Ribbon Postgame

Since generation 3 of the Pokémon games (with the exception of the 5th generation) there have been a fair amount of ribbons to collect. These ribbons persist during transfers and as of recent (the past 4 years) they’ve actually meant something because they are partially equippable, giving whatever Pokémon has earned them a neat title whenever they get sent out. The result of this is that you can quite literally have a Pokémon that is decades old (March of this year marks 20 years for the first gen 3 games!) with ribbons that were obtained all the way back in Ruby and Sapphire.

This mechanic opens up a lot of interesting scenarios and combinations to which I spend a lot of time either obtaining or at the very least thinking about. Take for example all of the shadow Pokémon that get a special ribbon from Colosseum/XD. For those unaware, there’s a special ribbon that shadow Pokémon get after they are purified that no other game awards. Because of this, this is more or less a marker that acts as a signal to other players that ‘yes, this specific Pokémon came from a spin-off game that could trade with the main generation 3 games to which I have transferred up all this time’. Just having the ability to do that is wild, but the execution of it allows for some even rarer scenarios.

Take for example Dunsparce. It was a shadow Pokémon in Colosseum. I believe it was obtainable in Pyrite Cave if my memory servers correctly. Well, Scarlet and Violet of generation 9 saw Dunsparce get a new evolution after all of this time. It would be entirely possible to transfer from Colosseum to Scarlet/Violet only to evolve Dunsparce and essentially have a generation 3 ribbon on a generation 9 Pokémon. There are other Pokémon like this, off the top of my head Quilava, Ursaring, Scyther, Stantler, Misdreavus, Sneasel and Murkrow are all Pokémon that can be caught in Colosseum/XD and can be transferred up into games with new evolutions. There are definitely more, but I can only speak on behalf of Colosseum and not XD (have yet to 100% XD yet for the second time, first time I did I was young and did not keep the shadow Pokémon together).

Another aspect of this is the fact that you can have dedicated Ribbon Masters. There is a small community of people out there that decided to catch a Pokémon and get literally every single ribbon available. I don’t really see too much utility in that because at the end of the day, it’s just another number that goes up with you hardly ever using most of the ribbon titles, but it’s an option. I do have a level 100 Wooper that has every single ribbon obtainable from gen 6 onwards minus the two harder Battle Maison/Tree ribbons, but I find myself often times using only two or three specific ribbons like the Rank Master Ribbon, the Gorgeous Royal Ribbon or the Skillful Battler Ribbon. Ribbons mainly act as an achievement type of system, where they show that you did something. Unfortunately, many of the tasks are mundane, like clearing the Elite Four with a specific Pokémon in your party or getting 999,999 dollars for a specific ribbon. But others have some weight to them, namely the tower ribbons.

The combination of getting ribbons and shiny hunting may be the ultimate test in collection and patience. I am not really much of a shiny hunter because I don’t think the palette swap justifies forgoing so many other details, like natures or stats but there was exactly one Pokémon I shiny hunted and got a special ribbon on.


This is my rarest non-event Pokémon. In generation 3, Sneasel was already one of the rarest Pokémon to get. It was a 5% chance encounter for the species in only LeafGreen in Icefall Cave, explicitly a postgame location, with the original (and really the best) shiny odds of 1/8192 for every encounter. I had planned it to be a hunt that would have taken me an entire summer because the odds were so low. But for some reason, I got it in a weekend in only 1706 encounters. I have no idea how it happened, but the idea after that was to get the Mt. Battle ribbon from Colosseum to give it the 100x Victorious title in Sword/Shield. I did that and the result is a Pokémon that I may be so bold to even say simply doesn’t exist anywhere else in the entire world. Yes, I may be exaggerating that a bit, but the end result is something you do not see every day. I also evolved it into a Weavile since it adds to the ‘rarity factor’ as it is a gen 4 Pokémon with a gen 3 ribbon.

A new aspect of the game as of Sword/Shield are marks. I wouldn’t be able to be content with this post without mentioning marks. Essentially, they are ribbons but they are tied to the conditions of the capture instead of the achievements of a Pokémon. A prime example of this is getting a mark for catching a Pokémon while it is snowing. They give a bit more of a rarity factor for catches and are a perfect alternative to the overdone and flooded state of shinies. There are a few types of marks, like the personality marks (which are a 1/100 chance on all wild Pokémon and to which there are a ton of these marks that a Pokémon can end up with- hunting a specific one here would be even harder than a shiny Pokémon), the weather marks (1/50), and the time of day marks (not sure the odds on these, but these are the most common). There are others and I’m not going to explain all of them, but there are three marks that are only obtainable in Sword/Shield that are not in Scarlet/Violet. These marks are for catching Pokémon when fishing, getting wild Pokémon from making curry, and catching Pokémon in dense fog. With the aforementioned scenario of Pokémon that evolve in later gens, you can get exactly one new Pokémon from gen 9 with the curry mark: Kingambit. Dudunsparce may be available with the special mark that can be obtained on Pokémon in dense fog, but who is to say that fog won’t eventually make its way back into SV?

With Bank shutting down in the future (and with how tedious it is to transfer all the way up), I think it’s more important than ever to highlight some of these Pokémon that will eventually be lost to time. I’m certainly not planning on playing the series my entire life, but it seems clear that in some aspects you will be able to bring Pokémon up to the most recent generation from the last. I think that as a collector that has already completed the National Dex and as someone who doesn’t care about shinies anymore, this route for filling the collection itch is probably the best one yet due to how obscure and at times how tedious it can be. At the end, you will have something that will make you feel accomplished until you realize that at the end of the day this is a video game and that it has no weight, bearing or value to your actual life, to which you then have to have cold and crushing reality set in that you spent hours trying to get it all while there are people that actually do what they are supposed to be doing and are hitting tangible life goals like starting a family or making a certain amount of money so that they can then do what they want with no issue, which you cannot do because you are not even putting in the minimum amount of effort to do.

Counter-Strike and the Importance of Mappools

One of my favorite games of all time is Counter-Strike: Global Offensive. For a while after high school, I was playing so much of it that I truly believed that I would go pro. After a few various tragedies, I decided that it was no longer worth most of my effort and instead calmed down and stuck to my studies much more.

Even into CS:GO’s lifespan, a mappool used to be something that wasn’t actually chosen by Valve itself. Early on, a player could be playing in the CEVO League and still be playing on maps such as Tuscan or Season. ESEA used season as well, and the non-remake version at that. The very first CS:GO pug I played on ESEA was that old version of Season. A long time ago, maps were either bought out by leagues to use in their formats (see Mill and ESEA) or maps that were deemed as competitive and balanced just naturally came out on top. Also, revisions to maps existed that improved the base maps in some aspect. Nuke is an example of this, as a competitive edition exists that added the entire ‘secret’ area. In some aspects, these competitive editions of maps eventually made it into the stock maps. It wasn’t until Valve standardized the round and bomb timers and started to consider major tournament hosts due to their ruleset that we even started to see the idea of the ‘Active Duty’ map selection exist.

Everyone seems to have an opinion on what map is in the game, but this post isn’t going to necessarily be about what map should be in over what, like Mirage out and Train back in and all of that. Instead, I would like to really discuss what really ought to be considered in the context with all of the maps overall.

The very first thing is that the most important aspect of the mappool is and has always been the safe picks for a team that ideally both teams could end up winning due to having good strats. I always saw maps like Mirage, DustII, Cache, and to a lesser extent Inferno and Overpass to fulfill this niche. The general idea is that these maps adhere to a mostly tried and true format that is used in not just Counter-Strike but in many other FPS games, that is three lanes that act as points of contact with important map control decisions scattered throughout the map that give a T side more options if they are to take it, coupled with the fact that there is more risk involved in getting those positions. The actual playable maps that a team has varies from team to team based off of their style and can get funky, but in competitive play and especially in best of three formats, if a team knows you have a good setup for these maps, they are far more likely to match it than outright ban it. These maps are inherently a big more pick up game oriented than the other maps in the map pool.

The second aspect of good mappools is the idea of dedicated picks/counter picks. I always saw maps like Nuke, Vertigo, Train, and also to a lesser extent Overpass and Inferno again. These maps typically learn towards one side a lot (mostly the CT side) more than the first maps, which how much they lean being a factor in how these counter picks work. The mark of an extremely good team in my opinion is having two maps out of this category that they can reasonably win against most players by having good teamplay on the T side and good synergy and layers of defense on the CT side. If a team is well prepared for these types of maps, they are extremely better off in the map ban process- this is in fact how my team, the LAN LORDS, won many of our games.

The last aspect of map pools which is probably the worst by design simply put is ‘the maps no one wants to touch’. These are typically new maps that are put into the game and the reason why no one wants to touch them in competitive is because they are too volatile and too new to really determine a good meta on all of them. They’re usually the first to go in the map banning process so often so that many teams will count on the other team banning said map so that it isn’t played. Maps that have had this distinction in the past and currently are maps like Vertigo, Ancient, Anubis, and even some more mild map remakes like Nuke and Train (to be fair, the outside scaffolding in Nuke was anything but mild). These maps have the highest degree and feeling of a ‘war of attrition’ when it comes to the banning process. If neither team ends up banning this map and they decide to heavily favor counter-picks, you have a really interesting best of three scenario when these types of maps get picked as the last map.

Three three aspects and categories of maps bring the map pool altogether in a more meaningful way than just ‘here’s seven maps’. I apologize to people that would like to see more changes and community maps in the map pool, since anything else would make the map ban process effectively moot and the map pool itself to be entirely out of balance. With all of this information in mind, is the current map pool adhering to this sort of format? Ancient still seems rather new, and admittedly I cannot comment on how people are playing it now, but if Ancient still isn’t a map that is mostly known and has a developed meta, then the map pool is a bit out of whack. Otherwise, the map pool is in a good position as of right now. Vertigo is definitely a map that can be seen as a neutral pick right now in the same manner that Inferno eventually was against many teams.

Also, as a personal note, seriously, remove Mirage. It has been in the game far too long and the fact that it survived over remakes of Train and DustII is just wacky.

The First* Post: A Dedication to pkmnclassic.net

*NOTE: The first post was just a site welcome post.

One of the games/series I am most passionate about despite any opinions of current quality or age is the Pokémon series. It’s something I grew up with, but never really grew out of. I tend to hide that fact because it’s something I have noticed in social situations that oddly enough defines you differently than merely saying you play games (despite the normie rush to GO in 2016- may rant about that on a later day). Anyways, one of the most solid generations arguably to replay with the right amount of Quality of Life improvements while still retaining that older GameFreak style design (read: pre-3DS era) is the 4th and 5th generations of games. While they don’t have the best features in terms of training, many fans still hold them dear on account of the fact that they were from a different era of the series yet they are still playable on one of the more recent consoles. While I personally am more of a gen 3 fan through and through, I cannot deny that the DS era Pokémon games really went above and beyond in the amount of features they managed to pack into each, while still letting each one (mostly) have its own identity in each way.

One of the biggest things that came with a networked enabled console was the fact that it could connect to the Internet. Gone were the days where if you wanted to trade with someone, you’d have to have a Link Cable and be in the same room. If anyone reading was playing the series during that time, they may have good memories about checking out the GTS for the first time or being able to battle with family miles away. These are game features that eventually got lost to time and could no longer be accessed due to the shutdown of what was known as Nintendo WFC at the time. This was something understandable, as most companies have to eventually shut down services that are being replaced by bigger, better services. The 3DS had released months prior and the WiiU was the next big release to come out.

Extremely shortly after Nintendo WFC connection shut down (and I mean EXTREMELY shortly after), wiimmfi came into existence with its sole focus being to keep Mario Kart Wii servers running. This isn’t a post on them, so I’m not going to delve into much of the details. Wiimmfi eventually replaced many online games, but the Pokémon series needed a bit more than what was being offered to really make it work.

Enter pkmnclassic.net. This is by far the number one recommendation that I can give someone to check out when they are replaying any of the gen 4 or gen 5 games. This service restores services to both generations’ Global Trading Station, Battle Video system, WiFi clubs and a lot of other niche things that only hardcore fans would care about. My personal favorite has to be the fact that Trainer Rankings in gen 4 actually work. These admittedly add nothing much to the game, but it’s something that shows the effort of the admins and devs- it’s a full commitment to giving a player the intended experience that the original devs had in mind, years after release.

There are a few flaws. The state of the games and their hack checking client-side are not great, so Pokémon with impossible moves sometimes make it into the Battle Tower/Subway, rendering it absolutely dreadful to play. At some point, I wanted to get a whole bunch of people in my local group to pick one Tower code from 01 to 50 to play and see how far we could all go and what teams we could make, but it seems moot when the bar is high for entry and bare minimum is having something like a Gengar with Destiny Bond for the sole purpose of surviving a No Guard Machamp due to a glitch that allows any Pokemon to have any move. Also, if you care about legitimacy, it seems a lot of the Pokémon that specifically get traded to you can be hacked. I remember getting a Exeggutor once that that moves it could not learn, and had its stats invested in the least beneficial way possible. For gen 5, Global Link and the Dream World do not work- but this is understandable, I wouldn’t expect anyone to try and recreate a browser game that essentially equated to baby’s first point-and-click adventure game mixed with berry growing (seriously, that thing was lame and I felt embarrassed even when I was playing it in the privacy of my own home).

Other than that though, it’s a literal experience booster. You can get any released event without having to even mod your DS or get an Action Replay- something that the original games didn’t even do on release. This means that you can access any of the Pokéwalker stages in HGSS or get some myticals you may have missed out back in their limited release schedules. The website for pkmnclassic.net also allows you to check the GTS at any time for something you may be looking for- this is nice for dex completion or if you want breeding rejects.

Eventually I would like to host a gen 4 competition using the service while being able to use the Battle Video service to commentate/view battles in said tournament. Down the line I may post more details on that, so stay tuned!

Welcome to my site!

Hello and welcome to my blog! This is a blog that is set up to primarily be for my personal use and discussing my hobbies. It’ll most likely be for video games, but I hope to expand my horizons a bit- this blog will keep me honest in doing so. I have wanted to make this for a long time, but I finally decided that 2023 would be the best time to do so. I chose an actual site instead of Twitter/Facebook/YouTube because I like the free form nature that an actual site gives me and I do not have to adhere to any social-media style data collection from those services.

A bit about me: I am a computing security and Isshin-Ryu karate student. I take both semi-to-very-seriously. I am also a senior service desk representative and enjoy my work with helping both my coworkers and customers. My hobbies mainly involve gaming, specifically, games that are a bit older that find new life in the current year with either mods or third party servers that allow discontinued game services to stay alive. I hope that with this blog I share a bit of insight into what is possible with these games.