Part 27
THE INTERIM UPDATES
I felt like I wouldn't bum you out of an "update" today, so here's an interim update. I decided that I'd like to show you all my favorite posts from the "PokeCommunity" Pokemon Quartz thread. Are you ready to learn what the larger non-SA Pokemon community thinks of Baro and his hack? Let's find out!
R.I.P. Eig
Died after consuming ten kiloliters of pure, liquid caffiene
Left behind his gloriously spastic posting career, as well as his mighty collectible Mountain Dew can... collection
A moment of silence, please.
...
Moving on.
Hey guys, It's Baro!
And he's going to make a sequel with the same Pokemon! I wonder if any suns will be inflated in that one too 
I'm sorry, but you must be a very, very challenged person to find this hack's sprites better then the originals. Your "enlgish" could use some work too, bub.
I dream of Quartz too
oh the dreams...
Haha, only in the beginning? Okay, I'll grant you that it's worse in the beginning, but it hasn't exactly become incredibly better. In fact, one could say it still sucks. If I may take the liberty:
It still sucks.
Well she is Foxy... but she's like 13 years old you perverted loser
That's 0 for 2, Ati. You lost a point for a technical foul by acting like this game was good, and another point was struck against you for you thinking that this game is, in fact, in English. It's more like some sort of disfigured Spanglish. Like... Baronian Spanglish.
Maybe Baro really is from NOTSPAIN.
"I DUN GET ITTTTTTTTT
" What's also worth noting is how huge his signiature is. It's at least eight times the size of his post. The best part though? I caught off like 20 more lines worth of images. Huge signiature is huge.
wow
no
i have no idea what the hell this guy is talking about
i hope the writer see my insult
You know, this gives me an idea: Lowtax should really make a special account where a couple of people can buy their own account for say, the cost of an account and a half (10.50 I suppose). Then they share their account like that. The stipulation is, they have to ALWAYS post at the same time, just like that. If at any time there is suspect that the person is in fact faking the "couple", they're banned.
I don't see much purpose for it other then I think it'd add a fun element to helldump.
No, no, NO! Not love birds. Rape bird and raped bird
... no comment.
Everyone is different.
No one is the same!
Everyone is different.
This romhack is lame.
I was expecting the awesome to be an acronym.
Here's a musical acronym of my own.F is for Fire Types who served in the war,
U is for the Undulating sound of Swap.bear's roar!
C is for the Chocobo who does my art and such,
K is for Kanto, which Foxy misses a bunch!
Y is for Yelling, which I do a ton,
O is for the Organization which tries to inflate the sun!
U is for the letter.... that I already used before!
A poet I ain't.
No, it doesn't. I'm a pretty open guy for storylines; they don't have to be too complex, they can even be too complex and not make much sense. I'm a big fan of Snatcher's and the Metal Gear series' storyline. I think MGS2's ending made alot of sense, even, and that most of the big "
" bits will be explained in MGS4. I think Snatcher would make a good book, personally.But this game? No. No.
Brilliant like the inflated sun you say!?
<RedChocobo> oh god
<RedChocobo> no
<RedChocobo> no that's horrible
I think Red has the right idea here.
Plug-Oink is the crux of this game to Bonjo. Why is that, you ask? It's quite, simple really. He's always had... strange urges around light sockets. The thought of that energy, the willing holes just sitting there, exposed, innocent in purpose staring at them with their slots, with their ground hole open in surprise... Once you combine that with his pig fetish, it's just a homerun for him.
No wonder Team AMBAR loves electric pokemon, eh?
I wonder if the 30 other GBA games he played were all Barby's Horse Adventure games, with some Frogger and Rugrats thrown in for good measure. I also wonder if he accidentally glued his eyes shut when playing those Pokemon games, because seriously, what?
The good news is that it lost. Hooray!
lol yea for shitt dawg. Also, check out his signiature. Oh those crazy hybrid sprites!
BARO IS A HERO TO THE ROMHACKING COMMUNITY. HE IS LIKE THE LEONARDO DAVINCI OF OUR TIME, PAINTING A WORK OF ART ON THE GREAT CANVAS THAT IS ROMHACKING. I PERSONALLY OFFER MYSELF TO HIM IN GRATITUDE TO HIS WORK, AND WILL MISS HIM.
So basically, I read through all sixteen pages of the thread on their forums. Guess how many people said they disliked the game?
None.
Looking at those posters, are you really surprised by that statistic? I'm not.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
INTERIM UPDATE #2
Baro. Infamous to... well, us at least. This game is his creation, his spawn. Baro is "apparently" well known in the romhacking world. Worshipped by many. Idolized. Adored.
I decided to follow his steps through the world wide web a bit more. Located on the "StudioPokemon" website, a Spanish-speaking Pokemon fansite, his/ his companion's site is known as "Whack a Hack!." It is fitting in a way.
It's worth noting, before beginning this, that Baro is no longer an active "member" of WaH or the community, it seems; however, his effects and even fandom remains, permeating through the world like some sort of crazy Baro-radiation.
The first thing you'll find on the WaH site is, of course, the index. Greeted by a very large Ho-Oh, one is lulled into a false sense of security destroyed the second you look down and see this:
Not shown: Sever's pointlessly animated tail movement. OH BOY!
You'll see the English language option there. The English language option actually opens up an alternate version of the index called the "Endex" and opens up the google Spanish -> English translator to cover up the gaps. The result is a level of test along the levels/ better then anything Baro uses in the hack.
IONIC WHERE ARE YOU
As you can see here, this is the list of the three "members" of Whack a Hack. Baro of course in the center. However, it seems only one of them is active (not Baro). Here's a translation provided by ElMaligno:
It seems Whack a Hack is not without drama. Hm.El Maligno Members translation posted:
In charge of Whack a Hack!
Lance from Sevilla, Spain. Pokemon Ambar/Amber.
Job: Made the original design for the website. He edited/wrote 2 [hacking?] manuals.
In modern times: He abandoned SP in order to join another [web]page, he later was expelled from it.
Baro from Galicia, Spain. Pokemon Quartz
Job: Pioneer [lol] of the Hispanic poke-hacking. In the beginning only Wah hosted his hack. He edited/wrote 6 [hacking?] manuals.
In modern times: After the arduous work of completing the first poke-hack rom of the world [he was] satisfied. He decided to abandon the world of rom hacking
Serg!o from Madrid, Spain. Pokemon Naranja/Orange
Job: Actively dedicated to the expansion of the principles of poke-hacking in the Hispanic world. His work [hack] broke with all hacking traditions. He edited/wrote 5 [hacking?] manuals.
In modern times: Currently helping in the administration of wah.
So much for thatIRC posted:
<Zorak-Laptop> Is their spanish as bad as Baro's english?
<ElMaligno> Nope, he has bad grammar. But its passable.
<Zorak-Laptop> Grammar counts
<ElMaligno> As periods and commas, those where lacking.
<Zorak-Laptop> Those count too :T
Oh boy ob boy
Well of course, it's important to note the various romhacks highlighted here:
Pokemon Quartz is, well, obvious. Guia Quartz is something special, however; it is a version of Pokemon Quartz where the game difficulty has been "upped", which I can only guess means "You're using Save States constantly to make sure you crit/ status effect ALWAYS", as well as ripping out your own hair anyway.
Ambar seems to be totally unrelated to Quartz despite the name. I'm rather unfamiliar still with the implied meaning of Ambar, other then of course the Russian workers group in America. Though the alternate translation of the title, "Amber" seems to show that... Baro and team don't know how to spell amber
Naranja is LeafGreen redo with Ash/ Misty (the Gym Leader one, not the Pokemon Champion one
) in a new land and with new trainers. Shiny Gold though is... interesting. It's actually... looking very good. It's a port of the GBC "Gold/Silver/Crystal" games, of which RedChocobo did an astounding good LP for. The port seems to, essentially, take the content of Gold and remake it completely with the LeafGreen tile set. It doesn't even seem to have anything negative change wise. Well, at least we can be vindicated that Baro himself didn't work on it.
I think it's worth now essentially seeing the real monster of this site: Its forums. They're uh, huge. Not SA huge but, well...
So much Spanish... it's like I fell into... Spain
This is at 20 people per page. That's... alot of people. Now, I tried personally seeing if I could find any Baro posts here. I couldn't find a username known as "Baro" by searching, but searching Baro's name came up with the simple fact that...
People mention his name and his hack alot, and it's an old forum to. Seriously.
And Quartz' popularity doesn't even restrain itself to this forum, it seems. Quartz was even mentioned in "Nintendo Accion", a Spanish Nintendo magazine.
It helps it spreadddWhat this means is that tracking Baro, at least with my admittedly limited Spanish skills (I can read and navigate the site rather basically, but I wouldn't trust my skills enough to, say, translate that thing earlier for you guys and not sound out of it, while ElMaligno hails from Puerto Rico and thus has a considerable bit more behind him), I can't find him on their forums. He sounds gone anyway. So where did Baro go?
Perhaps he's no longer on the internet, having moved onto a stable life...... maybe... However, I have a theory... a theory as to why there's so many fans of Baro, and as to what the nature of that site really is...
... It is the official website for Los Illuminados. Yeah. Las Plagas would be a very good way to get people from NOTSPAIN to like your romhack, wouldn't it? Think about it.
BARODDLER!
YOU WON'T GET AWAY WITH THIS (thanks Drake Lake)Anyway, there's not much else left to show you from the site that you can't see from yourself. Take a look around. They have a message board, romhacking guides, even a chat!
Baro's updates on the WaH subsite were mainly awhile back, and they all focused on the progress of Quartz. And then he apparently left (someone translate this entire thing for me please) However, I think there is no better way to wrap up this email with this tidbit: It's an email I sent to Baro's two emails ("Baro-chan" "Molesta a Baro") listed on the WaH site. Here is the contents of the email:
Sadly, both emails I found of his were, in fact, dead. Well, if you guys find more emails not the two I mentioned, let me know :P In addition, I need someone who knows Spanish to help me later with sending a message to the person who runs WaH. Perhaps they can help us get us in contact with Baro.Subject: Hello! posted:
I am an interviewer/ writer for a series of articles located on a website group known as "SA". We recently discovered (somewhat late) your memorable hack, Pokemon Quartz, to our community. We are quite interested in meeting the man "behind the hack", so to speak, to see the influential process that went into it. From what I understand, you are no longer into "romhacking", however we would still like to conduct an interview if at all possible.
We are incredibly eager to see what makes you tick, and what ideas and work went into the astoundingly unforgettable hack you created. Please respond if you are interested. We have been working on a series of articles on the game, and would greatly like to include your personal details in it
- Awrfey "Zorak" Somethin,
SA Platinum Member and Forum Writer.
After sending that email, though, I found this neat unrelated tidbit in my spambox that I'm showing because I have no idea.
OH BOY OH BOY
... ... huh.
Also, COMPUTER UPDATE: Well, my computer is back from maintenence. Early you may notice. This is because it ended up my computer was not long for this world, so laptop still for now. I ordered computer parts to make a new desktop, but we'll see how well that works out. I should have them in around three days from yesterday (so Saturday or Monday)
Also, OTHER NOTE: We're one of the most viewed threads in the LP subforum so
to you guys. In addition, we're like the 4th result when one google searches "Pokemon Quartz BARO". The result after us is some livejournal that links to the article 
Way to go guys.Thank you kindlyElMaligno posted:
Translating this bit only:
The rest of the article almost reads as a love letter for Baro, he also started as a sprite artist and later started to hack the games. And it seems he left the community for good...quote:
Hola WAH!
Soy Baro. Tiempo hace ya, eh? Bien, con todo esto de irse a lo grande, Quro me pidió que explicara un script que hice para mi nuevo hack, que empecé y dejé, no por cansarme del hack sino por cansarme de LOS hacks...
Hello WAH!
I'm Baro, long time no see, eh? Well, [I tried to quit while I was big (Ed. He sounds apologetic.)]. Quro asked me to explain a [vendor/buying/selling] script I made for my new hack, which I started and later abandoned. I didn't abandon it because I was tired of the hack; it was because I was tired OF THE hacks.
