![]() ![]() ![]() Asprey takes care to highlight the evolution of these anti-frustration measures over time, reinforcing how far out of bounds his runs become. Pokemon games were designed with a younger audience in mind, one perhaps the least familiar with genre conventions that could trash a hard-won collection of beloved virtual pets. The love and care taken by the design team to make these traps difficult to get into - the meticulous addition of an NPC to hand you a much-needed item or teleport you free, for instance, all while camouflaged as an unobtrusive part of the game world – is highlighted by the creation of the lock. There’s always a way to cut the knot, delete the afflicted save, and be free to play the game as the developers intended yet, at the nadir of gameplay, the lowest state in which progress can still be made, one can gain insights both hopeful and bleak. None of these puzzles will persist past the New Game button. Their construction is the art, the absolute knowledge required to construct such a lock the proof of devotion, examination of the cage a rumination on the nature of the virtual world. If the speedrun is an act of monastic devotion, proof of love for the game and power over the self, Asprey’s softlocks are not even so much as puzzles to be solved as koans to be contemplated, exercises in cosmic futility. All these terrible fates and more (including some non- Pokemon examples for good measure), are cataloged in Pikasprey Yellow’s “Soft Lock Picking” series, available for anyone who wants a profoundly unconventional way to explore Pokemon’s simple, cheerful* virtual world. In a third, the secret to your escape is to patiently plant and water a berry for months until you have a harvest sufficient to buy a single Pokeball. ![]() In another scenario, the player is trapped in Cerulean City, and the only way out is to trade an elusive Shiny Poliwhirl to an NPC. The necessary top prize could take 5 minutes or 187 years, your cartridge battery having long given up the ghost. Your only shot at avoiding eternal banishment to a remote island is to win a lottery you can play once a real-time day. In one, the player’s sole Pokemon is a Chansey (Lucky, if you’re a Japanese player), on the verge of demise by poison. The mechanisms of Asprey’s locks run on a gradient from the poetic to the sadistic. Not, however, by anything resembling intended play. No, each of Asprey’s soft-locks is elaborate, deliberate, and, in theory, escapable. Within the early annals of videogame history is a sizable hall of shame of poorly tested games easily made accidentally unwinnable (or, in some cases, impossible to clear from the very first screen by normal means). His grimoire of software and hardware knowledge combine to produce the conditions needed to place a save file into an elaborate kind of code-bondage, where restarting from zero seems more appealing by the minute.īut there’s no art to simply tossing the hypothetical Houdini of such a bespoke save file into an inescapable oubliette. Like the speedrunning community he is a devoted scholar of a chosen set of games, and under the handle Pikasprey Yellow, has employed that encyclopedic knowledge in service of producing emergent states of play. Wherever that lofty perch is, we aren’t going anywhere near it.Ĭhristian Asprey makes a lot of videos about Pokemon. The community coalesces around a game and slowly pushes it towards its most elevated state – whatever their cloistered order has decided that is – in search of the perfect run a zenith of play. Over twenty years of speedrunning as an online community has seen games built for a singular experience evolve into what can only be described as monastic disciplines, community members proving their devotion through both mental athleticism and scholarly documentation of every mechanic and phenomenon, intended or otherwise. ![]() Developer oversight and failed QA become arcane study, tools to push the limitations of what a human with a controller is capable of. A frame-perfect jump, practiced ten thousand times a split-second reaction, ground on the whetstone of a thousand fatal pratfalls self-inflicted damage to slip through the very boundaries of the world. ![]()
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