i was playing pokemon blue on stream earlier at 350% speed and i got to thinking
what if the reason nobody in the pokemon world has any good teams is because its considered a dick move to have a proper team comp
like culturally everyone is like “haha pick the pokemon you want! if you’re happy with three geodudes, thats you and your life!” and then you’re supposed to just have a friendly battle with any other pokemon trainers and whatever pokemon they just happen to have
like the average trainer is probably just walking around with a growlithe because that’s their pet, or a hiker has three geodudes because the geodudes help him with hiking. and if this pet owner and geodude hiker meet, you’re supposed to have a friendly battle but nothing too serious
now imagine the 10 year old kid that has six pokeballs on their belt comes up. you’re like “haha, we’ll have a friendly battle!” and you throw out your geodude
and they throw out a fucking gyarados, and it one-shots your geodude
and then you throw out your pidgey you have because the pidgey helps you navigate mountains because you’re a hiker
and then electricity crackles around the gyarados and a thunderbolt flies off of this giant dragon and evaporates your pidgey
so you’re down to your last pokemon. you tell them you’re gonna send out your bulbasaur. the ten year old is like “oh okay in that case i’m gonna pull out my vulpix.” like not only is this kid walking around with an amped-up super dragon, but theyve also got multiple pokemon specifically for making type advantage counter-picks?
this kid’s a fucking asshole! really, kid? what are you trying to prove here? this is a friendly match between strangers for fun! why are you composing real-ass competitive teams? what a fucker!
Well maybe that ‘when two trainers’ eyes meet, a Pokemon battle must follow’ rule was a STUPID RULE, dude, did you ever think of that? Listen, I’m trying to beat the most skilled and powerful Pokemon trainers in this whole country, I don’t want to fight you and your pet Growlithe. I’m just minding my business hiking this trail and you guys keep going “HEY LET’S HAVE A BATTLE” and here I’m going “Hey, listen, no, I’m training for competition, you don’t want this, please, let’s just pretend we never saw each other, I won’t tell anyone if you don’t, please don’t make me send you on a mad rush to the nearest Pokemon center” but you’re already pulling out your Pokeballs and going “hahaha whee battle” and just…
We are all trapped in a really dumb system, okay? I don’t want to do this. Please don’t make me do this. I am literally begging you. My Pokemon get hurt in these stupid street fights too and then I have to heal them, and that sucks, but the worst part is watching your face crumple because you thought we were having fun and I am LITERALLY NOT ALLOWED TO PASS YOU UNTIL I’VE STOMPED YOU INTO THE GROUND. I have places to be. I have other competition trainers to fight. I have this rival wandering around and THAT’S a whole thing. I have maybe 50 coins in my pocket and no, I don’t want to take your coins, okay? You spend that on food for your Pokemon or a cute hat or something.
i dont understand half of the words here but god if this isn’t the funniest thing i’ve ever read
im pretty sure red and blue weren’t programmed but just sort of… mutated into cartridges
Red and blue are why QA teams were invented
for fuck’s sake they weren’t badly programmed. They were bleeding edge. It’s so easy to forget that but Red and Blue were literally pushing the limits of what they could fit on the cartridge.
They used every trick in the book. In that way, the programming behind them is GENIUS. It’s frankly a lost art, in this era where hardware is insanely cheap and scalable, when you can just keep throwing more resources at the problem. But Red & Blue were when programmers had to get creative. Not currently using a piece of memory? Repurpose it, we can’t just leave it lying around. Only have a couple registers? Juggle them, keep careful track so we can restore them when we needed. Does this data need to be single purpose, or can we also use it for, say, a seed value?
And all this WORKED. I guarantee you 99% of children playing this never saw a bug in casual play. MODERN games are buggier by a landslide. Remember when X&Y came out and there was an ENTIRE CITY you couldn’t save in because it’d DELETE YOUR SAVE? Imagine that happening in the days of Red&Blue. It couldn’t have. I can turn on my red cartridge TODAY and have it work. And the bugs that did exist, those edge cases they missed? They produce this behavior because the game REFUSES TO CRASH. Sure, you can make it crash if you try hard enough, but goddamn it’s resilient. It just plugs away with garbage data in memory for as long as possible.
Y’all looking down from your 64-bit quad-core smartphones with 128GB SD cards like Red & Blue were programmed by amateurs. What, you also going to bitch that the Wright Brothers didn’t make a jet engine? These are artifacts from pioneers who wrote the goddamn book that others would use as gospel.
Sincerely, a pissed off goddamn programmer.
The Game Boy has 8 kilobytes of RAM. Most of the icons on this site could not fit into the working memory of a Game Boy intact.
i'll apple your turnover 