Ever since the start of the crowd-controlled Twitch PlaysPokemonback in 2014,Pokemonfans have devised unique and innovative ways to complete a plethora of titles from the series. One iteration even saw afish play through the Game Boy Advance gamesPokemon RubyandSapphire, based on where it swam in its fishbowl. And earlier this year, one fan devised a new way to play throughPokemon Red.
In January, 3D programmer at Gameloft Montreal, Constantin Liétard, devised a way to letTwitter users playPokemon Redthrough his avatar.Users would respond to one of Liétard’s tweets with their desired button inputs for the game, and every so often, a bot would gather the most popular input and send it to the game, which would then be reflected in Liétard’s avatar. However, now that Twitter has completedPokemon Red, the programmer has devised a new way for fans to playPokemon Emerald.
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This time, Liétard has chosen Discord as the method of crowd-controlled play as fans journey throughPokemon Emerald. This new method works very similarly to Twitter playsPokemon Red, in that votes on button inputs are accounted for every few seconds, sending the most popular input to the game. This time, however, as opposed to a still image that needed to be refreshed by Twitter users, Discord will play back the last second of the game in the form of a .gif in an automatic message.
Discord playsPokemon Emeraldis made possible through the work of a bot set up by Liétard himself. At the time of this writing, Liétard’s Discord server has over 1,000 members and about 300 active users. Discord’s current team consists of AKIRA the Ralts, MICRO the Tailow, Obama the Shroomish, and GEMI the Sableye, and BOO the Illumise. Anyone tuning into Twitter’s playthrough ofPokemon Redearlier this year may recall that it was filled with ups and downs, including one instance where a group of trolls took over the game overnight andreleased almost all of Twitter’s Pokemon.
It only took Twitter users about a month tocompletePokemon Red,so it should be interesting to see how Discord fares in its own efforts. So far, players have earned 3 Gym Badges, gaining their most recent one from Mauville City’s Electric-type Gym Leader Wattson. Of course, this isn’t an entirely blind effort though, as fans can communicate and strategize in a chat channel on the Discord server.
Last year, someone devised a way to let fanstake turns controlling a game ofPokemon Swordvia a livestream platform. So while many are eagerly waiting the arrival ofPokemon Brilliant DiamondandShining Pearllater this year, it’s clear thatPokemonfans have been able to keep themselves quite busy as of late.
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