The story of pokeguide.tk
2000 to mid GS Area: The guides
Inspired by Stadium guide by magnus on Gamefaqs I started to write a German Poke Strategy guide in Summer 2000.The guide contained a lot of info which was plain wrong but back then we did not really know better. Back then I posted on a messageboard poke-index.de. That board slowly died and the administrator Ganon linked to the village forum. And so did I. When GS was released I wrote a few new guides about GS strategy and a german manual on how to use gsbot including translations for attacks. I also played a lot of gsbot although I was on dialup back then and hat to pay per minute.
But after some months it was not really that interesting anymore. All the same strategy and extremely long games which were usually decided by a critical in the end were not really fun anymore. At least that’s my subjective memory. I wrote a special client for gsbot to automate standart gsbot tasks with a nice interface it but could only do simple stuff (attacking, creating a team) so it was never really able to compete with decent irc clients. Later netbattle was leaked. I instantly liked the idea. In fact I always wanted such a program. And obviously I tried to find out how the protocol worked. I wanted to make an unofficial server just like bnetd for blizzard games (which is illegal now but that’s a sad different story…). And I did. The protocol was quite simple and unencrypted back then. I asked Ian something about it though, and he kindly offered me the source. I added some additional features like automated matchmaking and a ladder system with a ladder page written in php it’s a shame that this stuff never got in to the official servers. Obviously when the server started to do all the calculations in version 0.9 I did not have any intention of integrating that into my server. Back then there was no good German Pokedex around either so I used the netbattle database to make one and finally registered pokeguide.tk.
Advance Generation
Information about RS was slowly released slowly and I didn’t really like the graphics or the sound and I really thought about quitting, but I cave the Japanese version a try – played it for a bit. I wanted to see the new special event Pokemon so naturally I tried to hack them. But what was that? It was not so easy – they always turned into eggs posing on a cheat messageboard otheres found the same. We worked together to find out why and what to do to prevent it. Someone suggested the data was xor encrypted with turned out to be correct. After some time we figured out how it worked. It was back then when I got to know PokemonHacker. He is a really nice and talented guy we worked together on a lot more hacking projects – and without him maybe I would not have made the dex in the RS area. One of the greatest things we found was probably the image of the Fire/Leaf Trainers months before the games were actually released in Japan. A lot of sites picked up this news. Other Projects of that time include but are not limited to a lot of cheats, the cry sounds, scripts, in-depth analysis of various special events, the compression of the images which resulted in pokepic and finally unLZ-GBA (PokemonHacker had the original idea), a feebas calculator, a custom eberry, ecardtrainers and a lot more crap (even a way to load super mario bros from pokemon if you hack your save).
I spent way more time hacking these games than actually playing them.
Cheats
I already talked about cheats a little. In contrast to Meowth I released my raw findings – and even went further and actually turned them into cheats. I know a lot of people don’t like that and there are messageboards where posting AR codes or links are not allowed. Obvioulsy I respect these rules if I post on such boards. But who am I to judge? If someone wants to cheat on his game he can do so it’s his game and he paid good money for it. Of course you have to be honest about it if you play multiplayer. Now that this emerald bug was found everyone suddenly seems to tolerate unlimited items and clones because it “just saves time”. That’s funny because usually that’s what all cheats do.
DP
The same time I really hope there will not be any unlimited health wifi cheat in pearl. That’s one of the few things I would not release if I found it. So far I don’t quite get the Pokemon Encryption in DP saves. But this will change someday…
Anyway DP release was a really great time gathering all the new info was really exciting, after the release of the icons my pages seemed attracted a lot of people and some great hackers among them. I can’t really say much about the game itself because I did not really play it yet (and I think I’ll wait for a version I understand). But the real pokemon “game” for me today is looking how the game works anyway.