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Comment by NegativeLatency | Hacker News Reader

These games were magical for me, I keep hoping for a good modern Pokemon game but nothing has quite captured the experience of playing through Blue for the first time. (Maybe it's that experience of playing a game without being able to easily ask the internet what to do next, but there was something delightful about discovering the whole in game world and all the secrets in it.)

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GameFAQs, Nintendo Power, and all the websites about Missingno thoroughly mapped out the entire game when I played as a kid.

The only real issue was all the fake ways to get Mew and the awful greedy Nintendo marketing department that removed Mew from the American game so that you could only get him from sanctioned events. What made it even worse was that they would look through your Dex before giving you one and if they saw you had used a GameShark or a MissingNo hack they would deny you the transfer.

Personally I found Diamond to be the magical experience. Everything I hated about the game I loved had been fixed. It was in color, there were no stupid cables needed that nobody had, and you could easily trade and fight over the internet. I was also old enough to know that a game can be more fun without looking at the guides.

Gold was my first, and it was absolutely magical - I had been exposed to Pokemon as a franchise through the cartoon and cultural osmosis, I had books and had seen the movie, but I hadn't played the first round of games.

Gold was like everything I didn't know I wanted, with cool new Pokemon and then the amazing "reveal" that after the first 8 gyms I could go back to Kanto and basically play through the Gen 1 game as well. I had no idea that was coming and it just blew me away as a kid. Tons of great memories of that game.

I didn't get into the next generation for whatever reason, just kinda missed me.

But Diamond was also fantastic. I had three other friends with copies and we would just sit around playing battles, hunting shinies, and just overall enjoying the experience together.

Those were the only two Pokemon games I played and they were both such peak gaming experiences that I'm barely interested in the rest of the franchise. How could anything top being 9 and deep diving into Gold, or being 15 or so and having a whole group playing together and just drinking mountain dew all night? Those games hit at the perfect time for me and I don't see how anything new for ever exceed those experiences.

I feel the same way. I found Legends: Arceus to be quite good.

This gave me an idea, what about a game that is proceduraly generated in whole, maybe using only the same underlying mechanics, for each run of the game or each person that plays? It’ll probably be possible in not too long with generative AI.

UCSC EIS was doing some work on this kind of thing over the past decade:

https://eis.ucsc.edu/

Everything procedural in nature essentially reflects the design philosophy of the creator: that's a fundamental restriction on the Holodeck. The generative approach is actually creatively less productive than a chaos function, because chaos is known to produce interesting long-run patterns, while generative acts more like an interpolation on existing patterns.

Very cool, thanks for sharing!

I understand this isn't exactly what you meant, but The Pokemon Mystery Dungeon[1] series is one interpretation of that idea. Basically a Pokemon roguelike.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pok%C3%A9mon_Mystery_Dungeon

The “randomizer speedrun” genre involves completing a script-generated ROM hack permuting existing game assets. A randomized ROM might rearrange everything from door warps, enemy locations, boss move-sets, even item effects can be randomized; and importantly the game remains completely solvable.

Not to be negative, but isn't that the whole category of roguelikes? There are definitely Pokémon roguelikes out there.

Not negative at all. I just learned something new, thanks!

Rogue likes are good enough, if you build a procedurally generated games it’s very hard to not make it very boring and empty. Many roguelikes do a good job at keeping things fresh enough to replay while not allowing for that.

Unless I’m missing something, Diablo was exactly this.

Diablo II (the one I know), generates maps procedurally. However, the quests, weapon categories, general story, are all the same for each run. I'm talking about taking this concept up a notch. At the very least, have a new story for each run or player.

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