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Solumin
Jan 11, 2013

Robindaybird posted:

no different from the infamous Saw Glitch from FFL

hopeandjoy posted:

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.

Yeah, good point! You just reminded me of Final Fantasy VI, which had "Evade" and "Magic Evade" stats, except "Evade" was never used for anything. This made the "Blind" debuff useless, among other things.

senrath posted:

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.

Yes, in the wrong place, that sort of error can have subtle effects that are hard to pin down. But it should be really easy to have unit tests checking that your stat changes work the way you expect them too! And if you're smart, you'll have 2 tests: one checks that whatever stat tracks crit chance changes the way you want it to after you use Focus Energy, and another that makes sure changing crit chance correctly influences the number of critical hit rates.

But, of course, back then they probably didn't have the time or resources for that sort of testing, and even today video games are famous for doing gently caress-all when it comes to tests.

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LAY-ZX
Nov 10, 2009

The Ghost/Psychic thing is probably the most egregious example of poor testing in gen 1, even well after the games released guides and other official material continued to be incorrect about it because they were so sure the type chart worked fine that nobody felt like taking five minutes to double check it.

Haifisch
Nov 13, 2010

Objection! I object! That was... objectionable!



Taco Defender
To be fair, the only Ghost move that used the normal damage formula was Lick. Even if the type chart worked right, it wouldn't be hard to find a move with more effective power than a SE Lick.

And Ghost was a Physical type, even though the only ghost line was all Special attackers.

Gen I was really more put together by what sounded cool than by what made for good game balance.

Onmi
Jul 12, 2013

If someone says it one more time I'm having Florina show up as a corpse. I'm not even kidding, I was pissed off with people doing that shit back in 2010, and I'm not dealing with it now in 2016.

Haifisch posted:

To be fair, the only Ghost move that used the normal damage formula was Lick. Even if the type chart worked right, it wouldn't be hard to find a move with more effective power than a SE Lick.

And Ghost was a Physical type, even though the only ghost line was all Special attackers.

Gen I was really more put together by what sounded cool than by what made for good game balance.

Never stops being funny thought

>Ghost was made 2× against Psychic instead of 0×

Prism
Dec 22, 2007

yospos

Solumin posted:

Yeah, good point! You just reminded me of Final Fantasy VI, which had "Evade" and "Magic Evade" stats, except "Evade" was never used for anything. This made the "Blind" debuff useless, among other things.

Technically it still does something! It stops Strago from learning Lores. He can't do that if he can't see them, and that part works fine.

Did you know that there were some other statuses that were supposed to give you evade penalties that don't work because of this bug? It's true! For instance, Reraise is supposed to drop your evasion (I guess you don't care about getting stabbed if you're just going to get back up) but doesn't.

FF6 has a ton of bugs for the same reason as Pokemon: no room for error checks. It's kind of impressive, actually. I helped collect a list at one point and could name a ton of varying severity. Evade is just an easy to spot one; there's lots and lots of others.

Commander Keene
Dec 21, 2016

Faster than the others



hopeandjoy posted:

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.
A lot of games end up really glitchy. The good ones end up with glitches that (mostly) do fun things, like Missingno or the trick in Wild ARMs that allowed you to underflow item quantities and get a million stat-boosting apples or bullet clips or whatever. The bad ones end up crashing every five minutes and forcing you to save in a different slot each time because this time might be the one that eats your save. It's all about the quality of the glitch, not the quantity of glitches.

Like Clockwork
Feb 17, 2012

It's only the Final Battle once all the players are ready.

A goodass glitch is honestly a rare thing, and RGB (although Missingno. was not available through the Old Man Fly trick in Green; that was an error introduced in localization! ...although we did miss out on select glitches, so I guess there's that) were really very stable for how buggy they were, and how good the glitches are.

Honestly if Yellow were about as unstable as RB I'd probably still play it; it still has a lot of the good glitches, but they're harder to get to. Which makes sense from a game dev standpoint—you don't want kids breaking their game on accident—but from a "I want to make this game do dumb poo poo" standpoint it's a bit sad. :j:

Ace of Aces
Feb 25, 2017

ZENRYOKU ZENKAI

hopeandjoy posted:

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.

A lot of later ones are too. FF7 has the same problem as FF6 with an entire stat that doesn't work (MDef does nothing; magic damage defense is based on the Spirit stat only - although this one was fixed), and in possibly my favorite example of 'FF7 is loving weird', Guard Scorpion's base stats are never actually used.

When the fight with Guard Scorpion begins, it runs a startup script that changes all of its stats from A to B. When it goes into counterattack stance, its stats are changed from B to C. But when it exits counterattack stance, its stats change from C to B, meaning that stat values A - the stats that are baked into the enemy - are never used.

There are other examples that range from oversights to 'what is even going on here', along with tons of enemies that have dummied-out moves. The Death Penalty and Berserk 'glitches' are a pretty good example of how sanity checks can cause unintended behavior and how unintended behavior can form a sanity check, respectively. Vincent's Death Penalty is his ultimate weapon, and its gimmick is that it gets a power boost based on the number of enemies he's killed. At sane numbers, it works exactly as intended, but if you go miles out of your way farm (it caps at 65535), it begins to interact strangely with the way the game handles damage, which is that first it works out the power, then applies it to the enemy's defense, then if the result is >9999 it becomes 9999 and that's what's displayed. If the initial damage check is too high, it will become a negative value, which makes the game go 'oh poo poo what are you doing' and it runs a failsafe script designed to avoid a panic where it just halts all its running functions and instantly kills the target, which is mostly famous for being able to one-hit Emerald Weapon (who you could beat hundreds of times in the time it took you to farm that many kills on Death Penalty).
The 'Berserk' glitch is actually a glitch, but it glitches in a way that prevents the game from crashing. Unlike in earlier FF games where most enemies had a generic 'attack' just like the party, due to the 3D animations in FF7, they had to specify generic and special attacks for each enemy individually, and needed to specify one of those attacks to be an attack that would be used if the enemy was berserked. Unfortunately, due to oversights, they just didn't do that for some enemies that are nonetheless vulnerable to berserk. This results in the game freaking out and 'randomly' accessing data to find an attack to use. Fortunately, due to the way the RNG works, the data it always comes up with results in it reading an attack with too much MP to be cast, so the game just prints '[Enemy name] skill power is all used up.' and the enemy skips its turn. If you hack a mob to have enough MP to cast it (more than 1000, which isn't legal in the first place), the game crashes. So the fact that the game is broken prevents it from actually crashing.

Sadly these days most games are either too complex, or have too-secure sanitychecking, which typically results in fairly harmless graphical glitches and not much else - anything more severe tends to make the game panic and leads to a crash, especially with console games. It's certainly one of the things I miss most about games from 15-20 years ago.

Zereth
Jul 9, 2003



Ace of Aces posted:

Sadly these days most games are either too complex, or have too-secure sanitychecking, which typically results in fairly harmless graphical glitches and not much else - anything more severe tends to make the game panic and leads to a crash, especially with console games. It's certainly one of the things I miss most about games from 15-20 years ago.
Or you just fall out of the level.

Sorites
Sep 10, 2012

Zereth posted:

Or you just fall out of the level.

Or an enemy's ragdoll breaks and it turns into that stretched-out boomerang thing.

Don Gato
Apr 28, 2013

Actually a bipedal cat.
Grimey Drawer
Or you get rude Frenchmen barging into a cutscene and loudly talking over everyone trying to move the plot along.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5DzsFMsIZPM if you want the source

Ace of Aces
Feb 25, 2017

ZENRYOKU ZENKAI

Zereth posted:

Or you just fall out of the level.

I had that happen to me in FF15 after I spent 30 minutes cheesing the Adamantoise, and before I saved. I was less than impressed.

Zereth
Jul 9, 2003



Ace of Aces posted:

I had that happen to me in FF15 after I spent 30 minutes cheesing the Adamantoise, and before I saved. I was less than impressed.
I was trying to climb up to the second story of some pod bed thing in Prey and fell into it, and while jumping around trying to get back out I then fell out of the level entirely. Fortunately the most recent save wasn't far.

Arcade Rabbit
Nov 11, 2013

Zereth posted:

Or you just fall out of the level.

Or, slightly adjacent to the level.

And thus, speedrunning was born.

Ace of Aces
Feb 25, 2017

ZENRYOKU ZENKAI

Arcade Rabbit posted:

And thus, speedrunning was born.

While the modern western tradition largely came about by doing that in Metroid Prime, organized speedrunning dates back to at least the days of replay-sharing of Doom via BBS and classic message boards. My favorite bullshit Doom technique is that if you blow yourself up right, because you're shorter when you're dead, you can slide under obstacles that should block your way in order to trigger the end-of-level switch (while dead). Seeing it in practice is amusing, imagining what it looks like in-universe is hilarious.

Blaze Dragon
Aug 28, 2013
LOWTAX'S SPINE FUND

Zereth posted:

Or you just fall out of the level.

I have an example of that one close to me.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kvGbbDRryeE

I'm still not sure what caused it, every other time I used that move I had no issues whatsoever.

Ryushikaze
Mar 5, 2013

Ace of Aces posted:

I had that happen to me in FF15 after I spent 30 minutes cheesing the Adamantoise, and before I saved. I was less than impressed.

It happened to me while I was heading to fight the final boss. Unfortunately, there is a Z buffer to trigger cutscenes, so I couldn't just fall under reality forever and had to reload. I only lost like 10 minutes of wandering derpily, though.

Bydoless
Feb 25, 2017

Cooperate? Surrender the Forums you call "cooperate?"
This is quite a big update, so I've decided to put everything in two separate SSLP Test Posts.



https://lpix.org/sslptest/index.php?id=147836

Bydoless fucked around with this message at 09:46 on Jun 10, 2017

Bydoless
Feb 25, 2017

Cooperate? Surrender the Forums you call "cooperate?"
Edit: I do like to apologize again for having such a large update.



https://lpix.org/sslptest/index.php?id=147835

______________________________________________________________________

Misc:

Map for both Opal and Peridot Wards

All items in this chapter.

All trainers fought in this chapter. (excluding Julia)

All pokemon obtainable in this chapter.

Sometimes when starting a new game, the Pachirisu may be replaced with a less worthwhile Zigzagoon.

Sometimes, when reloading a save in some building, there may be no music until you go back outside.

______________________________________________________________________

Music:

Most of the music here are GlithxCity remixes.

Unfortunately, GlitchxCity thinks this game is worth working with because a few of these are original to this game and not a remix taken from their site and shoved somewhere semi-relevant.

Normal Victory (Gym Leader Victory Remix) + Pokemon Symphonic Evolutions

Major Victory (Mystery Dungeon Primal Dialga Remix)

Catch your Dreams (Black and White Entralink Remix)*

Opal Ward

Peridot Ward

Pokemon Center (Pokemon Center Arrangement)

Evolution

Wild Pokemon (X and Y Super Training Remix)

Trainer Battle (Hoenn Trainer Battle remix?)

Meteor Grunt Battle (Johto Legendary Remix v.III)

Gym Leader Battle (X and Y Legendary Battle Remix)

Rival Battle (Black 2 and White 2 Champion Iris Remix)

To Greater Heights (Mystery Dungeon Sky Tower Remix)

Atmospheric - Flux (Rocket Hideout Remix)**

Atmospheric - Explore (Mystery Dungeon Primal Diala Remix v.II)***

Sinister Uprising (???)

* Used in the New Game intro.

** The Mosswater Factory uses this track, but at around half pitch and speed.

*** The portion of the Underground Railnet we can access here uses this song, but at around half pitch and speed.

Bydoless fucked around with this message at 10:00 on Jun 10, 2017

Antivehicular
Dec 30, 2011


I wanna sing one for the cars
That are right now headed silent down the highway
And it's dark and there is nobody driving And something has got to give

"Reborn City is an ecological shithole and no Pokemon want to live here!"
*eight encounterable Pokemon in initial patch of grass, 3-4 more in most other locations, more trades/special encounters in first two zones than entire mainline Pokemon games*

Ace of Aces
Feb 25, 2017

ZENRYOKU ZENKAI
According to my sources, to evolve Inkay you hit the B equivalent to cancel the evolution in progress.

SyntheticPolygon
Dec 20, 2013

Lotsa exposition in this game, and wow look at those terrains.

Good music though. But from the looks of it maybe not used in the most appropriate places.

Sindai
Jan 24, 2007
i want to achieve immortality through not dying
A character who likes explosions! Wacky!

Vinylshadow
Mar 20, 2017

Most of Reborn's music doesn't appeal to me since having high-quality whatever-genre-of-music-Glitch's-music-is-called doesn't fit with the sprite aesthetic (although some of the custom music does - Uranium did something similar with some of its tracks as well)

I much prefer SuperiorLarxene, Lala19357, TheGuitahHeroe and a few others who use DPPt/HGSS/BW/BW2 soundfonts for their Remixes/Original Compositions (and most of them have moved on to use XY/ORAS/SuMo-styled themes, but such is the life of a Pokémon music maker)

Eh, if there's one good thing about Reborn, it's that (some of) their Spritework has a lot of effort put into it - for example, a few trainers actually match their overworld sprites


Is it sad that "Espurr snapped back to reality" made me sing "whoops, there goes gravity"?

Leraika
Jun 14, 2015

Luckily, I *did* save your old avatar. Fucked around and found out indeed.
Ughhhhh, Julia.

Ughhhhh one-off terrains that do literally nothing but give your opponent an advantage.

And the thing that infuriated me most about Reborn when I played it - for all the inclusiveness and representation it preaches, oh boy that sure is a lot of very stereotyped brown people. (I'd forgotten about the scientists in Julia's gym because Julia's gym is the worst because Julia is awful)

Carlioo
Dec 26, 2012

:krakentoot:

Bydoless posted:

Hey, Enoby. Terrain Effects. You know them. Reborn has them. 37 of them in fact

D-did they actually come up with 37 different types of terrain with different effects? I don't know if I should be impressed by that, or angry that they seriously believe that anyone could remember 37 different terrains.

Acebuckeye13
Nov 2, 2010


If you or someone you know has a gambling problem, crisis counseling and referral services can be accessed by calling
1-800-GAMBLER


Ultra Carp
Jesus that's a lot of text

TracerK
Jun 25, 2013

Bydoless posted:


The devs sure do love their Japanese, to the point that they have to fill some of the city walls with Japanese characters like here.

Anybody that can speak moonspeak tell if they're actually saying something or just plain gibberish?

It looks like it says "ぼれゆれ" (Bo-re-yu-re), but the drawing of the first character irritates me far more than it should. (Why did they cross the vertical line and make the second half look like a "Ma" (ま) instead!?)

None of the dictionaries I use has any definition for it. Googling said phrase got me jack poo poo, but Google Translate has inexplicably translated it to "An idiot". Make of that what you will. :shrug:

Also, thank you so much for rewriting the dialogue so it doesn't make me want to claw out my eyes, especially with the particularly annoying ones like Florina Julia everyone in this game.

TracerK fucked around with this message at 16:09 on Jun 10, 2017

krisslanza
May 6, 2011

Carlioo posted:

D-did they actually come up with 37 different types of terrain with different effects? I don't know if I should be impressed by that, or angry that they seriously believe that anyone could remember 37 different terrains.

From what I understand, according to TVTropes, the terrain effects pretty much just exist for the sole purpose of ensuring the major battles involving gym leaders and... others, I guess.. always have an advantage over you, because uhm, I dunno. Artificial difficulty?
The maddening thing is someone made another fangame called Pokemon Rejuvenation, I think, which is a 'spiritual successor' to Reborn that the key point is to be even more difficult.
Also the story is just about as bad.

Prism
Dec 22, 2007

yospos
The concept of using field effects during boss fights to shake things up is not a bad one, but the actual implementation they used is a bit more of a problem.

FPzero
Oct 20, 2008

Game Over
Return of Mido

So okay, that was interesting stuff. I like the idea of more pokemon hanging out in the world that you can obtain through events, though Reborn maybe went too far with it and obscure conditions. Also wow that city is big and needlessly overdecorated.


A few general LP presentation notes I had in mind. For future updates, please consider making them smaller. I know you apologized for this but there were a number of place I could've seen you cutting off the updates. There was just so much information and text and extras included in the posts that I was partially skimming by the end of it all. Like, good effort getting it all, but maybe too much effort? I'm not sure it's necessary to have big lists of the trainers you can fight with their dialogue and all that added to the updates Also, while I appreciate you paraphrasing the text, I clicked on one to see what I was missing and saw that the full dialogue also includes things like characters showing up or moving into new areas. When paraphrasing, don't forget to actually describe the movements and characters because I know I got confused until I realized I was missing half the context.

A good start overall. Most of my presentation complaints are relatively minor so take them as you wish.

Leraika
Jun 14, 2015

Luckily, I *did* save your old avatar. Fucked around and found out indeed.
Personally, I like the collection of NPCs and challenge/win/followup quotes (because it's usually dumb or memes or dumb memes) but it'd be fine if that sort of thing was bonus content.

krisslanza
May 6, 2011

FPzero posted:

So okay, that was interesting stuff. I like the idea of more pokemon hanging out in the world that you can obtain through events, though Reborn maybe went too far with it and obscure conditions. Also wow that city is big and needlessly overdecorated.

Oh, you don't even know yet. :allears:
This will be a magical ride.

Omnicrom
Aug 3, 2007
Snorlax Afficionado


Prism posted:

The concept of using field effects during boss fights to shake things up is not a bad one, but the actual implementation they used is a bit more of a problem.

Oh god is the actual implementation the problem.

Look at Sun and Moon, that was a game where the boss fights could be made memorable and challenging via the power of a gimmick, and the difference was the gimmick wasn't overblown and didn't suck. What did the Totem Pokemon have that made them unique? Two things: A stat boost and some helpers. Notably both of these things are stuff that's already established in the game. Stat boosts are a thing in Pokemon Sun/Moon normally and so are SOS battles. SuMo didn't need 37 discrete field bonuses to make a challenging battle, it did quite fine with nothing more than "+2 speed and also some Castforms". The game didn't and doesn't need "Explosion is Electric and bonus power and Focus Punch always fail and countered by Mud Sport", that's something needlessly faffed up. It's overdesigned as all hell.

Speaking of implementation the concept of spending a big chunk of the game in a giant city is actually kind of cool, as is getting a slew of pokemon from finding them around town or via events. It's honestly the sort of stuff I'd want to see in a fan-game. The idea of exploring a different kind of setting or breaking conventions in neat ways is the sort of thing that in general I think Fan games and fan media should do. However the city lay-out looks like a complete mess and the level cap is very poorly considered and the writing is bad and I read all the horror stories in the Uranium thread about this game's writing and the incredible edgitude so I'm not holding my breathe it turns out well.

Also dumb memes are never the hallmark of quality writing in a fangame. Just saying.

Tired Moritz
Mar 25, 2012

wish Lowtax would get tired of YOUR POSTS

(n o i c e)
why does focus punch even fail? uggh it's too electric to focus

rannum
Nov 3, 2012

Thank you for taking the time to go into such detail on all the nonsense involved with this. The terrain changes are just insane on their own, much less the context of it being with the gym leader.

I kind of like the idea of cancelling out terrains but then they don't even give you a freebie. You have a dozen different special pokemon you can get under certain conditions, if you don't want to just give away the key to victory at least put a diglett in limited time event somewhere in the city.

Waffleman_
Jan 20, 2011


I don't wanna I don't wanna I don't wanna I don't wanna!!!

Wow, even like ignoring the mechanics, this is just miserable.

girl dick energy
Sep 30, 2009

You think you have the wherewithal to figure out my puzzle vagina?

Bydoless posted:

This is quite a big update, so I've decided to put everything in two separate SSLP Test Posts.
"Oh, c'mon, Bydo, it can't be that ba-" :stare:

Edit It's over eight thousand words long.

girl dick energy fucked around with this message at 19:50 on Jun 10, 2017

Jen X
Sep 29, 2014

To bring light to the darkness, whether that darkness be ignorance, injustice, apathy, or stagnation.

Waffleman_ posted:

Wow, even like ignoring the mechanics, this is just miserable.

amen

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Sindai
Jan 24, 2007
i want to achieve immortality through not dying

FPzero posted:

A few general LP presentation notes I had in mind. For future updates, please consider making them smaller. I know you apologized for this but there were a number of place I could've seen you cutting off the updates. There was just so much information and text and extras included in the posts that I was partially skimming by the end of it all. Like, good effort getting it all, but maybe too much effort? I'm not sure it's necessary to have big lists of the trainers you can fight with their dialogue and all that added to the updates Also, while I appreciate you paraphrasing the text, I clicked on one to see what I was missing and saw that the full dialogue also includes things like characters showing up or moving into new areas. When paraphrasing, don't forget to actually describe the movements and characters because I know I got confused until I realized I was missing half the context.
:agreed: with all of this.

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