Tag: misc

I was wondering if you had heard about the “Twitch Plays Pokemon” thing? It’s pretty equally entertaining as it is frustrating to watch? If you haven’t heard about it yet, a guy modded a Pokemon Red emulator in order for multiple people to be able to play a single Pokemon game file at once. Essentially it has turned into 40-50,000 people playing one game and keying in commands at the same time…. you can see where things can get complicated and frustrating for everyone involved!

…you know, I was just thinking about posting something on this.

Here it is for those who haven’t seen it: http://www.twitch.tv/twitchplayspokemon

One player has aptly described the exercise as follows: “This isn’t a thousand monkeys at a thousand typewriters. It’s twenty thousand monkeys at a single typewriter, and half those monkeys are screaming and desperately trying to progress while the other half throw shit everywhere. It’s wonderful.”  They have managed to flail and stumble their way as far as the Celadon Game Corner over the course of four and a half days, and have even evolved their Eevee into a Flareon (I had the good fortune to actually be watching at this glorious moment) and raised a powerful Pidgeot.  On the other hand, they have released their Charmeleon, thrown away a nugget and a Moon Stone, and spent a good hour stuck behind the tree outside Erica’s Gym.  The guy running this mess has said that he might hack the Surf HM into their inventory, since realistically there’s no way they’re going to get through the Safari Zone in 500 steps or less, but he wants to let them try first.  Personally I’m not sure even that will help, because they’ll still need to either teach Pidgeot Fly and successfully target Pallet Town or make it through the Seafoam Islands… then again, they’ve gotten this far.

EDIT: …aaand they just stuck Pidgeot in the PC.  They’re in trouble now.

I came up with a theory about the development of why XY was so small. I think that Nintendo was originally going to release Gen V on the 3DS using the XY graphics engine, but something happened that pushed back the release date. To pad time, they decided to implement the new Poke designs. For instance, you can see statues of the Tao dragons in the garden (scrapped from the original draft of the game?) Plus Team Plasma’s knight-getup would make more sense if they lived in a European-type region.

I’m not sure I understand.  Your proposition is that the generation with the largest number of Pokémon designs to date was the ‘filler’ generation meant to tread water until the 3DS was ready?

Any thoughts on the Pokemon Plus and Minus rumors that made the rounds recently? I personally feel a bit ambivalent, especially since it comes so soon after X and Y, but at least the design ideas seem fairly interesting…

Are you asking whether I believe them?  Because at present I see absolutely no reason to, and given that, I see little point in analysing any of it either.  "This one site says this one guy told them,” whoever they claim this one guy is, holds little interest for me.  Obviously it could all be true; I don’t know.  I’ll be waiting for something a touch more official before I pay any attention whatsoever, though.

I read an interesting pokemon fanfiction, “The Word for Wilderness is Wild” by Clavain. It is a tragedy/angst. If you read please read carefully. Why do I ask? Well you seem to get a lot of pokemon questions from varied things including games. What about pokemon literary commentary and for your readers. Doesn’t hurt to try I think. If you don’t want to its fine I think it would be good. Stockholm’s syndrome and other ethics get discussed in there along with identity crisis from a herd pokemon.

Link for the benefit of others.

Okay, I want to say right off the bat that I don’t want to make a habit of this, just because it’s kinda time consuming and if I accept it in principle I’ll soon be reading every piece of Pokémon fan fiction on the internet, and seriously f$#% that (I’ll read the other one you sent me, though).

Anyway.

This is interesting.  There are some things I find very odd about it – the way Rapidash seems to imply, for instance, that Tauros are unique among Pokémon in their lack of individual sentience, or what exactly we’re supposed to understand is happening when Tauros learns language.  The narrator’s eloquence also seems very odd.  My ‘editor,’ Jim, read this and thought it sounded like a philosophy student’s creative writing assignment, which is a little blunter than I would put it, but a fair point; this Tauros sounds like a verbose and highly literate existentialist.  Given the level of self-awareness with which Tauros begins the story (i.e. none), even given the transformation that is the central theme, the narratorial voice is oddly poetic (the title, in particular, just feels unbearably pretentious), and the depth of vocabulary and sentence structure is a little jarring.  Sometimes the ability to write in a simpler register can be a virtue.  Having said that, this story raises some very interesting points about the reaction of Pokémon to training: that different species are inevitably going to be affected in different ways, that highly social Pokémon are likely to be confused and dismayed by separation from their communities, that Pokémon themselves may very well come to understand the intrinsic weaknesses of their own species compared to others and develop feelings of inadequacy as a result, and that gaining greater self-awareness and greater comprehension of other species and the world may not necessarily be a gift.  This last I particularly like, since I’ve always thought that this is something trained Pokémon especially gain over wild Pokémon, but never considered the possibility that they might resent the broader perspectives they’ve learned.  I like being shown things I haven’t thought of.

I find the Alakazam a particularly interesting character, as brief as his involvement is.  As the narrative points out, a wild Alakazam is an extreme oddity anyway, and it seems to me that an Alakazam who didn’t want to be captured would have little difficulty avoiding it.  I find myself very curious about what he was doing and why.

I like to say that, although I personally don’t see the Pokémon world in that way, if likening Pokémon training to slavery or otherwise presenting it in a negative light will allow you to tell a good story, then I’m behind you all the way.  This is a good example of why.

Obviously the more pokemon sells, the more generations/games they will make. What are your thoughts on an appropriate FINAL amount of the creatures? 1000? 2000? It’ll be interesting to see how pokemon will end when it does.

Well, I don’t think they’ll stop making new Pokémon unless and until they run out of money, which at the moment is looking unlikely to happen in the next few years.  They do seem to be slowing down, with only 80-odd Pokemon in the Kalos generation (although, against that, Unova was the largest yet, and the only one to exceed Kanto in number of species).  I suppose, that being the case, it’s conceivable that they will declare an end to the whole thing two or three generations hence at #1000, which would be a neat place to stop, but something tells me they won’t – new Pokémon are their way of giving the franchise new life every couple of years.

I’m actually really interested to see where Pokémon will be twenty, thirty or forty years from now.  It’s only in the last century that it’s become possible for works of fiction to achieve anything like the degree of global cultural penetration that Pokémon has, so there is absolutely no historical precedent for how something like this will develop in the long term.  I sincerely regret that I will never see how it’s remembered in a hundred years or so!

EDIT: Winterdhole suggests: “Maybe instead of creating new pokemon, they’d find ways to upgrade old ones? … or well instead of “upgrading”, perhaps find new evolutions to put forward? Or new ways of playing?”

Well, sure, but I think they do that anyway, don’t they?  I mean… Mega Evolution.  Pokémon Amie and Super Training.  I don’t think they view that as a zero-sum thing.

There’s this new fan game beta called Pokemon Evoas on deviantart. It’s like a pokemon game but they’ve made changes like learnable abilities, took out the steel, dragon, bug, and fairy types and added in metal and light, pokemon having more or less move slots, and instead of a villain team there’s this evil meloetta that controls trainer’s minds with music and has no qualms with killing. Might be worth checking out to see how these changes might affect the tone of the main games, if applied.

You know, this sounds worth looking at just to see how they work with the idea of a Pokémon villain outside of a Mystery Dungeon-type setting, especially one like Meloetta who’s normally viewed as more or less exclusively benevolent.  Other changes you mention sound interesting but not terribly exciting; I’ve gone on the record before as saying I don’t like the idea of changing the number of moveslots, and X and Y do actually introduce a way of changing a Pokémon’s ability (or at least, I think that’s what it does), the Ability Capsule (having two abilities at once, while very cool in some cases, would be frighteningly powerful for some Pokémon like Yanmega, so I am distrustful).  Not sure I understand the purpose of removing Steel as a type only to add Metal.