Colour Blind (Pokemon)

Colour Blind
============

Endless stories seem to present themselves of hacked games and such. Some more believable than others, some leave you questioning who would go out of their way to edit their own version of a game, just to spook a few unfortunate victims who happen to come to possess one. I've never made an attempt to acquire one myself, however what I am about to tell you all is the story of how one game, managed to find it's way into my hands.

I had decided to purchase one of the original Blue/Red/Yellow cartridges to play purely for the Nostalgic side of pleasure, so I made my way to the city, and found myself at the closest game shop I could find, Toy World.

Toy World outlets aren't dedicated to selling gaming merchandise, but I did recall seeing them sell games in the past. After a good browse of the shop, I found nothing, leaving with nothing in hand but some minor information which I acquired from one of the Shop clerks, who informed me that I would have better luck finding older games at GameTraders.

So I made my way there, obvious patience in my stride, I was feeling confident that I would find what I so desired with every step. I arrived at GameTraders, a very small shop in comparison to Toy World, for that I found myself feeling grateful. I felt excitement kick in when I spotted a Pokémon cartridge case, only to find out it was a copy of Silver, with no other Pokémon related GameBoy Colour cartridges in sight. My search spanned over most of the day, being informed one way, only to be sent another.

Patience wore thin, til I decided to head home with no spoils of hard searching. I arrived home, disappointed after all the effort, so I gave in to online purchasing. I lucked out with finding a copy of Yellow being sold 3 blocks away from my home. I got hold of the owner, who was a girl who sounded no older than myself, 17-18. I practically ran out the door, hopped on my pushbike and made haste to the address.

When I arrived, I knocked on the door, to be answered by a relatively attractive girl,her only flaws seemed to be her unkept appearance. Bed hair, with clothes that crossed the borderline of being considered home-comfort to homeless rags, but it did not matter. I gave her the money, she gave me the game. Something felt eerie from how silent she was, vocally and physically. As I walked away after giving thanks, she mumbled out "You won't save him". I paused, confused at her implication, then left with another praise of thanks.

I arrived home, still curious as to what she meant by "You won't save him", it made me feel uneasy. But, nonetheless, I immediately started up Yellow on my trusty GameBoy Advance SP. That's when things got interesting. Normal titles appeared in their very nostalgic order, but the intro did not play. It went straight to the menu, which simply had the Games title, with no Pikachu in sight, only a boy with black hair, crouched with his arms extended, face hidden in shadow, facial features unable to be made out.

I instantly found disappointment. A hacked game, presumably one made to creep the victim out. But, I had gained no other copy of the game, I paid for this, and I was curious as to how this version was laid out. Hitting start, the basic title came up, except continue was the only available option of gameplay. Naturally, I hit continue. The game faded in to the lead characters bedroom, where the trainer was seated, staring amongst paintings and a map on the wall.

I decided to check out this playthrough's spoils of gameplay, so I brought up the start menu, and noticed the name. "Dain". A nice name, I admit, not a cliched name such as Red, or Yellow in this case. Moving on, I checked my trainer card, starting trainer cash, zero badges, everything seemed at norm, except for the portrait of the trainer.

As mentioned earlier on, a black hair boy, a very defined Japanese hairstyle, swept over to a side, all spiky and awesome, I found it to be in my favor. He was expressionless. No smile, a bare featured face, with dark eyes, and a stare that left you curious to his story. I found myself wanting to play through this hack, wanting to explore the unexplored, based in a childhood game.

I proceeded to check my Pokémon team, naturally finding a level 5 Pikachu, nicknamed "Ladie". I found that interesting, but she was a standard, level 5 Pikachu. After I was downstairs, I spotted my mother, who had a different hairstyle to the preset version, but seemed all the same, with dialogue etc. etc. I left the house, which was the house on the left, and Pallet town seemed to be normal. So I explored, my rivals house first, which was set-up as a normal NPC house, no rival sign out the front, but after speaking with the mother, it seemed Dain was a friend to the girl who lived here, named "Delia". I went upstairs, walked over and started a conversation with Delia. She seemed glad to see Dain, ranting on about how cute Ladie was.

She then prompted me a question, "Do you think I should get a Pokemon too? Become traveling partners, wouldn't it be fun?"

I chose yes, then shortly after her immediate ecstatic reaction, SNAP! The power turns off on the GameBoy. Frustration and confusion hit me at the same time, but I stubbornly turned the game back on. It jumped directly to the menu screen, with the title, and Dain standing with Delia, showing a small smile upon his face, which in turn made me smile. It seemed I lucked out on a hacked game with a luring progressive character storyline! I knew this game had me, I was hooked, I spent hours over the next few days traveling and collecting badges, all the while with Delia as company!

The storyline was laid out exactly the same as the default storyline, however fame of Dains battling efforts seemed to grow. Every NPC seemed to recognize him! I loved that Dain would occasionally speak, a rare feat in Pokémon games, almost a childhood dream in fact. He progressively got happier as I pushed him through the game, the occasional change of face on his trainer card, and his relationship with Delia seemed to grow more in depth after every gym. I made Ladie strong. She was by all rights my main,and was ahead the rest of my party, which only featured the obtainable free Charmander/Bulbasaur/Squirtle through the game.

I continued on, pushing through, until I arrived at Victory Road, where Delia asked to meet up later, as she wished to visit a friend in Viridian. I decided to see what would happen if I said no, so no I said. She seemed down at the reply, and asked if I wished to go with her. So I did, I wanted to get more in depth with Delia's storyline as well as Dain's. So we arrived at the house with basic NPC's, which made no special dialogue with me, so I left, and decided to give Viridian gym a look around, seeing as it was the final gym I had yet to conquer, and noticeably the one I had to forgot to challenge in my haste to the Elite Four.

That's when I was prompted by a caretaker of the Gym. "Do you wish to hold a strong position in Viridian? Possibly as Viridians Gym Leader? Viridian City lost it's previous Gym leader several years ago, he passed on, may he rest in peace. But nonetheless we require a new Gym Leader. You have grown renown Dain, word of your strength has reached nearly all of Kanto. It is only natural that the title of Viridian Gym Leader be given to someone of your attire?"

I said yes. Good God I said yes, I had never felt excited as I did at that moment. I had always wondered what being a Gym Leader would be like in one of these games. Ignoring all remarks I've heard over the years that all you would do is stand aimlessly waiting for the odd trainer to challenge you. Then, without warning, SNAP! Off went the power once more. Seeming less surprised than the first time it had happened, I turned on the console, and was directed to the menu.

There stood Dain, in a completely new attire, a dark grey outfit, suited to the Gym of Ground of course, I liked the look of it. Dain was also surrounded by a new party. Rhydon, Graveller, Kangaskhan, a very fitting party. However Ladie remained there, by Dains leg. But she looked...sullen. Sad, perhaps sad to the change? By then it dawned on me that Delia was missing from the image. In fact Dain's expression showed a weak smile. Something must have happened between the two when I accepted the role as a Gym Leader, so I hastily clicked continue. It faded in to the Gym, Dain standing there in all his glory, however I had no control over him. Then I realized this was a cinematic. It faded in, and out of countless battles, seemingly depressing 8-bit music playing in the meanwhile. Eventually, it faded to a black screen altogether, and a "One year later" appeared on the screen.

Then, vision of the game faded in, to nothing more than Lavender Towns Pokémon Tower, where Dain stood in front of a tombstone, Delia standing behind him, a step to the right. "I am so sorry Dain... she must've been everything to you.."

It was then it hit me. "Her". I think I knew exactly who had died in the passing year. Subsequent to the change of life, it would only make sense. I was give control once more, and I hesitantly clicked on the tombstone. "Here lies Ladie. Kanto's little flash of yellow, loved by all, fathered by Dain. Rest in peace". I was so in depth in the game at that moment that it was the soaked screen that snapped me out of it. I was crying, crying so hard over the loss over the Pokémon I had trained from the start. It was my fault it had died, I made those stupid decisions to completely change Ladie's life by becoming a Gym Leader, knowing that Ladie wouldn't be fit for the Gym. Guilt-written, I turned off the game, hoping to find a possible way to alter the storyline.

I arrived at the menu once more. No Pokémon stood with me. No Delia to comfort the loneliness. Just Dain, standing there. In all his.. "Glory". Tears had begun to run dry by this point, looking upon Dain's face, only to find an even more ominous shadowed face than when I first began. I clicked Continue, to instantly be shown a cinematic between Dain and Delia. Delia was crying, Dain arguing. It seemed Delia decided to comfort Dain with her presence after Ladie died, as he had given up on everything.

Then she left. With nothing but "I thought I could save you". I couldn't believe it. The previous owner of this game's warning entered my head. She warned me. Even now I brushed it off. I had just ruined Dain's last chance of friendship, all of it, my fault. I gained control once more, and I decided to check my menu. No Pokémon. Then, the trainer card. There it was. The original crouched position Dain was in when I first started. I wanted to strangle the person who made this by now, searching for an excuse that all this wasn't my fault.

Dialogue broke me out of the menu, surprising to say the least.

Dain: Ladie... gone. Delia... I'm sorry..

SNAP!

Ominous silence crept into the fray of my room. I felt continued disappointment. I sullenly paused at restarting the game. Asking myself if it was worth it. I might as well, I don't think I could get any more depressed at my vain efforts of getting Dain back on track, so I turned it back on. Usual lack of intro, but this time it went straight to the save file. Dain was standing out the front of his house, speaking to Delia. I almost yelped in delight there and then. Things possibly might have gone back on track. But the dialogue that followed, proved that hope wrong.

Dain: Keep the house, Mum would've liked you to have it anyway.

Delia: .. and where will you go? Don't do this Dain, you'll be a father soon..

Dain: I'd make a bad father anyway, I've already lost one child. She was all I had.

A father? That I was not expecting. This story was so intriguing. The implied child was obviously Ladie. But I was moreso interested that Delia would be staying in Dain's house, and where would he be going? The cinematic came to a fade, leaving Dain departing from Pallet. Dain appeared in Viridian City, standing outside the Gym. He silently trodded off, at half pace. Dialogue kicked in.

Dain: ... I know Ladie can't come back. Nor will any Pokémon fill the gap she left. But that won't stop me from acquiring one..

This world is cruel, undeserving of such Pokemon.

A villainous plot. How predictable and cliched. I didn't complain though, I moved on, and continued on. I gained control over Dain, and did the usual check of his status. A ground type party. The original party I was given when I accepted the role as a Gym Leader. Interesting. I check the trainer card. Dain is wearing a striped suit. His facial features much more defined and mature, Dain looked an adult now. I exited the menu, and instantly lost control, as Dain started a long journey through Kanto.

He walked, through Pewter, to Celadon, through Saffron, until he arrives in Lavender. Of course, a final farewell to Ladie before he sets off to a new life. He entered the Pokémon Tower, made his way to Ladie's tombstone, and gave me control to interact with it.

Dain: Here lies Ladie. My little flash of Yellow. You were my love to Delia, my Ladie.

I will never find another you, but a Pikachu I will find. I have lost strength to travel Kanto again, so I will form an organization to purge Kanto for me. I came in here as Dain, but I will leave as another, to start anew. As in depth as I was at this point, it was obviously noticeable of the layout of "Delia" and "Ladie". Same letters, spelt out differently. It seemed Ladie was Dain's way of showing his compassion to Delia in physical form. His love and strength, dedicated to a single person through his beloved Pokémon. Dain began walking amongst the other tombstones. Curiously, I attempted to press A, which started a minor dialogue.

Dain: I must find a name appropriate to depart with...Then he stopped at one. A tombstone singled out from the rest. I clicked on it, nerves settling in from what was about to appear.

"Here lies Giovanni."

---

Ketsuban (Pokemon)

Ketsuban
========

“Rhydon, use fissure!”

The Gym floor shook beneath Rhydon’s feet as it let out a tremendous bellow. If this move hits… SpriteGiovanni

All at once, an enormous crack opened in the earth. A gaping maw stretched across the gym floor, speeding rapidly towards the move’s target. Closer, closer…and the fissure opened up beneath the opposing Blastoise, sending it tumbling down untold feet into the darkness below. Then, as quickly as it had appeared, the tear was gone. The gym floor shone flawlessly under the cold, synthetic light, and Blastoise was nowhere to be seen.

The opposing trainer’s tears fell swiftly now, splashing silently onto the pristine tiling into which his Pokémon had vanished.

“Where…where’s Blastoise? Where…did he go?” The trainer was staring listlessly at the ground, refusing to move an inch. He was obviously in shock over the sheer magnitude of his defeat; Giovanni would have to remedy this.

“Pay up, kid”, ordered Giovanni in a low voice. The trainer acquiesced resignedly, forfeiting half of his life savings into Giovanni’s waiting palm. But he still refused to leave. “Go home”, commanded the leader, now slightly irritated. “You’re holding up the line.”

The trainer looked about himself in a dazed state, and noticed the challenger standing behind him, a small, black-haired boy of perhaps ten years of age. “Oh…sorry, I…I didn’t notice”, mumbled the defeated trainer with a small nod, and he at last began to pace resolutely back towards the Gym’s front door.

Giovanni turned his attention to the black-haired boy, who had stepped forward. He was wearing a red jacket over a black t-shirt and had a red-and-white cap pulled low over his eyes. Giovanni was intrigued by this challenger; something about him was unsettling, something about his slow, measured pace and expressionless visage seemed somehow…alien. But that was of no consequence; nobody had ever defeated Giovanni’s main team, and he was not about to let this child become the first.

“Welcome”, spoke Giovanni in a cool, intimidating tone. “I am the Viridian City Gym Leader. Do you dare to challenge me?” Giovanni rose to his full height. “I am the greatest trainer the world has ever known! I have defeated countless thousands in this very spot! Thousands upon thousands of championship dreams, terminated right where you’re standing! And yet you still dare to forever risk your only aspiration by blithely challenging my undefeated team?” The speech had been delivered flawlessly, and Giovanni felt quite proud of himself; surely, the child had by now realized his insignificance, surely he was at this moment quaking in his boots.

And yet, the challenger showed few outward signs of his distress. Giovanni’s oratory had reduced countless grown men to sniveling, crying imbeciles by means of that very speech, and yet here was a child, a whelp no more than ten years old, standing his ground. Rather than break down, the challenger nodded and stepped noiselessly forward. The effect was disconcerting, and Giovanni’s voice displayed an imperceptible faltering. “Very well…then let us begin.” Giovanni threw his first Poké Ball.

A stream of crimson light issued forth from the Poké Ball, quickly coalescing into Giovanni’s Rhyhorn. Rhyhorn was Giovanni’s usual lead, and had served him admirably in the past by gauging the strengths and identifying possible weaknesses of his opponents. The terrifying spectacle of the three-foot tall Rhyhorn’s single-minded charge attack had caused many to resign their challenge in terror by itself. But the child stared unflinchingly at Giovanni’s Pokémon, and threw down a Poké Ball of his own.

But there was a problem; the device was malfunctioning. This was unheard of; Poké Balls were made on assembly line now, and, as Kanto’s only major export, each Poké Ball had to be flawless. Those with faulty machinery were without exception weeded out somewhere in the manufacturing process; as a former head of Silph Corporation, Giovanni knew that. So what was wrong with the child’s Poké Ball?

Instead of releasing the customary beam of light, the Poké Ball was shaking eccentrically, without any discernable rhythm, and emitting periodic bursts of red light from its central seam. As bloody sparks jumped across its surface, the Poké Ball seemed ready to explode from the pressure of whatever was inside of it. Suddenly, the Poké Ball released its laser, but, instead of the customary red, it was a pale and sickly orange.

When the light faded, Giovanni caught his first glimpse of the thing that the Poké Ball had vomited. It was a pile of trash, just sitting there on the floor of the gym. Without warning, and before Giovanni could get a closer look, the pile of trash expelled a stream of pale brown-colored liquid, hissing and spurting as it did so.

“Water Gun”, commanded the challenger.

The fluid squirted through the air and impacted Rhyhorn squarely in the face. Giovanni’s face betrayed his worry; Rhyhorn did not usually survive any decently-powered Water- or Grass-type moves. Yet Rhyhorn did not falter; the pile of trash’s Special must have been completely pathetic for Rhyhorn to take such a small amount of damage.

But something was wrong. Something was…off about Rhyhorn after the brown liquid contacted him. Giovanni could sense it, though he couldn’t quite discern what it was; something seemed different about the shape of Rhyhorn’s back or the pattern of his armor plates. Giovanni only became truly alarmed when Rhyhorn did not turn his head, as usual, to receive orders; he stood unmoving, frozen to the spot from which he had received the attack. Giovanni walked around Rhyhorn to examine his face, and found it scrambled, with no discernable features. Various pieces of eyes, mouth, and nose were scattered haphazardly around its ruined face, which resembled a disassembled jigsaw puzzle on a featureless grey background. Giovanni was aghast. “Rhyhorn? Rhyhorn…use…Fury Attack! Rhyhorn?” Rhyhorn was not fainted, and showed no signs of collapse or fatigue. But he was clearly dead.

Giovanni could not look at the horror that his Pokémon had become, so he returned it to its Poké Ball. He could not lose; his team was undefeated, and this…thing would surely not prove a challenge to his stronger Pokémon. He decided to immediately move up a tier in strength, and so summoned Nidoking from its Poké Ball. Nidoking emerged with a savage scream, but Giovanni’s attention was focused on the pile of trash. As he searched for a weakness, he came to a sudden realization; most of what he had previously assumed to be trash consisted of discernable pieces of various Pokémon. Here was a Bulbasaur tail, there a Fearow beak and a Blastoise arm, all haphazardly stitched together into some kind of abominable mass and mixed in with…other things, things that he could not recognize. There were letters and numbers, pieces of signs and buildings, and chilling geometric patterns that he could not even begin to identify.

And it was distinctly larger than it had been thirty seconds ago. With each passing second, the thing…grew, Giovanni thought he noticed. It was a slow process, but the pile of trash appeared to be steadily expanding without any external source. But maybe that was just a trick of the light…

Giovanni didn’t even know where to look for a weakness, or what such a weakness would even be; but he did know that this monstrosity had to somehow be stopped. So he ordered Nidoking to attack.

“Nidoking, use Thrash!”

Nidoking looked around for a moment, wondering where the attack was even directed. Nidoking was considerably smarter than Rhyhorn, smart enough to notice that there weren’t actually any other Pokémon in the arena. Nidoking turned to look at Giovanni, who, presented with what might very well have turned out to be the last time he ever saw Nidoking whole, felt a sudden surge of regret. He pointed ruefully at the pile of trash, which had taken on an unmistakably crimson hue. Giovanni had seen it before, he thought, but he could not remember when…

Nidoking never got his close look at his foe. He was not one to disobey orders, for Giovanni was a hard master…and so Nidoking charged. He rammed fist after massive, armor-plated fist into the thing, but it showed no signs of any external damage or fatigue. It just sat there, glowing. As the word popped into his head, Giovanni knew what was about to happen. He tried to shout, tried a second too late to warn Nidoking of his fate. But Nidoking was so absorbed in its Thrash attack that it failed to notice, and so the end came quickly.

“Sky Attack”, said the challenger. His lips, Giovanni saw, did not move when he talked, but remained frozen open. In fact, he had not moved at all since the battle had begun. Giovanni suddenly began to wonder if he even could. The boy’s clothes were becoming distorted, becoming numbers and letters and Pokémon fragments one piece at a time. There were endless, mesmerizing geometric patterns in his eyes…

Nidoking flew through the air and smashed against the ceiling of the Gym with a reverberating crash. The collimated light from Giovanni’s Poké Ball intercepted the hapless Pokémon before the floor could; Giovanni did not want to have any opportunities to get a good look at the remains of his Nidoking. If only he had chosen a different move, Nidoking might have been saved…

The trash was not just larger now, but…spreading. The walls were spattered with it, oozing with Pokémon, and Giovanni’s pristine floor was covered in refuse. As Giovanni reached uncertainly for another Poké Ball, he discovered that his hand no longer fit securely around it in the position to which he had long been accustomed. For even he had not escaped the trash’s corrupting influence; his hand, though retaining its general shape, was gruesomely disfigured; a Weezing’s face, a Wigglytuff’s ear, and an Arcanine’s eye, along with other body parts too damaged to identify, protruded from his skin in tortured, hideous combination.

Giovanni tried to scream, but no sound came out. He fumbled with his Poké Ball, and tossed it onto the floor haphazardly, a novice trainer once again. Rhydon emerged, but even he was not free of the trash’s scarring. His skin had a reddish tint, and his spikes were misaligned with the ridge of his back… Giovanni could not order an attack, but he did not need to; Rhydon was as incapable of movement as Giovanni himself. Across the arena, the opposing trainer no longer bore any resemblance to a black-haired human being; he was already consumed, a pile of trash in a hominid shape. Only the cap remained, pulled low over where the trainer’s eyes had used to be. Giovanni could just make out the black, embroidered capital letters printed on the front. “Future Pokémon Master”, the cap read.

The boy’s lips could not move, but the trash’s attack came anyways. It let out a hideous scream, torn from the larynxes of nearly every Pokémon in Kanto, savagely twisted and ground together to form a single, unending screech. As the monster grew still larger, its cacophony grew louder, and Giovanni’s consciousness was fading fast. The walls of his gym turned to sludge, and Giovanni felt his body beginning to crumble around him. Rhydon was melting beside him, and the trainer and his Pokémon slowly merged into a single puddle of liquid death. The trash filling his vision at last invaded Giovanni’s final thoughts as he saw the world disintegrate, and the abomination consumed all.

Link's Awakening (Black)

LINK'S AWAKENING (BLACK)
========================

For me, the defining Zelda experience was Link’s Awakening. It was the first Zelda title I played and the most challenging. It took me longer to clear than any other game (I was pretty young). That said, it’s clear why this has bothered me so much. A few months ago I was helping a friend of a friend move. After a few hours of heavy lifting we took a break. I saw a box of old game boy cartridges and my eyes lit up. I like the new systems, but I still dig busting out that little 8-bit handheld. Or at least, I did.

The guy we were helping saw me and asked if I felt like buying any. I picked out a couple and then spotted it: Link’s Awakening. I lost mine (The non-DX one) and was looking to replace it. He looked confused when I asked him how much he wanted for it, like he forgot he owned it. I paid him, pocketed the games and went back to work. I should stress this: There was nothing wrong with the cartridge. The label was fine, the cartridge wasn’t cracked, nothing. I probably wouldn’t have bought it otherwise. The game started off normally. There was nothing off about the music, color or animation. I was stoked to play it again. Then I went to start a file.

Something was wrong. First off, there was no music; there was only this barely audible thumping noise every other second. Next was the top right of the screen. The knight statues had been replaced with two Stalfos. Different from what I remembered. The thing that convinced me it was a defect was that there was only one (empty) file. The other two were gone. At this point the thumping noise was starting to annoy me, so I started the file and entered “Link.” The game was faulty, but I was curious to see how.

It started off with Link tossing and turning while Marin watches. There was no music, but the thumping noise was gone. When I woke up Marin says the wait is over. She then said she’d “make preparations” and left the room. I tried to leave only to be stopped at the door by a dialogue box that read “…” prompting me to speak with Tarin. His friendly tone was gone. He was pleading with me, offering my shield and asking to go. He begged, saying he’d tell me where the sword was. The usual sound effect for text was replaced by something duller and strangely paced. His wording and tone made it sound like Tarin was crying. He then insisted that I must be hungry, promising to make me mushroom stew before rushing out of the room.

It wasn’t defective; it was hacked. Realizing that made the sequence with Tarin kind of interesting. I started exploring the village. The physical layout of everything was the same as I remembered except for two things. All the human characters that lived outside of the village were now in it (Except for the witch). Richard and the Cucco Keeper were standing near the Cucco statue, Crazy Tracy was at the center of the field of bushes, the second Fisherman was beneath the first and Mr. Write was beside the library. The music was the same track used for the village in the original, but slower and a bit scratchy. Second, the crane-game was gone. In its place was an area fenced off by lit torches. Inside was a large collection of bone piles, the same ones used in the caves and dungeons. In this area there was no music. Just a low pitch broken up by sharp, awkward breaks.

Every villager laughed and said that I couldn’t be “him” because I had no sword. The one exception was Ulrira. His sprite changed to show that his eyebrows were lowered angrily. The sword comment was an obvious hint, so I headed toward the beach. I made my way down, the music fading to silence. Oddly, there were no monsters. I was more confused than bothered by it and went for the sword. The owl flew down when I got near it. He cackled and talked about how glad he was to fulfill his role. He ordered me to take the sword and go to the Mysterious Forest before flying off. I grabbed the sword (not that there were enemies to fight with it) and headed back toward the village/forest.

Near the village the owl appeared again. Walking toward it caused him to scream about how you can’t go; that they can’t know and that they don’t deserve to. The game was forcing me into the forest, the layout of which had been changed. From the first screen I could only go right, where I found the witch’s hut. The dull thumping noise started again. When I entered it became faster. Speaking with the witch made it louder and even faster. She insisted that there were “other ways to make it” and offered power for “a way out.” The game shot out this brief, high pitched screeching noise. Syrup’s sprite stopped moving and no further text could be prompted. I left the hut and headed right.

The next screen was more familiar. It was Tarin in his raccoon form. The crying sound from earlier began looping, louder this time. He charged and began doing damage, crying as he did. The shield kept him off of me, letting me pull up my inventory. The magic powder had been added. I threw some onto him, thinking it would cure him. His sprite movements became faster, and text appeared as he screamed about how his skin was burning. A new animation played, the game releasing another of those high-pitched screeches. This one lasted for the whole animation, mixing different sound effects. Lines of darkness began to cover Tarin’s sprite until he was covered. The arms fell off, his eyes disappearing as the ground was stained with his blood. The game was making sure I heard Tarin’s suffering. I was horrified.

He hit the ground, a pile of blood and guts. The crying sound looped softly. The owl flew in and marked how excellent it was. I had done it almost to the letter. He screamed at me to put the thing out of its misery. I had no idea what to do. A new dialogue box popped up, Tarin whimpering about the sword. I turned the game off. A few minutes later I turned it back on, annoyed at the idea of the hacker getting one over on me. The file name had changed from “Link” to “Black.” I was intimidated, but determined. It brought me to the point I had just left. The fact that I hadn’t saved made me nervous. Everything was the same except Link’s clothing. I couldn’t tell if it was meant to be red or black, but the file name gave me a hint.

I cut at the Tarin sprite. The panels above and below Tarin became dark and the game made that horrible screeching noise. The owl flapped its wings and laughed, complimenting me. He ordered me deeper into the forest before saying “two down.” Hearing that, I went to the previous screen, into Syrup’s hut. There was crudely drawn blood everywhere. Syrup’s head was on her table. The rat was hopping up and down beside it, feasting. I searched around and found nothing until I reached her cauldron. Text appeared. “Still a few bones in here. What’d you think magic powder was made of?”

I saw it as a taunt and resolved to keep going. No enemies, no music. Screen after screen of forest, with a soft high-pitched screech in the background. Eventually I had to go north, traveling a few more screens before finding it. At the center of the screen was a black sword. To either side were two treasure chests. The right contained the fire wand, the left the ocarina. Taking the sword summoned the owl, who proceeded to teach me “the Lullaby of Longslumber.” It didn’t sound like music, just hisses and scratches like a series of audio errors. He then asked me to try the wand. Trying to leave caused “…Afraid?” to pop up. I used the wand, trying to defy it. The screen flashed white for a second, followed by every tree on fire. The owl giggled, flapping his wings and screaming about how they can be given no quarter.

Everything in the forest was on fire, including some floor panels. Eventually I was out, the high-pitched noise ringing the entire time with the sound of burning. I decided to talk to the villagers to see if there had been a change in their dialogue. I started with Madame Meowmeow. The thumping noise started again as soon as I entered her screen.

It was similar to the witch. Meowmeow starts pleading and the audio for her text sounded like crying. She apologized, saying that they were just too hungry. The same screeching noise before her sprite stops. When I left her house Bow-wow was gone. I went back inside to see what had happened. Meowmeow was in pieces, blood all over. Bow-wow was moving from piece to piece. Interacting with him brought up a box that talked about how happy he seemed. How hungry.

Leaving the house I saw the owl again. He was eager he was to keep going. He told me to play the Lullaby It would speed things along. The prospect bothered me, but getting through this insult to my childhood faster sounded good. Playing the lullaby led me to a room like the ones you found at the end of each dungeon. There was a treasure chest and two full heart pieces. A plaque on the wall read that for every “one you carry out” you’d receive new treasures. I took the items (the first was the roc’s feather) and left through an exit at the rear of the room, which brought me back to Marin’s house.

Trees blocked off the plains and beach, the forest by fire. The select glitch brought me into a black screen that forced a reset. There was no way out of the village. It was a weird, cruel cycle. I approached a villager, they said something, that horrible screeching noise sounded out and I came back to see something horrific and disturbing. I’ll post their dialogue and how I found them here:

Crazy Tracy: “Before you do it, tell me I’m pretty.” / A bloody pile with skin to the right. Richard: “You silence only a symptom. I was merely the first.” / His hands and tongue formed a triangle around him. He was in a pool of blood. Ulrira: “You actually let me think I’d go to old age. How unkind.” / He was lying sideways with the telephone where his head would have been. The blood scattered all over the floor made it look like his head had been smashed apart with the phone Ulrira’s wife: “I won’t hide. Won’t give you the pleasure.” / I never saw her, but when I tried to interact with one of the cabinets it read, “She’s finished bleeding out. Leave her in there.” Cucco Keeper: “Ha ha, I’ll find a way out!” / Impaled on the Cucco statue. The Fishermen: “The funniest part? I don’t regret it.” “Me either.”/ Their fishing poles are by the pond. If you interact with them it reads, “No more bubbles. You’d reel them up, but it would just tear it off” Papahl, Wife, and Child: “Anything! Name it, it’s yours! I can get it! I can get anything!” “Mercy. The one thing I couldn’t get my hands on.” “Why?” / Found them hung by what appears to be the hookshot chain. Shopkeeper: “Everything I’ve got, here and back home. Information, powders, weapons. Just lemme sail away. You’ll never hear from me again.” / Found him in pieces with arrows in his torso. The fact that the bombs and bow are missing from his stock suggests that that’s what was used. Mr. Write: “I never stopped, you know. Here’s the key. You’ll need a magnifying lens.” / He was sitting at his desk, black pixels around where his mouth was and his hands cut off. I didn’t catch on to what the black pixels were about until later.

When I killed the last victim the owl appeared. He thanked me for helping him to fulfill his role. He said I’d find Marin in front of the library. I found Marin, who said it was almost time to go. She gave me the magnifying lens and told me to take my time. Inside there were more books out than in the original, with one blank bookstand near the entrance. Each was a profile organized by crime and sentence. From top left to bottom right:

Richard staged a coup against the Hyrule royal family. He was left to bleed to death publicly after having his hands cut off and tongue removed as punishment. Ulrira, a former advisor, betrayed the throne as Richard’s informant. His skull was caved in with the medium that represented communication. Ulrira’s wife hid criminals and rebels in support of her husband and Richard. She was given a small but mortal wound and bound before being left to die in a small, confined space similar to the ones she used to hide others. Mr. Write wrote slander during the coup. His hands were cut off to rob him of his favorite pastime before being force-fed enough ink to burst his stomach.

Papahl and his family where thieves. They were hung facing one another so the last thing they could steal was a look at their suffering loved ones. Crazy Tracy was a man who skinned women and wore their flesh. He would wear the face as a mask and hide within what looked like a seat, the body stuffed to appear as though it was sitting. That is why the body seems so much smaller. Skinned alive. Syrup kidnapped and sacrificed a child to the black arts. She was forced to watch the bones from her arms and legs be used in making magic powder before being beheaded.

Cucco Keeper was a felon who escaped every prison in Hyrule. Impaled on a statue that represented freedom. The fishermen were pedophiles. Drowned with their genitals attached to fishing hooks. Madame Meowmeow killed her children and fed them to her pets. Diced into pieces and served to animals. The shopkeeper was a powerful criminal drugs and arms dealer. Killed with his wares, magic powder forced down his throat. Tarin was a serial rapist. He was transformed into a literal beast and then executed.

At this point I felt sick. That low thumping in place of music wasn’t helping. It grew slower and duller, as if the sound were trudging along. I spoke with Marin and she explained the rest of it. Koholint is a prison island. The worst of Hyrule’s criminals are sent there before receiving their death sentence from the judge: The owl. He had been waiting for an executioner, someone to carry out his will. I was sent by Hyrule to enact the wishes of the throne, leaving their carcasses as a warning to the next group.

Marin was innocent. She had been wrongfully sentenced for a gruesome crime she had no part in. She accepted that she would be killed by the executioner, but refused to give Hyrule the satisfaction of fearing it. Nor would she let her name be passed around in horror stories. She saved me so that you could tell them they had failed to break her. She asked if I was ready to end it. I was given the option of “yes” or “no,” but choosing “no” just let me explore the village again. When I said “yes,” the screen faded to white.

It came back up to an animation of Link, or Black, sailing away. He looked satisfied. Happy, even. It then cut to a drawing of the library. Marin was lying propped up against it with her eyes rolled back. Her throat and stomach had been cut open, with a huge slash across her face. A lot of care was given to the blood and guts. It was disturbing, and the picture has stuck with me long after I turned off the game.

Bold font appeared in front of her reading “CONGRATULATIONS.” Beneath it in smaller black print was “You’re the hero of Hyrule!” It fades to black, before white text appears at the center of the screen.

“And no one will ever know you volunteered for it.”

Link: Breaking Blue (Pokemon)

Here's more Pokemon glitch stuff

http://lparchive.org/Pokemon-Blue/

Here's a reenactment of LHBPkmnB:
http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL9A919EB79E23B318

And a bonus: MissingnoXpert breaking Yellow:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A9qSvvS3YrQ&list=PL60DCBEA2D1F73683

Blood Whistle (Super Mario Bros. 3)

Blood Whistle (Super Mario Bros. 3)
===================================

Foreword
--------

This is the recorded blog of a college student who was playing a modified version of Super Mario Brothers 3 on his computer. Shortly after submitting the last entry, he committed suicide in his dorm room. Warning: the following can be considered NSFW.

June 5th, 2012
--------------

A friend of mine recently sent me what he claims to be a scary Super Mario Brothers 3 hack that he wanted me to try out (because he didn’t have the courage.) I started this blog to record my progress through the game. He got this from a site that’s no longer active, and I’ve seen some pretty scary occurrences with emulator games before. Just look at BEN. All of that aside, however, there was something definitely off about this ROM. Its title was SMB3:BW. Anyhow, I won’t play any today as I’m quite busy with college work and such, but I will definitely start tomorrow.

June 6th, 2012
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I played some of the game today. Obviously my friend was misinformed, as I have played all the way through 1-3 and have found nothing irregular. All of the sprites, levels, and sounds didn’t have a fluke to their name. Wait… A secret! That must be how you have to unlock it! I swear you guys, I’ll find the warp whistle tomorrow and see what creepy secrets this game has to hide. Look for tomorrow’s post, it won’t disappoint. Maybe this will explain what the BW in the title stands for…

June 7th, 2012
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I wish I hadn’t unlocked that secret. This game will be the bane of my existence. I’ll try as best as I can to explain what happened and what will certainly entail. I don’t know if any of you will believe me, but this sick mockery of one of my childhood favorites must be exploited and never be seen by the eyes of any other breathing man on god’s green earth. And Todd (what I’ll call my friend for the sake of privacy and possibly security), DO NOT send that link to anyone else. You’ll see why below.

I entered the castle stage. Knowing its only secret was the warp whistle, I disposed of a dry bones before donning a raccoon tail. With a running start I was flying above the stage until I hit the secret area. My whole life before I hit up on my arrow keypad was completely different. I was happy. I was normal. I could wake up in the morning recognizing my own reflection, being absolute about my safety. Now it’s lies. All lies. I know that as of what happened today, my life will become an infernal hell in which every day will be a futile struggle to retain my own sanity. After finishing this wretched collage of electronic dejection, I will embrace death like a long lost lover with open arms. Now to get on with what had come to pass.

The blocks that lined the wall were a gloomy albeit polished obsidian black. Mario’s skin now had a grayish tint to it, but that wasn’t what was wrong with that picture. The music was a sped up version of the normal “bonus room” theme. Toad’s skull was cracked open and profusely bleeding, spilling blood onto the floor and making the room slippery like an ice stage. His mouth was also agape and spewing blood onto the floor. The blood had an eerie, reflective quality that SHOULD have been graphically impossible for an 8-bit game like Mario 3. I walked up to him to see what it is that he might say. What he had to offer is this:

Blood Whistle.

HEAR ITS CRY.

I then ran towards the chest to see its contents. The chest was drenched in reflective, realistic blood of the same type emanated by the orifices and exposed cranium of the poor little mushroom-headed fellow. Pressing onward, I ran through it to discover its dark secret. Its twisted surprise. I wasn’t prepared for the following events.

A blood-soaked warp whistle ominously rose from what I now believe to be the deepest crevice of hell. It blipped twice as the normal whistle would. That, my fellow reader, was the only normality of what I have played today. It played a deep tune that I can’t get out of my head as I write this. The whistle descended, violently striking Mario in the chest. He unleashed a bloodcurdling scream as it went into his back and out of his chest. This cry wasn’t 8-bit at all. It wasn’t even cartoon-esque. It was the sound of unfiltered anguish, of utter agony. His expression reflected the same. To end my experience on this perverse version of something I once loved, Mario was transported to the warp zone of the Blood Whistle.

I call it this because it had only the cookie-cutter outline of the quaint island. The water consisted solely of the same blood aforementioned in my encounter with the whistle. Corpses of Koopas and other enemies of Mario were scattered afloat near the shores. White menacing eyes glared at me between the waves, surfacing just to cast their evil glance at Mario (or me, I can’t be sure at this point). All of the worlds were indicated by their respective numbers, and all of the dots were crimson. At that point I noticed yet another abnormality, this time concerning the dot for world eight. Beside it were two 8-bit patches of fire that twisted and contorted in place. Without me pressing any buttons, the whistle stabbed Mario in the ribs. This cued him to move to the world two dot. Refusing to pay any further attention to the horrors that surely await in the distorted desert, I saved the game and quit. I have played more than enough of my fill for today.

I guess that I figured out the acronym from the ROM title meant Blood Whistle the hard way. Despite the horrors that plague this abomination, I will continue to subject myself to this suffering for the sake of all of you. Well, also for mine. It’ll help me keep track of the days, and maybe this desperate attempt to cling to my stable frame of mind won’t prove to be in total vain.

There are five thousand people that have followed this blog in the two days that it’s been up. After this pointedly interesting post, I’m hoping to have some more. For those of you following my posts, read tomorrow’s and share with your friends. I need you to expose the stark luridness of this shell of something I once knew and loved.

June 8th, 2012
--------------

Well, I did it. I managed to clench the fickle fibers of my perception of reality long enough to play through world two. I have come to the conclusion that whoever made this is completely and utterly deranged. There’s been a rusted gear or a broken spring in the mechanics of their sadistic mind. Their only purpose in creating this mod was to mentally and psychologically flagellate the naïve soul poor enough to take the bait of its mysterious origin. Well, I’m certainly naïve enough to fall into that category. I digress, to the experience.

I find myself asking how I could have missed major things like this yesterday when I saved the game in this world. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. Blood of the same texture from before was just as splattered across the desert sands as sand itself was. Solitary eyes watched me from the pyramids. Pentagrams and other satanic symbols were also infrequent in the environment. Could this hack be the work of the Illuminati? OK, enough pondering. I need to finish this grim tale. Skeletons of Koopas littered the bleak landscape. There was a distinct disturbance with Mario’s appearance, though. He looked starved and parched, as one would typically look after a few days in the desert. Mario then moved into the 2-1 block without my command and the music began to play shortly after.

This was a reversed version of the overworld theme. Whispers and other paranormal phenomena could be heard playing in harmony with the music, saying cryptic things. After about a minute I began to record the sound. I’ll upload it as soon as possible, but I know I definitely can’t do it today. One of the most distinct things I kept hearing was “let the whistle guide you” and “the instrument of blood plays the sweetest tune”. This creeped me out needless to say, but this of all things wouldn’t prevent me from playing out the remainder of this game.

The stage itself was VERY scary. The sky was grayish-blue accompanied by an almost white sun. The colors weren’t bright or cheery in the slightest. The pyramid blocks were faded and cracked, and the wooden blocks were obviously rotting. Mario’s sprite was visibly starving and pleading for thirst. The fire creatures fixedly stared at me like a shark stares at a school of fish, seeming to know who their next meal was. The neutral expressions of the Koopas had changed into ones of converged disgust and loath. I had obtained the raccoon by now, so I ran along the pipe-looking platform and took off.

I flew for a little while, which was nice. Mario’s face changed as well, being the normal happy smile you usually see throughout the entire game. I relished in the few moments of happiness I sought from this game. These moments were mercilessly ended within the course of a few seconds. The sky flashed a gloomy black before the Blood Whistle came and impaled the poor plumber yet again. Mario fell, his corpulent figure going limp until he hit the ground with a thump that I swore I could feel.

He was miraculously alive, his body twitching in a feeble attempt to rise. A fire creature jumped on Mario, who was now pinned to the ground and screaming in pain. His scream was bitterly realistic. It reeked of such ineffable pain it hurts me now to describe the sheer degree of torture this character was put through. There he was. Burning and seething in pain and there I sat, completely powerless. Forced to watch what I thought was the end of his trials on world two. I was so wrong.

The level select came into view. Whistle through back, Mario was transported to one of the Pyramid levels. When the level started, the background was an egregious smoke-filled black. Bursts of lightning filled the sky with illumination. Winged demons in flight were visible upon these strikes. Also in the skies glowed stagnantly lit pentagrams and 666. Mario was being carried by two of Bowser’s sons up one of the game’s pyramid structures. However, this particular structure was vastly different than the regular ones.

The bricks were cracked and faded with age. The edges were jagged with dried blood caked each block. Nothing but a heavy drum beat and the sounds of thunder played in the background. The thunder didn’t play in unison with lightning as happens in most games. There was an eerily realistic pause between the flare of the lightning and the boom of the thunder. As the top of the structure was reached, I saw the worst thing yet.

Bowser towered above everyone else, intimidating and terrible. Below stood four of his sons, two of which had carried Mario: Morton, Iggy, Ray, and Von Koopa. Above the entire scene were the words Blood Whistle in bright red neon letters. Bowser’s face had to have been ten times more evil then I had ever seen it. His green shell was cracked, and his white spines had been dipped in blood. Blood was fresh on his teeth also as his serpentine tongue licked them, making clear his intentions on what to do with Mario after he had disposed of him. It was then I came to a dooming realization.

Mario can’t die. The game won’t let him. However many things are thrown at him, in however many ways he is brutally maimed, mortality will not escape him. For a time, that is. He will continue to be sustained by whatever dark force or sick mind that drives the rest of these occurrences to passing until the game’s eventual end, in which he will ruefully and painfully perish. Now that that has been said, to continue today’s experience.

Suddenly, Von Koopa produced a dagger. It gleamed with uncanny realism in the light of the Blood Whistle sign that loomed above. After a brief pause, he began to slice Mario’s chest open. Mario again brayed that fearful cry, a cry that implied he would die only to endure torture of ten times the magnitude. Tears streamed down his faced as Von removed his heart, still pumping. He handed it to Bowser, who ate it with a crunching chomp.

His sons laughed as he did this, blood flowing from Mario’s exposed abdomen. With a bark from their twisted father, the sons shamelessly began to regurgitate and tear apart what was open. As they were doing this, Mario slowly turned his head towards me and uttered a single question through tears and blood: /"w-w-why?"/

I myself asked the very same question. Why would they treat him as an animal- if not less- for their amusement? Why would someone initiate the genesis of such a horrid contraption? A contraption in which life and death have no meaning and are manipulates, a contraption in which concepts such as morals, remorse and mercy are completely foreign? It makes me shudder to think that there is someone sick enough out there to put a character through this kind of unbearable hell just to sit back and laugh. It makes me absolutely sick to my core.

Oh, that reminds me of another thing. You’re probably wondering as to why I complacently talk about Mario as if he’s a human being. A human who suffers pain, sorrow, depression, starvation, and thirst like the rest of us. A human who is also capable of feeling happiness, remorse, goodwill and love like anyone else. It’s because I am thoroughly convinced that he is. Please, don’t stop following this blog because you think I’m insane. That will come later.

I believe without a shadow of a doubt that inside this game is a character with a complex range of emotions, someone who feels like you and me. But it’s just a game right? It’s just a contrived mixture of code and data put together to present words and images, correct? Wrong. I know with everything inside of me that Mario has to be alive. I have seen him truly happy and truly sad, and at one point I may even see him truly angry. He feels like any other living, breathing human being.

I don’t know how. I don’t know why. I don’t know how something so human could rise from something so truly inhuman. A character with a soul seemed completely impossible to me before I played this hack. I now have a goal with this game: to keep this poor creature safe. I suppose I now know the real truth. I’ll see you all tomorrow. Same place, same time.

June 9th, 2012
--------------

It’s me again. I had a horrible range of nightmares last night that are a direct result of playing this game. Some really weird stuff also went down. Before I get into today’s gameplay, I’ll have to go through them with you guys so I’ll have an interactive record of my dreaming habits related to this game. I myself am having a hard time as to how they were so close to home, and what they mean for my seemingly inevitable downfall.

Before I tell this, I have to let you in on a piece of relevant information. In the 4th grade, I used to play the recorder. Every kid had to learn some musical skill, and I liked wind instruments because of their method of play, appearance, and sound. Such is the irony of the instrument that has caused me all of this grief. In my dream I was playing the instrument in a dark room.

I was my 4th grade self, just coolly playing Mary Had a Little Lamb. Out of nowhere, I began to cough. I had choked on some blood that had materialized within and around my recorder. It covered it, and soon filled it. Blood began to pour in great quantity out of all of the recorder’s holes. It soon began to float in mid-air and hover. A few seconds passed, and then it struck me in the chest. It had impaled me, going directly through my heart and every other vital artery one could think of.

I woke up, the sheets plastered to my bare chest with sweat. I was completely fine. Not a scratch on me. As I sat there in bed, afraid of how I’m sure the game did this – or maybe it was just me losing my sanity – I began to hear noise coming from my laptop. It was closed, but a faint muffled humming sound was clearly audible. I warily approached my computer, the machine almost looking alive. I then opened it up.

It was a picture of a SMB3 Raccoon Mario sprite on a black backdrop. He was chained up by his legs and feet, and the chains reached outside of the screen. The Blood Whistle sat as the centerpiece of it all through Mario’s chest.

The tune of the Blood Whistle played over and over, a loop that only exacerbated the sound within the walls of my psyche. I tried exiting out of whatever this program might have been but the window wouldn’t close. I eventually had to take out my laptop battery, which didn’t sit too well with my OS. Luckily, I didn’t lose any files. Now for the gameplay.

I was on a weak imitation of the world 3 level map. The water was none other than blood. Ravenous fish jumped out of the water, looks of primal hunger on their faces. There was something off about Mario’s map representation that I noticed right away. Along with his Raccoon tail, the blood whistle was now a permanent fixture through his body. His skin had dulled a little from its prior shade of gray, now more outwardly noticeable. His mustache now had dots of red clung to it as well. Without my or Mario’s control, needless to say, I was moved to the first underwater stage.

A cherry red tint absorbed the entire screen. This was to be expected, as the water looked blood-ridden from the outside as well. I swam down the left side of the level to get a fire mushroom. As soon as Mario got it and his outfit changed, he got an evil simper on his face.

He looked at me and said/“Revenge, yes?”/ I confirmed his suspicions and then we set off for the danger that lurked near. The fish cast malevolent gazes at Mario as he swam by, incinerating them. His normal, happy smile returned. So did mine. The annihilation of the carnivorous critters didn’t last long before both Mario and I faced a hellish dilemma.

There was a large fish with rows of razor-sharp teeth. Below him were two power up blocks, one black-looking and one purple-looking. I assumed that these were supposed to mean red and blue. Obviously there was no progress from this point without finding out what these blocks had in store. Mario’s expression changed back into its gaunt appearance that he has had for the majority of the game. Knowing I had no other choice, I dauntingly hit the block that was black in appearance on the left.

The fish swam around from its position in top of us and began to tear off Mario’s limbs. By this time a group of fish had congregated around the entire scene. Their laughs were deep and short, registering as barks for the 8-bit sound processor. Mario’s unable body wobbled as he bled out, spewing black across the red. When he finally died, the big fish began to laugh. After a couple of seconds Mario’s limbs re-grew. With the blue block remaining, I hit it to get this all over with.

Bubbles stopped coming from Mario’s mouth. He cried out for help but that only made the problem worse. He sucked in tons of water, his hands around his neck. His face began to grow from gray to blue in a matter of moments. He kicked and fought, but he only wore himself down. Getting angry, he began to incinerate random fish that had gathered in the crowd. The fish began to laugh louder. For every fish he killed, two more appeared in its place. After a while he just gave up. I watched as Mario uttered his last gurgle on world 3, the Blood Whistle stabbing and taking him away. I saved and quit with haste. See you all tomorrow.

June 10th, 2012
---------------

Campus police gave me a visit today. Apparently one of you had reported my comments related to suicide and claimed I was insane. As a result, I have eliminated all personal information from this blog. I located the person who reported me and banned him. I also have an IP tracker, so don’t any of you try that. Speaking of followers, fifty thousand? I had never expected this page to accumulate this many active viewers. Wherever this popularity – or notoriety – came from, I am grateful. Now for today’s gameplay. After today, I’ll be lucky to finish the game.

Princess Toadstool’s letter appeared after the previous screen from world 3 faded out. She was squirming and shifting around. Bowser’s hand covered her mouth and nose, but it was easy to see the fear in her eyes. They darted left and right in stark, true fear. Bowser continued to have that sadistic smile on his face as he struggled with her. After about a minute and a half, Peach began to change.

Her eyes grew an ominous read as she pushed Bowser’s arm away with inhuman strength. She cackled like a loon, blue veins bulging so noticeably that they were clearly visible through her white satin gloves. Bowser than began to cower in timidity. The text on the letter said only this:

BLOOD WHISTLE

HEAR ITS CRY

~PEACH

The letter scene was abruptly cut off and the world 4 level select map was brought into view. Goombas and Koopas of all sizes appeared, furious and hungry as ever. This addition made sense. This was the giant/tiny world, the shown enemies would be dimensioned as such. The normally green grass was withered and dead. The small patches of water were blood. Mario still was in the fireball fatigues that he donned in world 3. When compared the other worlds, the map view for this one was vastly less disturbing. I would go as far to call this tolerable. Mario moved towards 4-1, into whatever nightmarish scenario this stage had to offer.

The stage had the usual kinks of any level in this game. The sky was black, which made the white clouds vibrantly contrast. A reversed version of the ground level once again played. The wood – as it had been before – was decaying and wasting away beneath Mario’s feet. The pipes were faded and cracked in various places. All of the enemies still possessed the same carnivorous looks of their inter-game counterparts. There was, oddly enough, a startling abundance of them. Koopas and Goombas danced around in a ritualistic manner. Mario was visibly petrified as he tried to avoid them, my arrow keys keeping them inches away from his life. Amidst the all of the din, there hovered a solitary power up block.

It was regular in appearance. Nothing was outwardly off about this, which greatly surprised me. Not knowing what horrid item it contained, I bumped it in blind vain. That maybe it could help me. You can most likely infer from the intonation I made in the preceding paragraph that I was completely mistaken. What appeared next is what I dreaded. That damn whistle. It was sitting there, blood washing over it as it rose from the yellow square. It sat there almost beckoning my name. With the imposing enemies, I knew I had no other choice. I took the weapon from its place. Fruitlessly hoping for the best, readily expecting the worst.

The on-screen foes ceased all activity. Their faces returned to a neutral, bank state. Five minutes they stood in place like this not moving a muscle. I jumped around and tried to kill them, but to no avail. It’s almost as if they were frozen within the confines of time itself. As if for specifically them, all interstellar and physical continuity came to a careening halt. Then they began to move. After the first couple had did it, I realized What truly was going on. This was a mass suicide. Most of them just jumped in the nearest hole, but others performed incredible feats of acrobatics and medical possibility.

One Koopa was bashing his head in on a pipe. Another Goomba jumped six or seven times his own height, turned around in the air, and sent blood flying everywhere with a great splat. Soon all of the enemies were dead. Their remains were spontaneously upchucked from the trench below. A grisly mixture of guts and gore littered the entire remainder of the level. Mario shuffled through the remains, horrified with tears streaming on his face throughout. Random deep, bassy tones played with nothing else to accompany.

Realistic squishy sounds were emitted every time Mario took a step in the scattered carnage. He continued to cry for the duration of the level. The whistle faded into view and followed Mario a few inches above his head, like a pestilential virus. After he cleared it, of course, the whistle went straight through his chest as Mario was headed to world 5. The game has a habit of putting me where it needs me to be, so I closed the window without saving.

Witnessing all of that death really racked my nerves. Sure it might be a game, but with the things this game has had to present to me I’m starting to lose my perception of reality. I’m starting to wonder to myself what is real and what is inside the computer. These two things are quickly fusing into one. The lines… they’re blurring. Pretty soon the days will start fading together, and by then I’ll have lost all sense of reality. I hope to see you all tomorrow. I don’t know how much longer I can put up with this game. No, it’s not a game. I couldn’t tell you what this is.

June 11th, 2012
---------------

Today being D-Day fits, because I’m fighting one hell of a war against this game (and a losing one at that). At least there are no more mishaps with you all so far, which puts me at rest. As of today’s gameplay, I fear for my own life. I feel as if something is coming after me. Lurking, seeking me out as to make immediate my demise. Never before has anything like this ever happened. Never before has anything electronic made me truly afraid, truly scared. I most likely will get no sleep tonight. Nothing in particular occurred, it’s just… you’ll find out below.

I was in the middle of the cloud portion of world 5. The sky theme played, except it was drastically slow and demonic whispers were clearly audible. The whispers were almost the same as the ones I heard back in world 2. Mario was outfitted with the Tanooki suit, which naturally suited the environment. There was nothing there except two things: A red dot, and a card game.

The card game icon looked similar enough to its regular game clone, except the spades rolled across a red background instead of a blue one. Now, for whatever reason, I was allowed to choose which path to take. I chose to do the card game, hoping it would serve as some sort of reprieve from all the madness. That was not the right choice.

Toad didn’t explain the rules of the game like normal. Instead, I was plunged into the rolling slots. Beside the slots was a risky scenario. Toad was on a guillotine. He looked at the camera with timid, teary eyes. He also was vigorously shaking his head. He shook his hands in a futile effort to free himself from this appalling apparatus, but nothing came of it. The entire picture engulfed me so much I didn’t even notice the slots. I cautiously pressed them, trying as best I could to line them up given the stress of the situation. I failed, and had to pay the personal price.

The blade fell with breathtaking speed. Toad was beheaded right then and there. His head did a couple of spins in the air before landing in a conveniently placed nearby basket. The initial spins flayed blood across the white room. Blood filled the basket and filled it up, toad’s body spraying blood from the stump where his head used to be. Out of nowhere, the Blood Whistle came down and struck his torso. The scene faded out and back to the map. I was moved to the only remaining destination in world 5.

Silent lightning streaked across the licorice black sky. Gray clouds and Mario were the only other consistently visible things. As far as everything goes, silhouettes of winged demons flew and danced in the background. I tried turning into the stone structure the Tanooki suit is so famous for, but it failed. No music at played. None at all. The demons would be heard whispering in what sounded like a variety of languages.

Spanish, German, and Latin were the most prevalent ones. A primal fear of the unknown gripped me as I blindly navigated the level. Judging by the look on Mario’s face, it plagued him also. This stemmed from childhood, which made it all the worse. I not only felt like Mario was in danger, I felt like my livelihood and well-being were in danger. At that moment, one of the demons swooped down.

I would say the most accurate way to describe this creature would be a miniature Cthulu. Its claws plucked out Mario’s eyes, making them profusely bleed. He unleashed an ephemeral, yet bone-chilling cry. After the searing pain relented Mario trudged on. His face was now void of any and all expression. It was because he knew as well as I did that he would be torn apart. Brutally and slowly, but it would happen. After a few more seconds, the second demon came.

It was identical in appearance to the first. It swooped down with grim, black bat wings and did its portion of damage. After it was said and done, the thing had torn Mario’s arms off. Mario stopped dead in his tracks. He sobbed loudly, knowing the worst was yet to come. I felt so sorry for him that the words escaped me. He continued with a morose look. His normal walk slowed to a shuffle. Not a few seconds after that, the final solitary specter came down. He did his work with one big slash. Mario was now without his legs, and his lump of a body sat there. He sadly wept in utter despair. He knew the end was near. He tuned to me and choked out this: “I’m sorry you had to witness this...everything...”

Those were his last spoken words on world 5 before a gaggle of hell’s minions descended and tore apart what remained of him. His entrails were liberally exposed as they regurgitated in their cruel feast. When the dust cleared, a mere shell of him remained. All you could see of his open stomach were his open spine and back muscles. As I had predicted, the Blood Whistle came to transport him into whatever hellish situation it contemplated would be worse than the last. Consider it sheer luck if I make another post tomorrow. If I do, it may be my last.

June 12th, 2012
---------------

I’m starting not to care anymore. I am in the throes of such a severe depression it’s all starting to fade away. Everything. School, friends, family. It’s safe to say this game is single-handedly ruining my life. Such sadness has never become me ever before in my life. My grandfather died when I was young, but that didn’t close to equate what I’m feeling now. It’s a direct result of the level that I played today, which I’ll get into right now.

World 6 appeared. Ice was everywhere. This is the one part that correlated to the unaltered version. Nothing else did. The ice was none other than frozen, realistic blood. Crystallized pieces of crimson droplets bordered the ice blocks. Blood filled in the small pockets of water that were. Of course, there was only a solitary dot on the map. Mario entered it, and I knew that whatever was to pass, it would be ten-fold of what had already happened.

Pure, sable white was the only thing that constituted of the backdrop. Blocks of blood ice served as a slippery ground. Mario slid along as I controlled him. He appeared happy. Overjoyed might be more accurate. Here he had nothing to deal with. Just him and the open space. Five minutes passed. Then ten. All the way through, Mario was happy as I let him run around and fly (he had regained the raccoon tail). It seemed like he had all the time in the world. The clocked ticked and ticked and all seemed right in the game. Making my way through the level, I found out it had no end. Time, oddly enough, would turn out to be the ultimate enemy.

At the twenty minute mark a tempest began to pick up. A flurry of snow and wind ensnared Mario, and he now began to curl his tail. His teeth chattered and his body shook. He soon had to sit down. Mario and I soon figured out how the game planned to snuff him out this time: with ice and time. He sat and tried to heat himself. This, needless to say, was a less than feeble attempt. Nothing but the creepy bass beats from world 5 played. Mario’s skin soon began to turn a light blue. Nevertheless, he still sat and brooded in the icy cold.

It was then that the utmost feeling of sadness had encapsulated me. I couldn’t fathom my sympathy. I couldn’t begin to describe how bad I felt at the fact that his death was absolutely inevitable and there was nothing I could do to stop it. Just simply watch in shock and dejected awe. Frostbite soon took his hands. Ten minutes after that, world 6 Mario was no more. Just a frozen block of a man, sitting there in the middle of an infinite winter wilderness. After the sadness came feelings of sheer loneliness.

I felt abandoned and alone. Just like Mario sitting in the middle of that ice field. I felt as if no one would save me from the torture of this game. The Blood Whistle came down and made a chunk sound as it impaled his chest, taking him to the next level of hell. I closed the emulator window like always, and ended this self-subjected torture. I WILL bring myself to play this game tomorrow, but mark my words. I’ll play the last tomorrow, and then this blog will (hopefully) live on in my memory. So my tribulation can be seen by the world. Be here. Same time, same place.

June 13th, 2012
---------------

It is ironic indeed that today is June the 13th. The unlucky number, the unlucky day. I suppose today isn’t completely horrible. Today is the last day I had to play this wretched game. This horrifyingly absurd remake of what I used to see as a wonderful game will soon be out of my life. Along with everything else. With this being the last post, I suppose I can finally be honest about my true intentions ever since I finished world 2. I’m going to take my own life.

This game has caused me sorrow on such an ineffable level that there is no other option. Life will never be the same. Mom and dad, I love you. Michael and Kelsie, you guys be good. Listen to mom and dad. They have a lot of valuable lessons to teach you. Lessons that I learned but can now never apply again. Now for what you seventy five thousand followers read this post for: the rest of the game.

Hell itself is what the game brought me to. I suppose that this was intentioned to convey world 8. No, not hell. WORSE than hell. Bodies were chained up in the background enduring a myriad of tortures. The only pain wasn’t strictly felt from injuries though.

The coughs, dying wheezes and vomiting in the background reeked of pestilence and suffering. Fires emblazoned certain people as well. The flames had an actual burning quality to them. Not like regular 8-bit fire. Flesh, eyes, and other internal organs and tissue constituted the walls and ground. If the hell I’m certainly going to exists, I think it looks something like this.

Mario stood before a possessed Princess Toadstool. Her dress was ripped in several places and splattered with blood. Her eyes gleamed red, the flames casting an evilly maniacal allure to her appearance. Bowser and his six sons were tied to wooden poles with terrified looks on their faces. Wendy, for some reason, didn’t appear anywhere in this game. In one hand, Peach brandished a sizable dagger. In the other, the Blood Whistle. She walked over to Bowser and looked him in the eyes.

Technical limitations slightly hindered the interpretation of what events passed, but it was easy enough to understand what was going on. Through his gag, Bowser pleaded with her not to harm him. She brought the knife close to him and he froze up. He was obviously paralyzed with fear. Her mouth got close to his ear and text rolled along at the bottom of the screen, conveying the text of what played out given the sound limitations. This is what enabled Mario to "speak" in the past.

/“Sh,”/ she whispered.

Bowser’s innards spilled onto the floor in a great heap. He let out a monstrous 8-bit roar of pain as this happened. Peach laughed, her red eyes reflecting whatever evil had possessed her. The princess proceeded to eviscerate all six of his other sons. Mario did nothing but look on in horror as his mortal enemies were torn apart by a woman he had once loved very much.

His face soon contorted into one of loathing. He had come all this way to find out the very girl he wished to save had been taken over by an extra-terrestrial evil. An evil that would not only haunt Mario, but me as well. The sort of evil that doesn’t go away when you turn off the game. The kind of dark force that follows you to your bedchambers and steals your soul. Princess Toadstool paused for a couple of seconds, then came at Mario with the knife.

/“Hey there Mario,”/ she said as she toyed with the knife.//

/“They got a little/ sharp /with me so I pushed them over the EDGE! Hehehe…”/

I tried to move Mario but nothing happened. He stood there, afraid of what she would do. She brutally slashed open his arms, legs and abdomen. Shortly thereafter, the princess produced some salt from her billowing dress and sprinkled it all over him. He screamed again, unmoving.

"'/The Princess Peach you used to know is long gone. The power of the Blood Whistle consumed that girl and made way for me. And speaking of which,/ ” she continued as she produced the Blood Whistle, “/Here it is. Hear its cry.”/

With a mocking kiss on the cheek, she began to play Mario the perverse song of the Blood Whistle. Its notes rotted away the last reserve of good in me. He was heaved by an invisible force into the flames.

He cried out as they consumed him. Peach chucked the whistle, making it strike him directly in the heart. He continued to wallow in utter anguish as she walked away. As she laughed, He looked into my eyes and bore me this parting message via the text at the bottom of the screen:

/“Do not let your life be as painful as mine was. I do not hold reservations against you, as you tried your best to keep me alive. I commend you for that. Good bye, Bradley, and good luck." /The tune of the blood whistle continued to play as the screen panned out of Mario’s hell.

How he knew my name is Bradley continues to befuddle me. How he could have such depth, such personality. I don’t know whether this is a result of the game being as haunted as it truly is, or the fact that someone’s could have been captured inside of this rom. Whatever the reason of this, of everything that has come to pass with this abomination, I am glad I’m finally done. I have made all of my goodbyes at the beginning of this post. I hope one of you takes the time to save this blog. Or at the very least, to show the world the true hell I have put myself through. I sure hope that the demented creator of this game isn’t festering in the same hell I’m headed for. Goodbye, everyone.

Aftermath
---------

This blog was the last recorded statement of Bradley before his death.

His roommate discovered him four hours after he made the last post. Bradley committed suicide using a recorder that he plunged through his trachea.

__________
-Dubiousdugong

Web Rescue: GatorAIDS. 7 Freakiest Pokemon RBY Glitches

[This website really wasn't up for long, and it had a really interesting page about Pokemon glitches. Fortunately, I saved it. - Owner]

The 7 Freakiest Pokemon Red/Blue/Yellow Glitches

December 2011

When “Pocket Monsters” was created by Japanese game designer Satoshi Tajiri in 1996 it was nothing more than a way for the designer to relive his childhood pastime of insect collecting and share it with the residents of his homeland. For all the options available in the original games it was still quite a linear adventure, and a simplistic one at that. Neophyte game developer Game Freak (directed by Tajiri) set out to produce the original two installments Red and Green, which became such a hit that Blue was also released. Never before had Game Freak produced a game so intricate and detailed, and mistakes were made to say the least. Programming oversights, data omissions, and lack of a proper error handling system eventually led to trainers getting lost in places that looked like this:

WHERE WE'RE GOING WE DON'T NEED EYES TO SEE.

Due to a lack of attention to finite details in their programming work, which is forgivable considering the sheer magnitude of their creation and this being their first time taking on such a venture, both the Japanese and North American releases of the original Pokemon games were riddled with glitches ranging from mildly amusing to downright terrifying. Here’s seven demons Game Freak unintentionally brought upon the world with their magnum opus.

The Original Missingno. 

MissingNo (literally “Missing Number”, #000 in the Pokedex) needs no introduction. MissingNo is the gold standard in Pokemon glitches and is quite possibly one of the most well known and celebrated glitches in the history of video games; MissingNo’s legendary status is on par with that of the Minus World from Super Mario Bros. Glitches in future generation Pokemon games are called “MissingNo” even though they are completely different entities, it’s a glitch that became the name for every other Pokemon glitch because that’s what happens when you’re #1.

MissingNo’s familiar “L” shaped appearance, non-threatening battle cry, duplicate moveset, and item duplication properties are quite vanilla today, but how would you have like to have been the first person to stumble across this beast? Can you imagine minding your own business when suddenly a random encounter begins and the screen freezes black for just a few seconds and…

"Ohfuckohfuckohfuckohfuck." - You

Your butthole would have tensed up at this sight, and don’t you deny that.

Any self-respecting Pokemaniac in the 1990′s knew the entire Pokedex (and the PokeRap) like the back of their hand. You knew #’s 1 through 151 better than your own family, so what in God’s name is this abortion?! It has a terrifyingly alarming name (“MISSING” appears in it), its graphic looks like the bowels of technological hell, and while it cries and fights like a regular Pokemon you have never seen anything like this before in your life. Confronted with the unknown you then do what any starry-eyed trainer would do in this situation: you catch the damn thing.

Sometime later you decide to show your friend your awesome trophy of a glitch and accidentally skip to the Pokemon League’s computer and bring up your Hall of Fame. The music crashes and turns to a single sound channel while the screams of tortured souls come through as pure static in another. Your screen flashes with the garbled mess of a computer virus and attached is a note from MissingNo reading “thank you for liberating me from my prison, this is only my first step to world domination.”

"PS: Check your 6th item."

"Old Man" Trainer ID Theft

Remember that old man in Viridian City who won’t let you pass because he’s a grumpy old fart who hasn’t yet had his fill of coffee? He’s just an arbitrary barrier in the game so that you won’t proceed further without delivering Oak’s Parcel from the PokeMart and once you obtain your Pokedex he changes his attitude and shows you how to catch Pokemon. Unknown to him, the old man also holds the keys to unlocking MissingNo… which come to think of it might be the reason he seems so disturbed and angry at the world. Could you imagine having to harbor that thing? I mean, sure, all the free coffee you could ever want but still I don’t think MissingNo would be suitable company at all, ever.

You can fool with the poor old man all you want if you have a GameShark and play with the cheat codes to alter wild Pokemon encounters. You can have the old man show you how to catch one of the Pokemon not present in your version of the game, you can have him catch a Mewtwo, you can enjoy a spot of meta humor and have him catch a MissingNo, or… you can force him to fight a trainer, and the game just doesn’t know what the fuck to do.

"YOU DAMN KIDS AND YOUR POKEYMAN!!!"

The old man is programmed to do one thing and one thing only: throw a Poke Ball. He still does this after the trainer sends out their glitch Pokemon and as you might expect the trainer blocks it. The old man never sends out any Pokemon (even though he appears to have 1 fainted and 5 normal Pokemon) so right now you’re on the edge of your seat because the trainer’s glitch box of the apocalypse is about to rock this grandpa’s world…

…and out of nowhere the PA system from the Safari Zone chimes in and says “TIME’S UP!!”

The battle ends immediately and the old man acts like nothing happened. He reminds you that you must first weaken the target Pokemon and on the surface it appears no lasting effects have happened… until you check your stats.
Your name has changed to “OLD MAN”. Due to the way the game handles the old man encounter it stores your actual name in the place where wild Pokemon data is stored (because this data is empty in Viridian City) and temporarily changes your player name to OLD MAN. When the battle terminates improperly the game doesn’t have the chance to reset the data and your name becomes OLD MAN. Any Pokemon you have cannot be nicknamed because you are no longer their original trainer, they do not recognize you anymore.

Every single instance where your name would be displayed now says “OLD MAN”. If you access your PC from a Pokemon Center it’s called “OLD MAN’s PC”. If you speak to a character who addresses you by your name, like Professor Oak for example, he will (hilariously) call you “OLD MAN”. If you check the sign outside of your home it will read “OLD MAN’s house”. You have become OLD MAN. He has stolen your identity and pulled off the greatest psychic cleansing ever documented. Everybody you have ever known starts calling you by the incorrect name like nothing happened. Even your own mother doesn’t know you anymore.

MAMA NOOOOOOOO!!!

The ZZAZZ Glitch

This can’t possibly be scary, can it? I mean the name almost looks like the word “pizzazz” which is kind of gay but at the worst would end up being a Shiny Pokemon, right? Shiny things have pizzazz?

Wrong. The “ZZAZZ” glitch is called as such because of a very specific string of data it injects directly into your save file. Unless you’re tempted enough to fool with the game by using sequence breaks or a GameShark you won’t come across this glitch, but God help you if you choose to peek into oblivion and play with things you shouldn’t. Like the saying goes, “when you stare into the abyss, the abyss stares back” except in this case the “abyss” is a glitched up zombie trainer who rapes you in the mindgina. Glitches are like drugs, and after a while freebasing MissingNo just isn’t enough to get you high; that’s when you OD and this happens:

Oh shit a vuvuzela!! BZZZZZZZZ

Let’s take a look at what the christ is going on here. First thing’s first, your opponent. It’s you as if you were staring into a mirror and there was an interdimensional time rift that sucked you into the cursed mirror world and unleashed the fury of Hell itself into the unsuspecting Kanto. Impostor Red has a full stock of Pokemon, though the first one appears to be poisoned. When he sends this Pokemon out it’s at level 153 and its health bar wraps around the fucking screen. This is what it looks like when you attempt to use a digital Ouija board to channel spirits (reference to the “Channeler” trainers unintended but pointed out).

By this point it’s already too late; you are completely and utterly screwed. The game is operating by itself and is pulling code and instructions from the 7th dimension and the only thing you can do is get your ass kicked by Pokemon of the netherworld while the mirror image of yourself laughs in a mocking tone. There is one escape, though: throw a Poke Ball. No, seriously. Bizarro Red will block it, the game will buzz for a second, and the battle will suddenly end.
But that’s not the end of it. Merely looking at the source of the ZZAZZ infection is enough to let its memetic properties propagate throughout your entire game. Earlier I mentioned the game injects a certain string of data into your game save. Check your trainer name. It’s a bunch of Z’s. The hex value for the letter “Z” is “99″. In base-10 “99″ is “153“, you know, the level of the Pokemon that the Mirror World Red sent out. Check your Pokemon roster. They are all now level 153. Not only that, they are all Bulbasuars. Bulbasaur occupies hex value “99″, which of course translates to 153. Check Bulbasaur’s moveset. Every attack will be Explosion. Can you guess the hex value of this move? I’m sure you can by now; it’s like a bad Jim Carrey movie.

Any trainer you fight, no matter who they are, will now be ZZAZZ. And now you are, too.

Try to watch this video without shitting your pants:

 
 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D3iVFfKjklk


 "Dokokashira Door" Glitch

Do you have an inexplicable fear of the unknown? Do you worry that one day you’ll open the door to your house and on the other side instead of seeing your living room it’ll be some unknown place in space and time? Are you afraid of being in an elevator because you don’t know what will be on the other side of those cold steel doors when they open? Holy shit, you are going to love this next glitch!

“Dokokashira” is Japanese for “Where is it”, as in “where is the door”. This isn’t “where” as in “it’s right around the corner”, it’s “where” as in “where does the other side of that door lead to?” Yes, that’s right, this whole glitch is about the phenomena of walking into what you think is the Pokemon Center and ending up in the middle of the burned out Cinnabar Island laboratory, with or without a sore B-hole. The “Dokokashira Door” glitch is the roofie of the Pokemon world.

This has "good idea" written ALL OVER IT.

This glitch is only accessible in Pokemon Red and Green, the original two Japanese titles from 1996. It was patched up by the time the Japanese Blue was released, and is not present in the North American release of the game. The reason given is that this glitch was “extremely hazardous” unlike, you know, the ZZAZZ glitch or anything like that.

Starting the glitch requires a fresh game because you need to have Oak’s Parcel in your inventory. You then must press Select and act like you want to change its place in your item list except rather than swap an item you attempt to exchange it with the first Pokemon in your party (which also requires use of the Select button). From this point the glitch is active and every “cycle” of the game (every 4 steps taken) will cause the warp point of every door to change to another location. By forcing the game to swap one set of data with another it turns your only Pokemon into the anomaly stored at hex value “FF” and also shuffles around other data in the game, namely the door location data.

Oh, and that bastard Oak won’t ever get his package because you just decided to open it and found out he ordered the key from The Lost Room.

Of course, with such a rigid set of operations with the glitch (every 4 steps) there’s no doubt a table that has been created by someone with way too much time on their hands. With careful planning you can use the Dokokashira door glitch to walk straight into the Hall of Fame room, access the computer, and beat the game with zero Pokemon in your party.

Must be post-tsunami.

 Hex Value "EC"

In basic terms the Pokemon game stores its Pokemon data in a single location occupying 256 slots of data (256 converted to hex is “FF”, the maximum). 151 of these slots are legitimate Pokemon, about 40 of them are MissingNo, and a few dozen are trainer data. Attempting to use a GameShark to “force” a specific encounter with a trainer ID will cause you to fight a glitchy trainer, not a Pokemon. Through creative circumnavigation, however, you can force the game to read these slots of data as “Pokemon”. If it sounds like a bad idea you’re absolutely correct but people do it anyways, and that’s how “EC” was discovered.

“EC” is the hex location where this glitch is stored. Most glitches have a name that people can use to describe it even if it’s a garbled mess of letters and symbols (e.g. “LM4″). EC has no discernible name. The safety net, then, would be to name it based upon what its sprite looks like. EC also has no sprite, not even a garbled “L” shaped mess like MissingNo. At the very least people could use its type, species, or other identifying data to name it, but it simply does not exist. EC is literally an invisible specter whose data normally corresponds to Lt. Surge.

He looks like an angry grandmother.

Entering “01ECD8CF” into a GameShark and playing the game results in battling Lt. Surge in the middle of nowhere. Most of these glitchy trainer fights possess the same roster of garbage data, but Surge is different. The Lieutenant will actually attempt to send out EC, which is frankly unheard of. EC almost always freezes the game but if the ROM remains stable enough the Pokemon you send out to battle it emerges from its ball with a “frozen” status effect, its HP bar wraps the screen, the location where its name belongs fills up with 9′s, and the screen eventually crashes and turns into a mess of HP bars and numbers.

“EC” is the only hex location in the game where data actually does not exist. There is nothing there, which cannot be correct because Lt. Surge is there. EC is the equivalent of Schrodinger’s cat. It exists and does not exist simultaneously.

Sweet dreams.

The Phantom Ditto

Most people who are familiar with MissingNo are familiar with its close cousin M. The two glitches are almost identical at first: they share the same attacks, they both look the same, they both duplicate items, they both crash the Hall of Fame, and their names both start with (or consist of) the letter “M”. M is entirely different, however, and that should be realized the moment you first encounter it and hear it scream like a Zapdos hyped up on crack.

M occupies hex slot “00″ in the ROM, it is not known why M is the odd-man out when it comes to the other 40-something MissingNo but M is “the one”. M is also the only MissingNo to feature evolutions, and has three of them. At level 138 M will evolve into Clefairy, M can spontaneously turn into a Rhydon unprovoked if you already have an M captured in your party, and at any level other than 138 M will evolve into Kangaskhan. To Pokemon theorists everywhere M is the “missing link” in the whole Kangaskhan, Cubone, and Marowak trifecta of mommy-issues bullshit even though it’s a block of pixels that also has two other unrelated evolutions.

Pokemon creepypasta is the worst kind.

But none of this is the reason why M has made this list. If you initiate battle with M and decide to capture it, after the game tells you M’s been caught…

ENEMY M USED WATER GUN!

What the fuck? It’s still there?! When fighting M if you capture it, the battle doesn’t terminate properly even though M’s sprite has vanished. Either that, or M can replicate itself endlessly and you can never win. If his surprise post-capture attack doesn’t scare the living hell out of you and you throw another Poke Ball at it… you’ll catch a Ditto. A perfectly harmless, completely 100% legitimate, Ditto staring at you with his goofy expression of being completely stoned and complacent.

And nobody knows why this happens.

Dozens of basement dwellers have disassembled and reassembled the Pokemon ROM and studied it in and out, bit by bit, and there is no explanation for the “phantom” Ditto. It’s just “there”… and nobody has a reason why. None. Not even a theory.

"I WILL EAT YOUR SOUL *cough* i mean... oh hai there!!~~"

 Charizard M'

For something as benign and goofy as MissingNo the creature can evolve into some pretty scary shit rather fast, and this isn’t “evolve” in a Pokemon sense. First there was the original MissingNo that started this list off. Then there was M, a distant cousin with a bunch of branch evolutions to rival that of Eevee’s. Finally, we’ve come to Charizard M, the embodiment of Hell itself in a Game Boy game.

Charizard M is not a Pokemon. It certainly looks like one (guess who) but it’s  not. It should not exist, it is not from this world and is comprised of a programming language forged in the very core of the Earth. Charizard M is beyond what can be described as a “programming anomaly” and mythology states that Game Freak didn’t even put it in the game; the master copy of Pokemon was blasted by a bolt of lightning and this happened. Do not treat Charizard M as a Pokemon, for you will be sorely indebted to the Beast in the worst way possible for a Pokemon trainer: without warning or provocation it will eat and transform your Pokemon. Permanently.

If you see this on a Game Boy screen, it is too late.

Charizard M occupies slot “FF” on the cartridge. “FF” is as far as you can go in hex data; Charizard M is the end of the road. The couple dozen or so glitches before it are all boxy glitchy messes that don’t do much until you reach “FF” and discover the final boss of Pokemon. “FF” doesn’t even correspond to a Pokemon, it’s where the game stores the data for the “cancel” menu option. If you dare try to force an encounter with the Cancel button then you’re a goddamn retard and deserve the full fury that this demon can unleash upon you. It’s cry is a mess of static that ruins the audio of the game and by the time you hear it you cannot run. You are in his domain now.

If you’re stupid enough to capture Charizard M and add it to your party you won’t even see it in your roster; it will appear as a blank space. If you move it to the top of your list guess what happens? You will lose your other 5 Pokemon; they will be masked in nothingness by Charizard M because the game reads this creature as a “stop” order. You will no longer be able to heal these Pokemon at a Pokemon Center nor can you interact with them in any way. You just shoved them into a portal to oblivion where they are being raped (by furries) as we speak.

Think it’s a good idea to store Charizard M in a Pokemon Box? Are you stupid? If you put this thing into a box the same will happen to everything in that box; it will vanish. Poof. If you’re not careful with how you handle Charizard M you will end up with more Charizard M’s. No, you didn’t misread that; these things multiply if left to their own devices. Not only that Charizard M has the ability to turn your other Pokemon into copies of itself. If you play with Charizard M everything you have ever caught in your game will become Charizard M.

Don't look now BUT HE'S RIGHT BEHIND YOU.

-
DracophileCharizard M

(Spent the better part of your childhood playing Pokemon and sperging out about MissingNo? Join us on the GatorAIDS Forums today!)

Categories: Game Graveyard, The Tags: game boy, glitch, missingno, nintendo, pokemon, spooky