okay so I just watched a yt video about breaking pokemon games and need to talk about one of my favorite game glitches OAT
so I havent personally played this game so apologies for the lack of specific, and also apparently it;s not actually real, but still its fucking amazing, and at the end I'll share a real bug with the exact same mechanism that you could do right now with just a certain game
so we will be talking about the phenomenon known as unsigned integers. basically it's a concept in coding where if in a code of for example a game the value of some sort of variable turn negative, the entire thing flips. or, in human terms, the machine looks at negative numbers, freaks out like a kid just learning zero isnt the smallest number, and desperately scrambles to cover it up via making it the largest number possible
now the glitch comes from one of the early Civilisation games, Civ II I believe, and some of you might already know where this is going. To those who very justifyibly dont, the needed context is: in the game you make a civilisation and choose a leader/faction
so basically, according to this urban legend, there was a truly comical bug if one decided to buth choose Ghandi and Democracy. You see, each leader has an agggresion counter, which determines how likely is it that said leader suggests/tries aggressive options. It runs on a scale from 0 to 255, with Ghandi scoring a 1. Now Democracy, if chosen, will lower the leader's aggression counter by 2. According to oral history, if one chose Ghandi and Democracy, the lowering of his aggression stat from 1 to -1 caused the system to freak tf out and flip it to 255, causing Ghandi to adopt the US home defense system and start to fucking nuke everybody
sadly this seems to be just a legends, that, funnily enough, did get coded in as a legit thing in Civ X, but here's an example where you can absolutely wreck a game using this and some other principles
so the games are the 3 original pokemon games, or blue/green, red, and yellow. the method I'll describe works only for the two former, but there is a way to do it in yellow too.
first of all, one must choose charmander. the pokemon has to know growl and be poisonable, and only charmander of the starters can do both.
secondly, the player must NOT battle their rival in around Viridian Forest, nor should they trigger the last trainer battle of the forest
now, step 3 is most likely the trickiest of them all: the player has to trigger a poison screen (outside battle damage from your pokemon getting poisoned, applies every 6 steps or so I believe), a wild pokemon encounter, and the aformentioned final trainer battle at the same time. this means that the player has to get poisoned, ensure that they are *exactly* in poison-damage distance from the grass in front of the trainer, save, and reset the game until they happen to also get a wild encounter
next, the player has to die. let your one charmander succumb to the sweet embrace of death, after which the trainer will try to trigger a pokemon battle, but isnt able to, since the player is being transported into the pokecenter.
next up the player has a few options, but 3 of them are the best
for them the player has to encounter either:
after encountering one of those, the player must use Growl on it *exactly* 6 times, and it isnt specified if they must kill it or flee, so I'd do more research/save beforehand and see which one works
regardless, the player must now head into Viridian Forest. upon entry, the trainer from before wil try to start a battle, but instead of that, one of three level 1 pokemon will appear depending on which pokemon was growled in the last step
in case of the rival's Squirtle, or option A, the pokemon will be a Gengar
In case of a level 3 Pidgey, or option B, the pokemon will be a Nidoking
In case of a level 4 Pidgey, or option C, the pokemon will be an Ivysaur
the player then must catch the pokemon with only pokeballs, since basically any attack from your above lvl 10 pokemon will OHKO the pokemon, and that is not what we're here for
after that, encounter literally any pokemon, with the newly aquired lvl 1 glitchmon leading, and immediately switch out to your actual starter to defeat the pokemon. this is done so that the glitchmon gets XP
and now, it is very important that you get as weak of a pokemon as possible as your opponent, because if your mon gets above 53 XP this glitch won't work
but, if you got this fat, there is a secret I must share
you see, one of the reasons why these three are the best ones to use with this glitch, is because their experience gain is in the medium slow category. now you're probably asking "but Tiger, what does that even mean???" and to that I say that that is not important. the one thing you must know is that because no pokemon in blue/green/red/yellow were meant to be lvl 1, the medium slow category pokemon have -54 XP.
and now some of you probably can very much see where this is going. you see, just like in the sadly mythical case of the Nuclear Ghandi, the game freaks tf out over negative numbers existing and treats -54 not as -54, but as over 16 MILLION, aka the amount of XP needed for the pokemon to be level 100. so when you get 53 or less XP, the game tries to calculate your pokemon's level, sees a negative number, fails to comprehend its existence, and makes your glitchmon level 100. that's right. ONE HUNDRED.
best part? all of this bs happens BEFORE THE FIRST GYM
you have a max lvl mon BEFORE THE VERY FIRST BOSSFIGHT
this is genuinely insane and I hope you had as good of a time learning about it as I had <3
