Pokemon Fire Red: Chaos in Kanto INCOMPLETE (but I tried so hard!)

[xyzzysqrl]

Chaos in Kanto was an attempt at randomizing Pokemon Fire Red, the remake of the start of the line of fuzzy little monster-collecting games, to be a totally random experience using every pokemon that had been announced or released by the time the mod author started their hack.

Unfortunately, due to some weird circumstances, it could not be completed. My first tip-off that something was wrong came during the intro sequences, when people occasionally dropped the first letter of their text box. Later, an old man offered to describe "eight badges" but actually offered ten choices, the lowest of which caused some interesting issues.

When talking to a little girl on the roof of the department store locked the game, I knew things were trouble but I did my best to carry on and keep Pandora, my trainer and chaos insert, rolling through the story beats. Eventually however we reached a point where it was impossible to carry on. Pushing an elevator button hardlocked the game, and that elevator was plot-critical.

I like to imagine Pandora and her team of misfit legendaries and strangely-OP pokemon simply entered that elevator in the Silph building and never came out. My emulator simply couldn't handle rendering the 5D hypercube she activated as she went transdimentional and blew off into the multiverse.

With no boundaries before/after/within her, she has embraced a form of chaos we cannot know. If you want to imagine her future, imagine a [?trainer?] in fields without number, catching subdimensional mysteries and probably like eight fuckin' Dialga.

Godspeed, Pandora and company. You were not a failure, you were just incomprehensible to the last observable moment.

Comments

[kjorteo]

Repeating what we said in the stream chat:

This Fire Red ROMhack was not a remake of the gen 1 Kanto games.

It was a prequel.

This was MissingNo.'s backstory.

When Pandora and her team entered the elevator, she ascended to a higher plane of glitchy omnipotence. She lives on as an entropic mass of (glitchy characters representing more than 99) Master Balls and a monument to the unchecked hubris of scoemce.

A fitting end to this tale, and the beginning of so many more.

[xyzzysqrl]

This is probably also a sort of demicanon.

[penguinmayhem]

the doors closed




and they were never seen again

[xyzzysqrl]

You can see their shadows wandering off somewhere
They won't make it home, but they really don't care
They wanted the highway
They're happier there today.

[bhagpuss]

I humbly salute your masterful lyric-fu! I googled the verse, curious to see what obscurity lay behind it and when I found it, as I expected I recognized neither the name of the band or the song. Then I hit Play.

FFS! So that's who and what that is! As the first comment in the YouTube thread says "There was this one summer in the 90's they played it on the radio a couple times and I loved it, but the DJ never said the name, and then they never played it again." I mean, it's not a great song (Although it has some of the best pauses I can remember) but it does roll along.

Thanks for reminding me of it. Now I can forget it again for another few years.

[xyzzysqrl]

Fastball's "All The Pain Money Can Buy" is actually one of the few CDs I owned physical copies of, back when. I had a brief fascination with the band. They played the absolute hell out of it in Maryland, I can tell you that.