Pokemon

[deanb]

[Mister Jack]

Has anyone been reading about this Twitch Plays Pokemon thing going on?  It's quite a fascinating social experiment, and there has been no shortage of drama and discord throughout the game, especially where Eevee was concerned.  Case in point:

 

Edited February 20, 2014 by Mister Jack

[CorgiShinobi]

I know of it, but I haven't been paying enough attention to understand all the jokes/memes centered around it, except for "The Helix" because I heard that Red was stuck in front of the Helix fossil for a long time (for some reason).

[Mal]

I haven't watched it but it is pretty hilarious. I wonder how many people are going to force them to spend hours trying to look for Mew under the truck. It also will be fun to see what they use the Master ball on.

[Mister Jack]

Here's what I know:

 

- The helix fossil has been deified because it seems like every five seconds Twitch is making Red accidentally go into his inventory and try to use the fossil.  It's been likened to the magic conch shell from that one Spongebob episode.

 

- There is a ledge on route 9 that took a full day to walk past because Twitch kept making him jump back down to the lower level.

 

- There was a huge snafu where the need for a Pokemon with surf presented itself and Twitch couldn't agree on whether to take Eevee or Lapras.  Eevee fans wanted to buy a water stone and change it to Vaporeon, while the Lapras camp felt that getting that many Twitch users to coordinate on a complex task like buying and using the correct stone was impossible.  In the end, they took Eevee and accidentally bought a fire stone and turned him into Flareon.  When they tried to deposit him in the PC to make room for something else, they instead accidentally released two of their best pokemon, including their starter Charmeleon.

 

- There is a Rattata who has undone hours of progress multiple times by accidentally using Dig on the map.

 

- Pidgeot is super overleveled because Twitch can't possibly coordinate on switching out other pokemon to share exp.

[deanb]

Have they got past Safari Zone yet? I had some friends speculating the other day that given the nature of Safari Zone that Twitch might not get passed it. Still it's certainly an interesting thing happening. Wonder if anyone might try it with other games, it'd need to be something relatively basic mind.

 

Also fun that it's so popular Twitch have had to shift it's chat onto it's own server.

[TheMightyEthan]

Last I heard they're not past Safari Zone yet, and a lot of people are speculating that getting past it will be functionally impossible.

[Mister Jack]

The democracy system was implemented specifically for instances like the Safari Zone.  If you haven't heard about that, it basically allows two more commands: anarchy and democracy.  If enough people vote for democracy at any given time, then the trainer won't do anything until the chat tallies votes on which action he should perform.  It slows down the game considerably, but also makes it much easier to guide the trainer through precarious areas.  Of course, if enough people vote for anarchy then it goes back to the default mode where the game processes every single command that comes in.  The democracy system has been rather controversial, but it does help to prevent more roadblocks like route 9.

 

[TheMightyEthan]

The democracy system takes commands over a 5 second window, and then executes the most common command.  Even with that system it's doubtful they'll be able to coordinate enough to finish the safari zone.

[Mister Jack]

I believe it's actually more like 10 seconds now.

[TheMightyEthan]

Well at the moment it's way far into the anarchy zone, so it's somewhat academic.

[Mister Jack]

Looks like they beat the Safari Zone at least.

[TheMightyEthan]

Oh really?

[Mister Jack]

They had to switch to democracy to do it, but yes, they beat it.  Looks like at the time I write this they're at Saffron City.

[CorgiShinobi]

I couldn't remember where the Team Rocket HQ portion was in the game.

 

Sometimes I miss my copies of Red and Blue, though I doubt normally I would go back to playing Gen 1 all over.

[Mister Jack]

Honestly Pokemon X is the first game I've been able to enjoy since blue/red.  I stopped yellow pretty quick because it was just a rehash, and several years later I tried to play platinum and found it tedious and boring.  I really don't know what it is about X that makes me enjoy it so much more, but I do.  It's kind of confusing to me because the game really didn't change much.

[CorgiShinobi]

 

I've jumped into the fray, mainly because while visiting family I'm a little bored.

[Mister Jack]

Unrelated to the twitch stream but someone sent me this.

 

[TheMightyEthan]

Honestly Pokemon X is the first game I've been able to enjoy since blue/red.  I stopped yellow pretty quick because it was just a rehash, and several years later I tried to play platinum and found it tedious and boring.  I really don't know what it is about X that makes me enjoy it so much more, but I do.  It's kind of confusing to me because the game really didn't change much.

 

I was the same way, except the first Pokemon I played was Yellow.  I didn't like another one until White/Black.

[CorgiShinobi]

We're in Democracy right now. It seems slow, but honestly I think we'll actually see more progress now.

[Mister Jack]

I've been observing the community surrounding this twitch stream and there are a lot of people saying that democracy should be removed or that it "ruins" the game and makes it not fun.  I think that when people say these things they're only showing their own failure to see things from outside their own narrow frame of reference.  I don't think the introduction of democracy ruined this twitch game.  In fact, I'd go so far as to say it's the best thing to happen to the stream since it started.  Before I go any further, I should explain that for me, it isn't about democracy being better than anarchy.  I don't give a shit what mode the game is in.  What I do care about is that having two modes introduces a whole new metagame into this stream that I find fascinating.  This is more than just a game; it's a social experiment.  If we spent the whole game with nothing but anarchy mode, then the question would just be "Can 70,000 Twitch users beat Pokemon Red?"  Thanks to the Safari Zone, I can tell you quite confidently that the answer would be no, they can't.

 

Once you introduce democracy, however, then suddenly everyone has to make a choice.  Everyone following that stream since the beginning started out as an anarchist.  Democracy wasn't forced on these people.  No, they had to vote for it, and vote for it they did.  Why?  Because as nice as total and complete freedom for everyone sounded, it eventually proved impractical for actually getting shit done.  A ton of anarchists compromised their principles for the sake of progress, even if they immediately voted for anarchy again once the complicated tasks were done.  On the other hand, the ones who never once voted for democracy are the same people saying that it should be removed from the game entirely, and I say those people are full of shit.  If anarchy is so great, then they shouldn't need to have it handed to them on a silver platter.  They should have to earn their absolute freedom by proving they can still accomplish their objectives under such a system.  Most of the time they don't do too bad, but when they constantly fuck up they should be reminded that their precious freedom can be taken away at any time.

 

Not only that, but if we didn't have both of these systems set up we wouldn't have this crazy holy war going on between the Helix Cult and the Dome Cult.  I've read several discussion threads, and believe me when I say that tensions are high between the followers of these two ideologies.  I actually find it more interesting to watch than the game stream itself.  Some of these people are practically fanatics.  They want their side to win no matter what.  As clever as the mod behind this stream is, I wouldn't be surprised if he/she planned out this democracy thing well in advance just to provoke this exact reaction from people.  What started out as a silly and nonsensical game of Pokemon has turned into a constant struggle between two opposing philosophies, and that's way more interesting to me than an entire game of nothing but Red spazzing out constantly.

Edited February 23, 2014 by Mister Jack

[Little Pirate]

[Chronixal]

I wish the whole fucking thing would go away quite honestly. Twitch was already bad enough stability wise in the last few months thanks to changes and whatnot, but this twitch plays nonsense has pretty much turned parts into an unusable mess.

[Faiblesse Des Sens]

Here's something else to talk about:

I finally watched Pokemon Origins and it was spectacular and totally captured everything Blue/Green/Red was about.

 

...until the last ten minutes or so when it became an X & Y advertisement and the true intentions of why they chose this specific piece of nostalgia (the first games) to make a new movie/show. The extra bad part is that you know it's coming once 2 items from earlier in the episode get explained in the end before he goes after Mewtwo if you've followed X & Y at all. At least they weren't dumbasses about Mewtwo being the 2ND Mew at the end and how Mew was still out there.

[Mal]

http://club2.nintendo.com/3ds-pokemon-promo/

 

If I am reading that right then my reaction.

 

But then I realized that I don't care for Pokemon anymore.