Hello!!!!!
I’ve been an enjoyer of Pokemon since I was a little tiny creature! My first console as a kid was a DS, but my family never got me any Pokemon games. Later on, as I was exploring Youtube, I learned of all the Pokemon nonsense and became interested. Or maybe it was the Pokemon cards dominating the school playground?
Randomly one day, I was given a crusty Gameboy Advance with Pokemon Silver as a gift from one of my older siblings! I WAS SO EXCITED!!
(there was brown gunk in the speaker, it was really gross)
But alas, the earlier Pokemon games had an annoying flaw. The components in the cartridge that hold the save data and that act as a real-time clock need a constant supply of power. A small circular battery is soldered into each cartridge, and when it runs dry you can no longer save your game…
This copy of Pokemon Silver had a dead battery, so I couldn’t save. I brought it to the used game store right away. Funnily enough, I think they did battery replacements there, but I was too foolish to even think of that. I was able to trade in Silver and get a copy of Pokemon Ruby!
I don’t know why it has bite marks on it
I played the first hour of the game like, five times and reset when I got stuck. Whenever I played RPGs as a kid, that was my strategy. I never beat any of them…
NOW FOR A LESSON IN POKEMON!!!!
The Pokemon games are generally split up into “Generations”. This mostly refers to the in-game mechanics and Pokemon that exist. Pokemon Ruby is part of Generation III.
Ruby and Sapphire were the first games for the Gameboy Advance, released in 2003. They’re both basically the same exact game with some minor story differences, and different obtainable Pokemon. Games are released in twos to promote trading between players (and money capitalism).
Colosseum is a GameCube game with its own original story and world. It contains some rare and cool Pokemon that you can transfer to your Gameboy games. XD is a sequel and more of the same.
FireRed and LeafGreen are remakes of the first Pokemon games in the new and shiny Gameboy Advance engine.
Finally, Emerald is a third version that goes along with Ruby and Sapphire. It contains the same world, but even different-er Pokemon available and lots of added content and niceties!
All of these games support the 251 Pokemon that first appeared in older games, as well as 135 new Pokemon. To collect them all for yourself though, you must give Nintendo lots of money and have access to basically every one of these games!
What?
So, I’m setting out to 100% Generation III! I’ve owned all of the Gameboy games for a long time (before they were $100-$200 each, lucky!) but only have beaten Emerald and LeafGreen. I’ve never really delved into post-game content either.
Each individual game has 100% requirements, but by playing through them all I can make some of those requirements a lot easier by sharing Pokemon and items between games!
I’m not going in to play 8 hours of Pokemon every day and beat all 5+ games ASAP. This’ll be more of a chill thing that I work through when I’m in the mood. These games are pretty comforting to me, and I love the endless team building options!
I’m starting by playing through Ruby, which I still haven’t beaten to this day. Just gonna enjoy the sights and sounds, and read the dialogue which I never did as a kid. I did a little snooping through the Pokemon available in the game and picked out 10 Pokemon to try to use!
Ruby and Sapphire are themed around Land and Sea respectively, so I tried to pick some earthy-colored guys to fit with the game. Either brown or ruby-red! I’ll catch them as I find them, and since you can only have 6 Pokemon on your team, I’ll have to narrow it down to who I like most.
The lizard with the Christmas tree growing from his arse is Sceptile, but no ordinary Sceptile!!
Back to school with you mister!
Every Pokemon has a normal color scheme and a special, rare color scheme that sparkles when you put it into battle.
Sprites from Bulbapedia 🙂
On the left is a normal Treecko (baby Sceptile, one of the three Pokemon you pick from at the start of Ruby). On the right is a shiny Treecko!
Your player character has a random 16-bit ID number, and a second, secret random 16-bit ID number that isn’t shown to the player. Every individual Pokemon you encounter has a random 32-bit “Personality Value” that determines that individual’s strengths and weaknesses.
When a Pokemon is generated by the game, it does an XOR operation your ID, secret ID, and both halves of the new Pokemon’s Personality Value. If the result of this is less than 8, then the Pokemon is shiny!
The result is a 16-bit integer, which ranges from 0-65535. That means you have a 8/65535, or 1/8192 chance of finding a shiny Pokemon. THAT IS STUPIDLY RARE!
I want to play my Ruby with a shiny Treecko. I have to save before receiving Treecko, check is it’s shiny, reload my save if it’s not. It takes about 20 seconds per try… 8192 attempts will take about 45 hours of tedious resetting.
That doesn’t stop us foolish Pokemon fans though!
Over the past few days I’ve been hard at work trying for this teal fellow with any spare moment I could muster. Then my wrist started to hurt from repetitive motion and I started to get sick of babysitting my Gameboy…
After 1400 attempts, I decided to work smarter rather than harder! We have computers to do our tedious repetitive tasks for us! This wonderful person, 40cakes, made a robot that can do the shiny hunting for you.
He has a 24/7 livestream of the bot trying to catch every shiny Pokemon
I dusted off my old disgusting gaming laptop from the closet and got it set up with my save file from my cartridge. It’s been going for hours and hours now and still no luck. But it’s so satisfying to look over and see it doing the work for me instead of exploding my wrist pressing tiny buttons. I can catch up on my reading and other (fun) gaming.
It’s running the game at normal speed, exactly as if it was on the real console. Obviously, this feels a little less special than doing it all by hand, but I’m feeling great about it and that’s all that matters. If I was still hunting by hand I wouldn’t be writing this post!
I’ve never gotten a shiny Pokemon in the Generation III games before, so I’ll definitely hunt for something by hand at some point. It would be awesome to make my own bot sometime too, since I’m supposed to be a computer science expert and all…
Well this post got longue as heck. I hope you enjoyed my nerdtastic exploits! I’ll be sure to update you all on my Pokemon journeys.
Next post will probably be about all the games I played in 2024. It’s a lot to write so I’ll have to pace myself and take a few days. Until then…
🐒See you next post!🐒
sücco's burgeoning blog! 
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