There really is an absurd amount of complexity hidden in the numbers underlying pokemon games… it’s the kind of thing that could drive me insane if I were to give a ****. Luckily I don’t give even the tiniest of ****s, all these crazy shenanigans for a few-point advantage is only of consequence if you’re playing against another person who has also sunk ungodly amounts of time into the matter.

Pokemon Gold was pretty cool though… came within a handful of mons of actually finishing that one, was going to trade some of the last ones across from a friend’s Silver version but the internal battery on their cart had died and their save died with it.

Sooner or later this will happen to mine too, and all the time I spent on it will truly amount to nothing. If I remember rightly, the in-game time counter was up to something like 10 solid days of my life that are never coming back. Not that I would have spent that time curing cancer, or anything else useful, if I’d not been playing pokemon…