Recent content by ThomasWinwood

The Desert Resort is after the third gym. If you'd said Route 4 that would be more reasonable (you can catch Pokémon there before fighting Burgh). It's hard for me to not use Drilbur in Black and White, given you can get it almost immediately after the first gym. It's good from the moment you...

I think everyone should watch Moonie's video on Nintendo's policy towards protecting its intellectual property. It's valuable to understand what they do and why, even if you don't agree with it. That's an expression of regret, not a commitment to avoid taking action. The calculus for Nintendo's...

The expansion reduces the number of teams stored in the Hall of Fame in order to make it still fit in the two sectors allocated to it with the increased size of the data stored there. Three lines above the definition of struct HallOfFameMon in src/hall_of_fame.c is the line #define...

I was going to get something in Area Zero, spotted a Volcarona, caught it for the Pokédex entry and went on with my day. Checked the boxes later and it turned out to be a shiny—I wasn't looking at the screen and didn't register that it made a noise when I started the battle.

They had the ability to ship new versions of games with bugs fixed, and sometimes they did—nowhere near all of them, sure, but it was a lot harder for information about bugs to get from the players to the developers back in the early nineties (not to mention we've had three decades to find bugs...

That's a sad state of affairs. Here's hoping for a speedy patch.

I have no time for this sentiment anymore because it turns a blind eye to all the bugs that existed in old games. Some off the top of my head: Sonic 1 shipped with nonfunctional invincibility frames and a game crash if you roll into a ball when finishing Labyrinth Zone. Sonic 2 had an enemy...

I must have received a different copy of the game to a lot of people because I haven't been playing a pervasively buggy game marred by game crashes. I've had an incredibly enjoyable experience with a few drops in framerate when there's a lot on the screen (notably raindrops and large quantities...

Basically all games have memory leaks these days, they're a symptom of programming languages with manual memory management. As long as they're slow enough they're not worth the time it takes to find and fix them because the player will stop playing and take a break before it becomes a problem.

Assuming the leak that they made an open-world Pokémon game with a fixed gym level curve, rather than each gym leader picking a team roster from a list of eight (or however many) corresponding to how many badges you've already acquired so you always get an appropriate level of challenge, then...

Honestly I'm underwhelmed. The school framing device is pathetic. Terastallising seems like a neat enough concept but the implementation is incredibly bland—of course it is: they stopped including the full National Pokédex because processing hundreds upon hundreds of unique assets was costing...

Normally autobattling is added to an RPG to cater to people who don't care so much about the gameplay and just want to enjoy the story, but Pokémon is not exactly known for its storylines so I'm not sure why this is here. Is this their solution to the problem of wild battles becoming effortless...

The way to make the list shorter would be to make it a list of Pokemon-move pairs… EvolutionMoves:: db CHARIZARD, WING_ATTACK db METAPOD, HARDEN ; etc …but you're on your own for how to edit the code to correctly read such a table.

I would guess that team A started work on Scarlet and Violet after Sword and Shield shipped in 2019, while Legends Arceus was the responsibility of team B after they finished development on the Let's Go games in 2018. It looks like Legends Arceus was delayed due to the COVID-19 pandemic, so the...

I went in basically blind, so while I knew of a few Hisuian forms from the trailers and such I didn't know where they'd be or how easy it'd be to swap my party around. I ended up adopting the "whatever you find" approach and built a team of Cyndaquil, Starly, Bidoof, Shinx, Geodude and Gastly...