do is keep the Wooper unevolved, teach it Return, and have it hold Protein. This makes the game jump to their PC Box names, which you can rename in this generation and write code THAT way. My Quagsire is customized so that the game interprets it as a jump to the items stored in the PC and interprets that next instead.

At least, that's what I was TRYING. There are multiple factors that can mess this up. If the third Pokémon in your party has a value the game doesn't like, it can cause problems. You can also run into issues if the emulator you're playing on doesn't replicate the Coin Case glitch properly - this will always work on console, but I had to try another version of VBA.



When I did, the game instantly reset and did THAT. Egads, it's not just Gyarados that turns red now!



It's way funnier in Gold version because Ho-Oh actually loses its silhouette and reveals itself in all its rainbow chicken glory.



This is starting to look like one of those drug addict ROM hacks everyone loved in the early 2000s.



Not touching that grass! Fortunately, this effect is completely temporary. As soon as you reset, everything's back to normal.



I then re-attempted the Coin Case glitch with this party. For the record, here is the list of items I hacked into my PC for this:

Gathering all that without a Gameshark is tedious, but totally possible.



YES! It worked this time! So what did that code do exactly?



Go to the Day-Care and deposit and withdraw any Pokémon you don't care about. You'll notice that it instantly gains levels...



And has had a bit of an identity crisis.

Yes, the code I just ran turns the next Pokémon to come from the Day-Care into Celebi. ONLY the species byte changes, however, so you'll have to overwrite its moves to make it legal. But still! Now you don't need that stupid event from Crystal version. Though the PokéDex flag doesn't get set, that can be fixed by trading it or sending it to Stadium 2 and back.



However, there appears to have been a slight side effect. I don't know how this happened, but Croconaw is now suffering the hybrid glitch. Remember that from Generation 1? Where a Pokémon's two species bytes don't match?



Luckily evolving to Feraligatr fixes everything. If I couldn't do that, then he'd be stuck with Celebi's back sprite unless I send him to the Day-Care which would make him Celebi for good.

Hmmm. Speaking of hybrids, I did mention Q is also in Generation 2. Let's go get him!



In the code I've shown, HM07 determined the species of the Pokémon I was going to get. HM07 is the 249th item, however the stack of four Great Balls increments the number by two, to 251. So I add two more stacks of four Great Balls to make that number 255. If you deposit three stacks of 99 and withdraw 95 of each stack, you get three stacks of four Great Balls, so you can manipulate the incoming Pokémon that way.



I...what? 247 levels?! Well, that looks like a very expensive ransom I MEAN AHEM CAREGIVING FEE but it's actually just 24,800, that text box never displays more than four digits. So what did we get?



It's Q, but in its Generation 2 form. Let's see how he battles.



Oh dear. He looks like me!



He's useless. Unless someone has an incredible piece of advice for me on how to use him.



Without...fighting? What?

Whatever, let's check his stats again...



Oh...OH RIGHT. I forgot all about this! Q still has the property where he and anything below him are ignored by most game functions - like healing!



So what happens if you enter battle with all fainted Pokémon?



...Nothing! You just instantly win before you can send anything out! See, Generation 2 added an actual error handler here. Trying to fight with no Pokémon to send out causes the game to just exit the battle and pretend you won. Sure you get no EXP or money, but who needs that?! Q can trick the game into not healing your team after a blackout, which means you have nothing to send out! You can move through the entire game this way.



No need to deal with this brat ever again!

So, that was a handful of the glitches in Generation 2. There's one last trick I'll discuss because it's not really worth trying out. This trick has to do with this guy:



WANNA BET?

Q's cloaking ability ALSO extends to the Time Capsule. He and anything below him won't be checked for compatibility, letting you send Generation 2 moves and Pokémon to Generation 1, which then turn into glitch moves and Pokémon - whatever their ID equivalents are. This lets you get glitch Pokémon you couldn't before, not that there were many you couldn't get before.

You can even get glitch moves without Q. If a trade evolution Pokémon is traded into Generation 2, at the level it would learn something exclusive to Generation 2 in its new form, you can teach it the move then trade it back to Generation 1, since you're already past the compatibility check. Glitch move get.

We've broken Generations 1 and 2 to hell and back now. I can't thank my viewers enough for sticking with me all this time, but I think I've officially run out of material now. Which means all that's left is to do something big to finish the LP on. Hmmm, but what? Maybe the answer is...Crystal clear? Heheheh...