First off, instead of happily plugging the game into my DS and transferring it to the new games nice and simply, I decided it might be fun to properly train it 'old-school', before letting it loose competitively on the new, wi-fi, touch-screen modern hotness. Who says there's no room for romance in, erm... Pokémon? All I had to do was spend a day or so working out what in-game berries to feed it.
Problem 1 quickly reared its head: I didn't have any of those berries. So over the course of a couple of nights I got hold of one, grew it, replanted it, until I had enough to go around nicely. Of course, a slight miscalculation in my permanently sleepy state (planting 2 = twice as many) somehow meant that one morning when I woke up to find that I had over 60 of this virtual berry, far more than I could ever find a use for. Maybe I should take up virtual jam-making, although knowing my luck with this whole project so far I'd probably end up living in a shipping crate with only a retro Game Boy and a magic bean to my name.
Next I had to figure out how to make tasty treats for my precious Pokémon. Maybe this was the stage that I should have taken a step back and properly surveyed the utter, utter pointlessness of what I was doing, but for some strange reason it made perfect sense to do so at the time. I worked out that if I made purposely average treats with one of my 60 berries, it would raise its stats in 3 areas at once at half the speed – a net gain! However, with the condition stat stored as an 8-bit integer, it would max at 255, and my treats were regularly coming out at level 23 – if I could just play the treat-making minigame flawlessly twice to boost it to level 24, then it would perfectly add up to a nice, round 255 in 11 treats, saving time and... well, actually if I have to replay the minigame hundreds of times to get it to come out perfectly its not really saving any time is it? But still, it makes perfect sense in my head and I've worked it all out on my own, using my superior intellect and maths reasoning to streamline the training of my virtual creature. I'm being productive!
The next step was actually applying it. Of course, it failed to work. For some reason, instead of reaching 255, it stopped somewhere in the middle. It told me that Togepi didn't like my treats. I failed to account for this in my pokémaths. Thus rendering most of the adventure to date and previous days work pointless. Still, I've got a stack of treats saved from when I last played in 2007, so I just used them instead. It has literally only just hit me that I should have used them in the first place.
Change of plan needed then, and I dusted off one of my other old games and discovered that a very useful move tutor could be traded over from that one, that would really help move things along. The only minor flaw being that I'd need to find another old Game Boy from somewhere to trade with, but my brother used to play too so his will still be about. Amazingly, considering that this could have added another layer of complexity to the proceedings, it didn't and he found it in record time! There was only one minor flaw... the wireless adaptor. A small, grey piece of plastic designed to plug into an obsolete console, that had become separated from said console at some unknown point in the last 5 or so years. I've invested too much into this now to stop though, so on with the search!
While examining the unopened boxes from our house move (4 years ago), I came across the following items:
a box of wooden railway toys “for passing onto my future kids”
a box full of 7 year old love letters (as in, from 7 years ago, not from when I was 7)
a VHS tape of a 2006 wrestling pay-per-view
a strip poker set, unopened
a watch
another box full of cuddly toys
two full ring binders of GCSE physics and chemistry notes
approximately 400 obsolete hard drives
a broken remote control helicopter
a pair of thumb-handcuffs
and a partridge in a pear tree.
When I was just about ready to start burning things, I called in my brother for help... and he promptly found it in his own room. In the same box as he found his Game Boy. Maybe I should have started by looking there.
So that's the adventure to date, still nowhere near finished but I think you'll agree, after investing THIS much in it I surely need to see the project through now. All I need to do is trade that item over, and then the minor issue of beating a section of the game 32 times in order to unlock another special move to teach it. But I'm sure that will just fly by.
In other news, my t shirt and socks are co-ordinated today!
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