For those of you whose lives don’t revolve around constantly refreshing your Facebook home page and scrolling through Reddit until all the links turn purple, it’s time to consider a lifestyle change because you’ve really been missing out. I’m not talking about looking at pictures of cats and seeing Buzzfeed quizes spammed all over your newsfeed, I’m talking about TwitchPlaysPokemon.
If you went ahead and clicked the link you’re probably now highly confused as to why Pokemon Red is being emulated with a hyperactive chat room next to it. In a nutshell, you type into the chat room what you want Red to do. If you want him to walk left, you type “left”. If you want him to hit the A button, you type “a”. Simple, yeah? Except not, because as of earlier today there were approximately 60,000 people typing in commands. Which is why it took hours to get through Route 9 (….the road between Cerulean and Rock Tunnel) because you had trolls consistently typing “down” so you had shit like this going on repeatedly:
Not gonna lie, I watched the live stream for an hour straight watching everyone try to cut down the tree to get to the Celadon gym. It sounds stupid, but honestly I got really fucking pumped whenever Red got in front of the tree and the START menu popped up. My adrenaline would spike, and then because of all the sporadic commands the Pokedex would get opened instead and I’d sit there listening to Bulbasaur and Charmander sounds. The whole thing is on a 20 second delay, adding to the clusterfucking of commands.
Now I realize this whole thing may sound a little dumb, but then you have to take into account the sort of comedic cult it’s breeding, which makes following the whole thing worthwhile. Here’s the most basic summary there is:They start out the game with choosing Charmander (let’s be honest, Bulbasaur is for scrubs and there’s 5 million better water Pokemon than Squirtle available) and named it “ABBBBBBK,”which everyone began referring to “Abby K” for short (don’t forget the thousands of people typing in commands, hence the the stupid nickname). They start going through the game and catch a Pidgey (now a level 44 Pidgeot) and a Rattata named JLVWNNOOOO, more affectionately referred to as “Jay Leno.”
Where shit starts to get weird though is after they get the Helix Fossil. Whenever you open the Items Bag and select an item, you have the option to toss or use it. Most items wind up getting tossed (throwing out a perfectly good Nugget) or used on stupid things (hence why they have a Rattata that knows Dig and Thunderbolt), but you can’t toss Key Items like the Helix Fossil. So whenever the bag gets opened there’s a 99% chance you’ll get the joy of watching the HF get selected multiple times just to have Oak tell you that you can’t use it before a stray “B” command comes along.
Oh, and “SAVE” gets picked a lot even though the game never shuts down, making saving pointless. For whatever reason escaping my grasp, the Helix Fossil has now become a religion within the people playing the game, with the Dome Fossil being its evil opposite. Whenever something bad happens you’ll get chatroom messages along the lines of “PRAISE BE TO LORD HELIX, OUR ONE TRUE SAVIOR”, whereas bad things get attributed to the Dome Fossil. For example, there was a strategy going around that the very last spot in the party should be saved for Lapras, because it’s a freebie and they’re going to need a Surf Pokemon (if they even get that far). However, some people thought they should just get Eevee and evolve it into a Vaporeon, which would require them to buy a Water Stone. So to everyone’s dismay they grab the Eevee, and whaddya know, they wind up with a Fire Stone. Good job guys, not only is Flareon the worst Eevee evolution, but now you have two fire pokemon that can’t Surf.
Bummer, right? Now Flareon needs to go into the PC to make room for something that isn’t as useful as a bag of dicks, and the fact that they got stuck with it in the first place was attributed to the doings of the Dome Fossil. They try to put it in the PC, but instead release Abby K and Jay Leno. The only competent Pokemon left was Pidgeot, now affectionately referred to as “Bird Jesus” because it literally carried them through Rock Tunnel. In the process of literally walking in circles in the Celadon Rocket Hideout, Flareon (referred to as the False Prophet) got released into the wild at some point and everyone rejoiced. Because of the warp mazes in the Rocket Hideout, they spent 24 hours trying to get to Giovanni, which spurred the creation of Anarchy vs. Democracy. Basically you spam in the chat room whether you want “ANARCHY” or “DEMOCRACY” and it tallies up the votes to see what the majority is. If the majority says democracy, the computer tallies up the command inputs of “left”, “down”, “A”, etc. and whichever has the most after 10 seconds is what get input on screen. If Anarchy is the majority, well, every command input gets its time to shine again and you get to watch Red walk into walls and shit.
Democracy is what finally got them the Lift Key in the Rocket Hideout, but honestly it completely defeats the point of the whole game. Also, it’s not nearly as exciting when Democracy is in effect because of the imposed game lag, and watching a level 30+ Charmeleon lose to a level 24 Weepinbell because it used Growl every single turn was hilarious.
In other words, everyone needs to go right now and start spamming “ANARCHY” in the chat room, because this whole “progress” thing is bullshit and it’s more fun to watch a level 44 Pidgeot lose against random Oddishes because Sand-Attack keeps getting selected.