TwitchPlaysPokemon is still going – and is on to Pokemon X for 3DS
Remember TwitchPlaysPokemon? It took the world by storm last February as thousands of players around the world took to Twitch to take control of Game Boy classic Pokemon. It turns out that it is still going, and is even more sophisticated.
The premise is still the same: Players enter into the chat window the controls they’d like to send: “Up”, “Down” “A” “Start” and so on – and the these are relayed by some clever code to the game itself. As you might imagine, playing along with thousands of players at once made it both difficult and time consuming.
After the original Pokemon Red was completed, the creators of TPP moved on to the sequels, and as of yesterday started Pokemon X, which was released only last year for the 3DS.
Making this work is certainly more challenging. As the 3DS requires more processing power, rather than run the game on a PC emulator, the game is running natively on a modified 3DS. Astonishingly, this means that as a result the online features of the game still work the same – so TPP can trade and battle Pokemon with real people online.
The other challenge is the touchscreen input, which is used throughout the game. To make this work, the TPP creator has enabled the player to enter grid coordinates into the chat window – with a grid helpfully overlaid on the lower screen. Unfortunately, your author hasn’t played the game, so is unable to commentate on exactly how much progress appears to have been made so far.
You can see the live stream here:
Watch live video from TwitchPlaysPokemon on www.twitch.tv
Apparently plans are also underway to next play the N64’s Pokemon Stadium 2 – complete with a Twitch-only betting game running alongside it.
It’s a truly astonishing project – and one we’re both stunned and delighted that Nintendo hasn’t stamped on yet.
