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hopeandjoy posted:Inexperienced developers and the sheer size of the game. Game Freak had made, like, two games before Pokemon Red and Green. One was a puzzle game and the other was a platformer and neither was for the Game Boy. They had made nine games before pokemon, two of them on game boy. But both of them were relatively simple puzzle games. Game Freak was founded in 1989, so it's not like they were amateurs, but they had never made anything nearly as complex as pokemon, and fitting it on the game boy was a challenge beyond their capabilities. Game Freak is still a weirdly small company for how popular pokemon is, and they sort of do whatever they want as long as they keep making pokemon too. In the past few years they even released a couple games on steam, and a solitaire-based horse racing game on 3ds. I dunno about the others but Pocket Card Jockey is amazing and you should play it right now.
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Jun 2, 2017 06:29
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Begemot posted:In the past few years they even released a couple games on steam These are both so wildly opposed to my perception of Game Freak that I'm looking at their logo and I still kinda don't believe you. The jockey think looks adorable though, I'm getting it.
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Jun 2, 2017 06:47
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LAY-ZX posted:These are both so wildly opposed to my perception of Game Freak that I'm looking at their logo and I still kinda don't believe you. This conversation is reminding me that it's sad that Game Freak's best non-Pokemon game, Drill Dozer, never got a sequel or continuation of any kind.
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Jun 2, 2017 06:53
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Super Jay Mann posted:This conversation is reminding me that it's sad that Game Freak's best non-Pokemon game, Drill Dozer, never got a sequel or continuation of any kind.  
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Jun 2, 2017 06:55
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Super Jay Mann posted:This conversation is reminding me that it's sad that Game Freak's best non-Pokemon game, Drill Dozer, never got a sequel or continuation of any kind. What the gently caress they made Drill Dozer? 
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Jun 2, 2017 07:03
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Begemot posted:They had made nine games before pokemon, two of them on game boy. But both of them were relatively simple puzzle games. Game Freak was founded in 1989, so it's not like they were amateurs, but they had never made anything nearly as complex as pokemon, and fitting it on the game boy was a challenge beyond their capabilities. I'll second the recommendation of Pocket Card Jockey, though it can be a little frustrating at times when the cards just seem out to screw you over, which can ruin not just a race, but your horse's entire development. As for Pokemon, I do think it's important to note that the original games took up literally all the available space on the cartridge, that's why it lacked even the most basic sanity checks against things like arbitrary code execution. It's not that Game Freak didn't know about those hazards (most of them would have been glaringly obvious from a coding standpoint, since the vast majority of Gen I's bugs are pointer errors reading random chunks of memory, or in the case of the ACE bug, writing random chunks of memory), they just plain didn't have room to fit safeguards.
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Jun 2, 2017 07:32
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EclecticTastes posted:As for Pokemon, I do think it's important to note that the original games took up literally all the available space on the cartridge, that's why it lacked even the most basic sanity checks against things like arbitrary code execution. It's not that Game Freak didn't know about those hazards (most of them would have been glaringly obvious from a coding standpoint, since the vast majority of Gen I's bugs are pointer errors reading random chunks of memory, or in the case of the ACE bug, writing random chunks of memory), they just plain didn't have room to fit safeguards. On the whole, it's something that's easy to forget. I get all  about having spare 4GB SD cards lying around; memory optimization is still a thing but there's a lot more room for bloat these days.
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Jun 2, 2017 07:44
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Everyone considered that one guy whose name escapes me at the moment a literal wizard for the longest time for not only figuring out how to more efficiently pack the data onto the cartridges for Gold/Silver/Crystal, but doing it so efficiently that they could have not only the entirety of the new setting, but all of the previous region as well.
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Jun 2, 2017 07:55
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Malachite_Dragon posted:Everyone considered that one guy whose name escapes me at the moment a literal wizard for the longest time for not only figuring out how to more efficiently pack the data onto the cartridges for Gold/Silver/Crystal, but doing it so efficiently that they could have not only the entirety of the new setting, but all of the previous region as well. Yeah, that little guy no one's ever heard of named Satoru Iwata.  He was kind of a nobody, last I heard his career just kinda flamed out at HAL.
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Jun 2, 2017 08:19
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I didn't say he was a nobody, I just said his name escaped me I'm terrible at remembering names.
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Jun 2, 2017 11:57
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EclecticTastes posted:I'll second the recommendation of Pocket Card Jockey, though it can be a little frustrating at times when the cards just seem out to screw you over, which can ruin not just a race, but your horse's entire development. How much would Gamefreaks have had to take out to put those safeguards in?
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Jun 2, 2017 20:54
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SirPhoebos posted:How much would Gamefreaks have had to take out to put those safeguards in? it's extremely hard to say, as it depends on what Game Freak would consider priority and what actually takes up space.
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Jun 2, 2017 21:59
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It would also depend upon how efficiently the safeguards were programmed.
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Jun 2, 2017 22:15
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I've always kinda wondered how it would turn out if they redid R/B/Y like they did ORAS, the older story and setting with modern tech and programming. Would it be just as good, or would it lose a certain something without all those bugs?
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Jun 3, 2017 00:38
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Malachite_Dragon posted:I've always kinda wondered how it would turn out if they redid R/B/Y like they did ORAS, the older story and setting with modern tech and programming. Would it be just as good, or would it lose a certain something without all those bugs? Do FireRed and LeafGreen not count?
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Jun 3, 2017 00:43
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Ragnar Homsar posted:Do FireRed and LeafGreen not count? Is 13 years still modern to you? In fact, it's been more time between the remake and now than the original and the remake.
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Jun 3, 2017 01:16
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I'd say it probably wouldn't hold up; I first experienced Gen I-ish in any real capacity as a kid through FireRed and to this day Kanto is just a big ball of meh. Nostalgia and the jank is what makes Gen I interesting. If Pokémon hadn't had so many sequels to compare the first games to, I think that Gen I looks a lot better because of how huge it is for the console it was on, but it suffers from having 20 years of sequels to compare it to. Maybe if GF was more willing to add later features other than pure mechanics improvements, but they seem to like their remakes to be mostly faithful with only a couple of changes.
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Jun 3, 2017 01:20
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BlazeEmblem posted:Is 13 years still modern to you? he was talking about rby being a buggy mess which frlg isn't
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Jun 3, 2017 01:20
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BlazeEmblem posted:Is 13 years still modern to you? I still want them to do another, but not just red and green updated again. Do a Yellow remake (Thunder Yellow?), keep the pikachu starter and playing as Ash and all that, maybe expand the Team Rocket storyline a little. Then do another, Ocean Blue maybe, where it's a similar thing but you play as Gary Oak. Could have a similar thing with Team Rocket with the other two from the anime. Butch and Cassidy I think they are, in the english dub at least. And reverse all the rival fights so you see the other side of the same event. Like instead of encountering Gary on your way to Bill's you encounter Ash on the way back. Instead of beating the elite four and then Gary's already there, you beat them and it goes on like you've beat the game and then halfway through Ash comes in to challenge you. Probably sounds a bit silly but I always thought it'd be cool.
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Jun 3, 2017 09:19
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SirPhoebos posted:How much would Gamefreaks have had to take out to put those safeguards in? Like others have said, it's extremely hard to say, but we can at least look at what is available to take out in the first place. From a purely "Defeat the 8 Gym Leaders and Elite Four" point of view, you could probably hack out Diglett Cave, the SS Anne, and Safari Zone right away for being completely optional, save for the placement of the Cut and Surf HMs (which could be changed). Beyond that, there's not much that immediately comes to mind that could be completely removed without altering the core of the game somehow. Taking out the Team Rocket plot would have the problem of changing why you can't challenge the Gym in Viridian right away. Reducing the number of Gym Leaders would make the game feel less expansive. So it might well be that they couldn't have removed enough stuff to actually fit the sanity checks in anyway.
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Jun 3, 2017 21:35
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The power plant and the game corner would also be up on the chopping block, or they'd have to reduce the amount of pokemon
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Jun 3, 2017 21:41
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The Seafoam Islands could be excised pretty easily.
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Jun 3, 2017 21:43
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So could the Pokemon Mansion, although then you'd miss out on that sweet Mewtwo lore.
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Jun 3, 2017 21:45
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Silph Co and Pokemon Tower could have been shrunk, and so could Rock Tunnel and Mt. Moon. Cerulean Cave too.
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Jun 3, 2017 22:01
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Destroy all caves. A pokemon cave has never been something anybody has looked forward to.
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Jun 3, 2017 23:06
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It's pointless to speculate what they could remove without actually saying what those safeguards would be. A lot of the bugs in RBY are caused by oversights and bad assumptions, like the Old Man/Missingno glitch. The game stores your name in the wild pokemon table, and assumes the wild pokemon table will be overwritten by proper data later. But if you go to Cinnabar Island, the data isn't overwritten. Those should be fairly small fixes, though obviously I can't speak with any real authority. The kind of serious glitches that let you read and execute anything in memory are a lot harder to catch. Those sorts of things are handled by an operating system, and there probably isn't much the game itself can do. And the GB and GBC definitely didn't have enough memory or processing power for a proper OS.
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Jun 3, 2017 23:34
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gently caress it. Only six species available in the game. It's not like you can use more than that anyway.
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Jun 3, 2017 23:45
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That's boring as hell, though.
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Jun 3, 2017 23:50
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Just adding sanity checks wouldn't have fixed much, is the thing. There's plenty of issues of just plain bad programming, which is the reason the lack of sanity checks is so conspicuous, but there's no guarantee those checks would be competently programmed either.
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Jun 4, 2017 00:01
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I think a lot of it just comes down to the fact that there were very few games so ambitious on the game boy at the time, so all the stuff that seems obvious now was stuff no one knew about at the time. Not even really bad programming, it's just that when you try to make something that big and you've never done it before, poo poo falls through the cracks. And to be fair, for all that Gen 1 was indeed complete buggy jank, I played through it about a million times as a kid and came up against something game breaking maybe once, as a result of doing something the game told me not to do, so I have to wonder, how broken are those games, really? How much of it is just that we've had over twenty years to find every tiny little weirdass thing that doesn't work quite right? ... okay, yeah, the games are pretty broken.
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Jun 4, 2017 00:12
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They're pretty broken, but also they hold together well enough that millions of kids were able to play them the whole way through repeatedly without anything going critically wrong. By comparison, a certain AAA company is known for releasing games with nebulous bugs that can wholly prevent progress and trigger for no clear reason beyond the game decided to say "gently caress you'.
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Jun 4, 2017 00:18
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GirlCalledBob posted:And to be fair, for all that Gen 1 was indeed complete buggy jank, I played through it about a million times as a kid and came up against something game breaking maybe once, as a result of doing something the game told me not to do, so I have to wonder, how broken are those games, really? How much of it is just that we've had over twenty years to find every tiny little weirdass thing that doesn't work quite right? I mean, everyone knew missingno and that the anime lied to us about ghosts being good vs psychics E: that said a lot of the jank is bad balance as much as buggy programming, just look at that list.
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Jun 4, 2017 00:19
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Shugojin posted:By comparison, a certain AAA company is known for releasing games with nebulous bugs that can wholly prevent progress and trigger for no clear reason beyond the game decided to say "gently caress you'. Basically this. Gen 1 has issues - a lot of issues - but odd quirks and balance problems are way more forgivable and even kind of endearing, especially when you compare it to some of the poo poo that modern games try and pull. I say that, but I'm enjoying the 'holy poo poo red/blue/yellow were broken as hell, what the gently caress' chat, because it's kind of fascinating just how many things managed to be broken, and in such incredible ways.
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Jun 4, 2017 00:29
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Shugojin posted:They're pretty broken, but also they hold together well enough that millions of kids were able to play them the whole way through repeatedly without anything going critically wrong. In a funny way those game breaking glitches probably allowed a lot more kids to finish the game than if those glitches weren't there.
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Jun 4, 2017 00:47
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GirlCalledBob posted:I think a lot of it just comes down to the fact that there were very few games so ambitious on the game boy at the time, so all the stuff that seems obvious now was stuff no one knew about at the time. Not even really bad programming, it's just that when you try to make something that big and you've never done it before, poo poo falls through the cracks. I'd say the glitches were, oddly enough, a net benefit for the game, at least at the time. Playground rumors of all the cool, weird poo poo in the game make more people interested, and seeing that some of them were true made it easier for them to keep spreading. Pokemon hit a lucky island of jank, where it was stable enough to work perfectly well for just playing through and trying to catch them all, but weird enough that there was plenty of crazy bullshit to reward people who like to experiment with edge cases. Glitches were mostly "hey, lookit what I found!" as opposed to "What is this piece of poo poo?"
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Jun 4, 2017 00:53
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There's also the fact that the game also centers around collecting and there's the desire to find and obtain the coolest rarest thing possible. If you can find this weird rectangle of TV static that somehow gives you infinite masterballs, who knows what other cool poo poo you can find hidden within the game if you do X with Y. That also fired up a ton of rumors and motivated people to delve into the game's code and learn it front to back. It might also be the reason why people to this day find and leak tons of stuff whenever a new game is going to come out shortly.
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Jun 4, 2017 01:04
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But then there's things like Focus Energy cutting your crit chance instead of increasing it. That's just oversight. I know development standards were different 20 years ago, but seriously, that should have been noticed.
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Jun 4, 2017 01:13
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Solumin posted:But then there's things like Focus Energy cutting your crit chance instead of increasing it. That's just oversight. no different from the infamous Saw Glitch from FFL
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Jun 4, 2017 01:37
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Solumin posted:But then there's things like Focus Energy cutting your crit chance instead of increasing it. That's just oversight. Honestly, there were so many 80s and 90s RPGs with things like stats that didn't do anything and busted actions that I'm not shocked some checks like this for Gen I dwell through the cracks. A lot of early JRPGs are pretty glitchy.
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Jun 4, 2017 03:01
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Solumin posted:But then there's things like Focus Energy cutting your crit chance instead of increasing it. That's just oversight. Even now it's stupidly hard to notice that someone typed in / instead of * by mistake. That kind of bug is actually one of the hardest to figure out if you don't have the resulting numbers staring you in the face at any point.
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Jun 4, 2017 03:24
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