MISSINGNO is just the default name when there is no number given, I'm guessing?

IE missing number

yeah i think it was something from debugging that just got left in

missingno was so fuckin cool

Catching Mew is really easy, you just have to do a few things in a certain order to get Mew.  I've done this so I know it works, it's a matter of hitting start right as a certain trainer gets the "!" above his head and teleporting away using abra.  You can find the instructions online really easily, but yeah it's just a matter of tricking the game's code.  That's where all of the cool shit in pokemon comes from, it's all just from exploiting the programming.

This can be done really early on in the game so it's not that big of a hassle to start a new game for it.  You can do it in Cerulean City.

yeah the pokemon rumors were the best because the real ones were just as zany. how the heck did people work them out??? i'm guessing a dork with a debugger but still

the only thing I used the internet for back in the mid-late 90's was to look up cheatcodes at gamesages (now ign) and at crappy aol keyword websites. I think the only code I tried that didn't work was the green sonic code in sonic 2. i spent hours trying to get that to work.

and the nostalgia of the old days stems from only having like 20-30 games for a console that were all vastly different styles and genres, so you had to spend all your time playing them and looking up codes to see what else you could do after you beat them.

MISSINGNO is just the default name when there is no number given, I'm guessing?

IE missing number

yup. empty pokémon slot

you missed out an a zillion items

also mew

I think the reason these rumours were so rife  in Pokemon was it was sort of the first game pretty much everyone had. It was so much easier to spread these lies because lots of people played it. Plus, Minssingo and the Clonde Pokemon Glitch (you could clone your Pokemon by pulling out the link cables at the right time during a trade, so they would recieve your Pokemon but you'd also get to keep it. The second Pokemon was lost forever though) actually worked I think it sparked off other rumours.

When you're young things seem so much bigger! You couldn't save in most games remember so you had to do it all in one play through. Even things like that makes getting to a bit you've never got to all the more exciting than just getting past the bit you're stuck on and then auto-saving straight away. I also don't think that RPG Maker helped us out you know, we became sort of familiar with the game making process, sure the games were terrible, but we were still making games. I guess when you start doing that, other games, even professional ones become just a little less special.

i guess it comes to how less ambitious they feel they can be when they have a BILLION DOLLARS invested in a project. it's really more about making a profitable game than a good game, and everyone seems to think that making a profitable game requires them to just senselessly follow the archetypes of other games. the thought that the game medium has exhausted its reservoir of ideas is absolutely, totally false. you're seeing the same shit over and over because of lack of ambition and creative ability, not that every possible avenue of thought has been explored.

another thing is that having more people involved in a game project kinda stifles what individuals are able to contribute to it. the best game elements are ones where the people involved are allowed to take legitimate ownership of the ideas and presentation of their work, which is impossible when you have that many people contributing things that are effectively created by somebody else. i think you're usually going to get a better cumulative product out of a handful of people than a massive amount of similarly talented people. on larger products it really comes down to how capable the leadership at the top is, and most people in the industry genuinely don't have the talent or vision necessary to lead large groups of people. they've just been there the longest.

games are really an INDUSTRY now, not these innocent creative projects. unless some unforeseen paradigm shift occurs, or there is some more enthusiastic showing from the independent community, you're going to continue seeing games go further and further downhill.

everything in the OP is 100%

i liked videogames a lot more when there was just a lot less known about them. Everything was a mystery, I didn't know what was coming out, what existed, what was gonna happen next, etc. except when I could get my folks to let me rent a game or get a nintendo magazine at the corner store that carried them

there's also something about the limitations of 2-D graphics that I appreciate. I'm just not as into games striving for realism, it's much easier to suspend my disbelief when the visuals aren't trying to mimic reality. I can handle a sprite reciting awful lines via a textbox, but some voice-acted fully 3D dude delivering some cheesy melodramatic bullshit just makes me upset.

everything in the OP is 100%

i liked videogames a lot more when there was just a lot less known about them. Everything was a mystery, I didn't know what was coming out, what existed, what was gonna happen next, etc. except when I could get my folks to let me rent a game or get a nintendo magazine at the corner store that carried them

there's also something about the limitations of 2-D graphics that I appreciate. I'm just not as into games striving for realism, it's much easier to suspend my disbelief when the visuals aren't trying to mimic reality. I can handle a sprite reciting awful lines via a textbox, but some voice-acted fully 3D dude delivering some cheesy melodramatic bullshit just makes me upset.

yeah this was another point I was sort of making but didn't make it as good. Sort of an uncanny valley thing. Like my brother had a bunch of cheesy rave posters and some of them have an obvious anime influence but it's actually halfway cool AT A GLANCE or whatever. Like it's easier to think anime can be badass when like... you don't see a lot of it and you don't have to HEAR it. Dear god the voice acting

but yeah also I think there was /some/ filtering of games, it does seem when you look more at games that came out in Japan it's a lot of anime bullshit, I mean a lot more than Final Fantasy etc., with no other aspirations than to look like a generic anime/Lord of the Rings bs. Just like some people think British comedy is the best shit ever because we only get to see the best ones, right?

also I find it weird that kids in Japan always probably thought of Dragon Warrior as a bunch of Dragon Ball Z-looking dudes fighting monsters. Or maybe they don't but it did weird me out whenever the graphics got distinct enough and the boxart changed that it looked that way instead of generic fantasy art. I don't know what I imagined the game would look like with proper graphics but I know I didn't imagine Goku with a sword/helmet

even Earthbound is mad weird just looking at the concept art like was this the actual intended look of the game? Because like, it does have a feel to it but if the SNES had the ability to scan in real drawings and use them for backgrounds, like some RPG Maker games have done, I'd say it'd look on par with those games

Edit: Isn't there a psychological theory like, when you're younger it's harder to separate what ASPECT of a thing you like the most. Because I really think I liked the music of one game better and didn't give a shit about the graphics. I looked up the Donkey Kong Country music recently (think I mentioned this) and I like it a lot on its own even though I barely remember the context at all. Then again maybe there's just enough context that I remember to make it interesting, I dunno. And I know as a game I actually hated DKC because it was so fuckstrating, the difficulty level and all. I also thought the computer-rendered stuff was kind of cheap and didn't want it to catch on. So I know I really HATED my experience of playing the game even if remembering it doesn't evoke negative feelngs. Looking up the soundtrack to a game you've never played and know nothing about it, not even what GENRE it is is fucking weird. It's like weirder than experimental music. But yeah I feel like I'm the only one that never thought the stories of games were BRILLIANT, even if I thought the premise was cool I realized they were kids' games and even if they /wanted/ to write a better story they were limited by cartridge space + they're writing for kids, not adults. I knew stuff like WAR AND PEACE was better literature but no way I was going to read that when I was 6

here's that Earthbound concept art I was talking about, kind of going with the whole LIMITATIONS idea:

http://www.unseen64.net/2008/12/22/mother-2-earthbound-snes-beta/

not that it looks BAD it just looks more reminiscent of a bunch of children's books that sort of just blur together in my memory now

fuckstrating

yessssss

man jester and aten you are not the only people using that tldr's but were this some social event where i would be in close range holy shit i would start beating the fuck out of you in GREAAAAAT FURY. people stop making tldr's it's the worst excuse ever!! this is sort of EVEN WORSE scenario because it's ragnar and yeah he rambles and that's load of text when i see one but HOLY SHIT GUYS how about reading ragnar's posts since it's even his topic?!? just how insensitive can you get!?

also you people kind of repeat the reason of IT'S NOSTALGIA...  but suprise, suprise fuckers it's not!! because pretty much everything he has said here are pretty good points and kind of nearing the core of the issue of what made old games really good in the atmosphere-sense. this is kind of what I and Guana talked like for 8 fucking hours yesterday at his home (beer and talk about mark rothko, john fahey, robocop animation and chiptune music... high art, high times), this is pretty much what draws me and Guana to the whole chiptune genre in music again and again. exploration, weird events, the tone of NES chip that pretty much made any music in games sound really different, the unexplainable mysteries.
damn there was just lot of stuff we talked about yesterday but have you ever thought that all those weird visual/audio-visual elements and events in old games actually made them sort of attractive to us when we were young? like we had no idea what is this feel we get from old games but somehow it got stucked in our minds for the rest of our lives and we wonder that what the hell was that feeling we had by then?

maybe those games were beautiful in a way to our young selves?

and we just couldn't explain what we felt by then. nobody can explain these uhh MICRO-MOODS or atmospheres, it's even hard to even for me. this is sort of what made me get into MODERN ART in the end because while old classical stuff is all pretty (makes a pretty view heh) and good in compositional sense and lot of times even achieved good atmospheres, it was impressionism and moder classical that really tooked the whole art to a whole new level, touching our emotions and moods and tough issues that we face in our daily lives! similiarily John Fahey is really fucking good because it's basically just old blues solo-guitar music but somehow the man makes it sound really weird and haunting. it makes you yearn for more! ahhhaha this is what the shitty leo kottke and michael hedges ENTIRELY missed in their music. these micro-atmospheres or MESSAGES are kind of what really made elliott smith important to me - a lot of his stuff  just could touch some feelings that you can't just entirely point out.