Pokémon Blue Reverse Badge Acquisition F.A.Q.

Pokémon Blue Reverse Badge Acquisition F.A.Q.

Q: What are you trying to do?
A: I am trying to beat the game as fast as possible, while acquiring all eight gym badges in the reverse order that they appear on the trainer card

Q: How is that possible?
A: Through the use of glitches, anything is possible

Q: What is the best time in this category?
A: The best time is currently 30:11 RTA by Decon.  You can see the leaderboard here: http://forums.pokemonspeedruns.com/viewtopic.php?f=151&p=5399

Q: What is your current Personal Best?
A: My best time is 31:52 RTA

Q: What's RTA mean?
A: RTA stands for Real Time Attack.  Basically, it means we're using an external timer to guage how long a run takes, not the in game timer.  This is required for most glitched runs as save and quit is allowed

Q: Do you need to use Pokémon Blue?  Why not Red or Yellow?
A: Red could be used.  The player would lose a few seconds getting coins in Celadon City, but that's about it.  Yellow, on the other hand, is a completely different game and would have a very different route

Q: Why did you name yourself and Bulbasaur "I"?
A: It's faster to name the player a one character name.  "A" would technically be faster, but I like naming myself "I" :)

Q: Why did you name the Rival "RRRG--"?  That can't be faster
A: Later on in the run, we are going to perform a glitch called Item Underflow, which essentially allows us to access more bytes of memory than we are supposed to in the form of items.  The Rival's name is a section of memory we have access to, so by naming him a specific name, we give ourselves access to specific items

Q: Why do you pick Bulbasaur?
A: Ask me later

Q: What is Brock Through Walls?
A: Brock Through Walls is a glitch that allows us to walk through walls as soon as we get to Pewter City.  There's two basic pieces to it:
	- Brock Skip.  When the player tries to leave Pewter City via Route 3 before defeating Brock, he is stopped by an NPC that takes him back to Brocks Gym.  By saving after the dialogue and before the walk to the gym, we can reset the game and walk past him
	- Walk Through Walls.  When the player normally talks to the NPC mentioned above, the game searches through memory to find the coordinates of the player and executes the event that corresponds (usually walking the player to the gym).  If the player talks to the NPC from the right side, where the game never intended him to, the game locks up because it's stuck trying (unsuccessfully) to find the coordinates.  By setting up certain values in memory, we can trick the game into thinking there's an event for these coordinates and it allows us to walk through walls

Q: How do you get those values?
A: There are two ways to get the values we need.  The first is a 100% consistent method.  The second is a faster, though less consistent method:
	- By having a level 8 Pokémon with 16 PP on the move in slot 2, 36 PP on the move in slot 3, and 0 PP on the move in slot 4
	- By having a Pokémon with 16 special and a Pidgey with a certain value of HP (many values work)
Both of these methods give us the coordinates we need: 16 x 36

Q: So why do you pick Bulbasaur?
A: For both methods, Bulbasaur is the fastest.  For the Pidgey method, Bulbasaur has the highest base special of the early game Pokémon, which means it can reach 16 special at level 7/8.  For the PP method, Bulbasaur is the only starter that has 3 moves AND a move with at least 36 PP at level 8

Q: What is Item Underflow?
A: Item Underflow is a glitch that allows us to access the memory addresses immediately after the Items.  This is done by acquiring -1 items

Q: How do you do that?
A: There's a few steps to this, so I'll list them out:
	- We get 6 items.  Pretty self explanitory how that's achieved, but it's required for another step
	- We set up a trainer fly.  Trainer fly (also known as the Mew glitch) will allow us to encounter any Pokémon we want based on the special value of the last Pokémon we saw
	- We encounter Missingno.  Using trainer fly, we encounter a Missingno.  Seeing a Missingno duplicates the item in slot 6 of our inventory and adds 128 to the quantity.
	- We set up a trainer fly and encounter Missingno again.  We need 255 of an item, so we toss 2 before encountering it the second time
	- We toss all of our items, and then lose some more.  When you toss a stack of an item, the game decreases your item count by 1 and moves the items up in your inventory until it reaches the CANCEL button.  The game knows it reaches the CANCEL button when it reaches an item with 255 quantity.  This allows us to have 1 item, but have more than 1 item (if that makes sense).  We then merge item stacks twice, which removes two more items from our inventory, and then we have -1 items!

Q: ...what?
A: Exactly

Q: What just happened?
A: Probably something that's too much to explain here.  Feel free to ask in chat and I can do my best to answer it :)