Glitch demonstration videos (not so much full runs/speedruns, those just don't interest me as much for whatever reason) are pretty much the only things I normally bother to watch online. I have some strange mental block that makes me not care about 99% of online videos of any sort, but the minute you say "look at how hilariously broken and exploitable this game is" I am
there.
Anyone feel like tossing out any recommendations? I would assume most people who like Pokémon glitches are familiar with ChickasaurusGL's videos, but I binge-watched pretty much all of them earlier this year and he's added a lot of interesting stuff recently. I'll probably be going back to work through all the recommended similar videos at some point, heh.
For all my love of reading about and watching glitches I do surprisingly little actual experimentation with them, so I can't think of anything interesting that I've caused to happen on purpose. I do remember this one incident from when I was much younger, though:
I was at my cousin's house, relaxing on the floor by the window and playing yet another file on Blue Version. I was battling Blaine, and his growlithe and ponyta went down without incident. Out came his rapidash... and then everything went haywire. Out of nowhere, the music faded out and was replaced by the occasional "thump, thump" of a shaking poké ball. Blaine's rapidash had spontaneously acquired a burn or some other status condition that I'm pretty sure I hadn't inflicted upon it, its name had glitched out, and its HP bar (and possibly my own pokémon's?) had wrapped around the screen. When I tried to act, the game claimed that the gibberish rapidash was "frozen solid", then that it was "burned"; then the skull-and-crossbones used to indicate burn damage flashed over its head and its massive HP drained down to nothing over the course of what felt like almost a minute.
Blaine sent out a gibberish arcanine next, which was immediately afflicted by the same combination frozen/burned status condition and ungodly huge HP bar as its predecessor. I tried to attack, and its freezer burn sapped all its HP before the attack went off. I'd won! Hell if I knew how, but I wasn't complaining (though I was wondering whether the game would continue its little freakout). The game gave me money, the screen faded out to return to the gym map... and then it froze. I restarted and was presumably plonked back into the gym right in front of Blaine, or wherever it was I'd last saved. I tentatively tried battling Blaine again, expecting his rapidash to cause the game to throw another fit once it was sent out... but nothing happened. The battle progressed normally, and I was allowed to receive my badge and TM and continue the rest of the file without incident. Baffling, slightly disappointing—although at least it meant that nothing was permanently screwed up—and I've never seen it happen since.
Years later, now that people have done all their experimenting and I've done all that reading, I can identify that sequence of events as what's known as the "
TMTRAINER effect", or at least something closely related. What I can't identify is
how on God's green earth it happened. I don't remember having performed any glitches on that particular file at all. It's possible that I might've done some missingno. item cloning, but I'm not aware of any way that missingno. or M' could've caused this effect. I didn't know about any of the glitches that
are known to cause this effect—really, I doubt
anyone knew about them, since this was well before any serious English-language glitch research had surfaced—and I'd probably have been too chicken to try them if I had known. I do own a cheating device that's tailored to first-gen Pokémon games, but I don't know if I owned it at that time; even if I did, that "tailoring" means that it locks you in to only changing sensible things via lists and menus, so it's harder to make a mistake or an intentional substitution (e.g., enter the index number for an invalid pokémon in a wild modifier code) than it is via GameShark or Game Genie. As far as I can recall I was using perfectly normal pokémon with perfectly normal moves in a perfectly normal battle up until that rapidash went bananas for no discernible reason.
The only slightly strange thing I can recall is that for some reason I could swear the pokémon I was using was an oddish; that doesn't make sense, since I'm not normally interested in that line, there's no reason for it to have been an oddish instead of a vileplume, and why would it have been sent out against Blaine of all people? I might be misremembering that part. Not hard, I guess, given how muddy the backsprites were back in the day. Maybe it was a poli-something, since they're also black and round and blobby; I've never been terribly interested in them, either, but at least they're not grass-types. Whatever it was, surely it can't have caused this on its own.
Sooooo yeah! Still no clue as to what inexplicable hiccup brought all that about, but it was quite the experience for little mini-me, and it's fun to reminisce about even now. Glitches! Good times, man.
