Let’s Play Pokemon? How About Twitch Plays Pokemon?!

Instead of watching a Let's Play, what about joining in with a bunch of people and playing in one?

Twitch.tv, the gamer’s one stop shop for all your viewing needs, creates some very interesting streams sometimes. Whether it’s something silly like SaltyBet (a stream that runs the fighting game sandbox game MUGEN with loads of popular pop-culture characters duking it out for “worthless” currency) or something like Awesome Games Done Quick: A charity event put together by the people at SpeedDemosArchive. With a net traffic higher than Hulu and the fourth highest on the entire Internet itself, there’s always something worth watching on Twitch.tv if you dig deep enough and look long enough.

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Enter Twitch plays Pokemon, the latest and sometimes greatest attempt in community based entertainment. The premise is simple: There is a chat bot that is reading for inputs constantly, and then acts them out. By typing down for instance, the player character will go down. Typing START will open up the menu, leading to many viewers believing that the Pokedex should be checked every 5 seconds for help.

A popular tactic at the moment involves consulting the Helix Fossil obtained at the end of Mt. Moon.

Of course, with mass input comes a lot of confusion from both the chat and the gameplay. TPP was stuck on an area with a ledge for nearly an entire day, due to the need for only one instance of the down input to register to erase minutes of progress. Some of the inputs unfortunately even had to be throttled by the person running TPP, such as the start command. For the most part though, the community is completely in control of the actions and there is minimal interference from the organic experience of a crowd-controlled RPG.

A pretty good example of standard battle gameplay.

The thrill of winning a Gym battle with 20,000 other players, the spills over ledges and the combined wills of all the other viewers to be the Greatest Master is something you can only experience once. 99 percent of people that frequent Twitch.tv have played Pokemon before and watching a run of it would be nothing but old hat. But the absolute genius of crowd sourcing inputs and making TPP a completely user built, interactive experience is an amazing and unique idea that can be both frustrating and enthralling to everyone who is participating, not just watching. From maps that people are laying out in chat to navigate areas to battles between people who wish to use the S.S. Anne Ticket in battle or save progress every five steps, there is rarely a dull moment to be had. After nearly a day trying to defeat the Route 9 ledge boss (dramatically recreated below), TPP has advanced to the Rock Tunnel on Day 3.

A popular representation of Red in relation to TwitchPlaysPokemon is to have him appear as a robot with large antennas, obviously to receive chat inputs, which can lead to situations like the infamous Route 9 ledge boss.

Approaching nearly 3,000,000 views in 4 days, if you ever wanted to be a part of Twitch.tv history and take part in one of the most unusual things to happen on one of the large websites on the planet, head on over to TwitchPlaysPokemon and join millions of people on the greatest Pokemon Journey that has ever been! You too can be part of Red’s journey with ABBBBBBK (The faithful Charmeleon), Pidgeotto (who might just reach level 99 as a Pidgeotto), Drowsee, DUX, JLVVNNNNNN (A top-percentage Rattata), and more as they, and maybe even you, journey to the Indigo Plateau and achieve the title of Pokemon Master!

 

It’s going to be a long journey to the top….


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Author
MANGO SENTINEL
As a die hard gamer and a 40 foot tall mutant hunting robot, I love to analyze and pick apart video games to be able to play them at high levels, and of course, to look good and be flashy while doing it ! Currently the NA eSports Analyst at Cloth5.com, a League of Legends fansite, I've decided to branch out and blog about more broad concepts. If you want more focused League of Legends content, be sure to check out my work at Cloth5.com, otherwise stay tuned to my new GameSkinny account for all kinds of articles covering a wider range of games, from League of Legends and DOTA2 to Fighting Games and even the occasional Hearthstone piece !