Countdown to XY: A Nostalgia Thread

Day 6: rumours.

I believed you could catch the "ghosts" in Lavender Town with a special Master Ball.
My friend convinced me that there was a Pokemon called "Polymander-dip-mago-eagly" that could learn any move.
Also, Splash was definitely an OHKO move that only hit 1% of the time. For sure.

I was a pretty gullible kid.
 
Day 6: Rumor? Probably the only one I believed was back in my grade school days out on the blacktop. Some kids were saying that if you beat the Elite Four 32 times in Yellow Version, you would receive a Togepi egg. I knew Togepi existed from the anime, but I didn't bother to try and get it at all haha. So whether I believed it or not, no time wasted.
 

Codraroll

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I guess I believed the "press A and B and some D-pad button really fast to make Pokéballs catch anything" rumour. My cousin even demonstrated it for me a few times, and succeeded, probably due to sheer luck.

I also believed the rumours saying the grass outside Pallet contained really powerful Pokémon (akin to Cerulean cave), but that the developers had put them there as a joke, and you had to hack the game to even go there.
For the longest time, I also thought the move Tombstoner/Tombstony was coded into the games, just that nothing could learn it. I was very disappointed when I found out that the move only has a name, and that's it. Not even a typing or a base power.
 

Bull of Heaven

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Okay, this is a difficult one. I'm sure I used to believe all kinds of ridiculous rumours, but I'm having trouble remembering them. I definitely remember hearing and believing something about a secret underground location in Johto's National Park where one could catch a silver Gyarados. I think it was allegedly accessed by Cutting all the tall grass in the park and then using Dig, but I'm positive that there was more to it than I remember.

Edit: Oh, and of course holding B when using a Poke Ball increased the chances of a successful capture. You had to start when the Ball touched the Pokemon, press and hold the button as hard as possible (the harder the better) and avoid pressing A. Oddly enough, most people seem to have heard different versions of that one.

<- not silver
 
Need to play a bit of catch-up for this.

Day 4: What was your first level 100 Pokémon?
My first level 100 Pokemon were some of the event ones that came at that level, but the first one I actually trained to 100 was my in-game Volcarona AND Galvantula from Black2. I made a point to get them to 100 at the same time.

Day 5: What is your favorite Pokémon and why?
My favorite Pokemon has changed quite a few times over the years, but I'd say Galvantula takes the cake. Joltik is an absolutely adorable fuzzy ball of cute, and Galvantula, while somewhat lacking in competitive use, just works. It is worth noting that Inkay is also an adorable critter, and depending how Malamar shapes up, they may take the spot. Or tie it.

Day 6: Which Pokémon rumors did you believe as a child?
I came to the scene sorta late, sometime after Gold came out, and a fair share of rumors had died down. The main thing that comes to mind was the claim that Crystal had multiple save files, though that's not really even a rumor.
 
I believed that Dragonite was Charizard's brother (dunno what that means, maybe cos i thought there was only one of each Pokemon in existence)- that came up in like kindergarten for me, where there was tha Kanto episode with the silhouette of dragonite lol. And in Emerald i kept on looking for a "Steel Valley" near Mauville. Never found it. Oh, and that you could have two pokemon (opp genders ofc, and next to eachother) in the party next to each other, and they could breed when you ran around lol. I always thought the daycare centre was only for getting levels on your pokemon

And this is so true for me
Edit: Oh, and of course holding B when using a Poke Ball increased the chances of a successful capture. You had to start when the Ball touched the Pokemon, press and hold the button as hard as possible (the harder the better) and avoid pressing A. Oddly enough, most people seem to have heard different versions of that one.
 
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cant say

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DAY 5, FAV MON:
Growing up I always loved Articuno. Mostly for its appearance, but it was also handy in slaying those powerful dragons back in the day, and I loved its cry for some reason, it just sounded legendary. There was just something about Ice types in general that I liked as a kid as well. Nothing really stood out to me the same way as Articuno did until fifth gen when I adopted a little Zorua in Castelia City after it played with my Celebi. I thought it was the cutest of all cutemons, then it evolved, and all of a sudden I had a new favourite Pokemon. There's just something I love about Zoroark. He looks so evil, but also friendly at the same time. I always have a hard time explaining why I like Zoroark. He's just... cool
So Zoro gets my current vote, but can't ignore Articuno for all that nostalgia
DAY 6, RUMORS:
We had the typical rumors floating around when I was a kid, Mew under the truck, beating the E4 100 times to battle Prof. Oak, Mewthree, The grass outside Pallet Town etc etc.. My best friend at the time always seemed to be one step ahead of all the rumors and would tell me about them and not to believe them before I would waste my time. He wasn't around for third gen though, and I wasted plenty of time trying to hitch a ride on the spaceship in Mossdeep. The only rumor(s) I got really sucked into were all the button pressing combos to catch pokemon! Me and my brother had a routine when we'd hold A, and tap the D-pad in the direction the ball was going, so up when you throw it, up and down when the ball is bouncing on the ground, and alternate let and right when it shook. We were so convinced it worked that we taught everyone!
Also that pressing B increases your chance to evade (or weaken) attacks, and mashing A increased the power. Our poor N64 controllers, how they have suffered..
 
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DHR-107

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Day 6: Which Pokémon rumors did you believe as a child?
Oh dear.... Which ones didn't I believe? Bill's Secret Garden, Mew under the truck, Celebi in Ilex forest, Moss Deep Space centre... B+Down on a Great Ball (Which I still do out of habit even though I know it has no baring)... But the best one by far is one of my friends managed to convince me that after completing the Johto Dex (Minus Mew and Celebi of course), a Team Rocket Grunt would follow you around, and then battle you in Goldenrod. Where if you lost he stole the Pokemon that were in his party (And he had like super strong Pokemon too). So after I completed the dex I never returned to Goldenrod to find out until I had a team of Level 80+ Pokemon and had Beaten Red a few times... Turns out no such man appears :(

The amount of rumours I heard to do with the Old Man in Viridian City were outstanding too. Weirdly enough lots of them turned out true, like Lv 0 Missingno evolving into Kangaskhan (So you have Sky Attack Kanga), 99 item trick and finding mons from the Safari Zone there. Sometimes glitches are useful :p

cant say

Oh my god... i heard about the Stadium Holding A thing too :o I used to that all the time as well! Mine was a slightly different variation though where you held down A while the damage was being dealt... And then let go when you thought that was the damage you were supposed to do. Obviously a lot of the time the bar kept moving a little bit more...
 
Edit: Oh, and of course holding B when using a Poke Ball increased the chances of a successful capture. You had to start when the Ball touched the Pokemon, press and hold the button as hard as possible (the harder the better) and avoid pressing A. Oddly enough, most people seem to have heard different versions of that one.
yeah it's always interesting to hear how many variations of this there are. for my school it was always a+b+down and you start holding as soon as the pokemon was in the ball (in gen 1) or as soon as the ball stopped bouncing before the shakes (in gen 2)

Also that pressing B increases your chance to evade (or weaken) attacks, and mashing A increased the power. Our poor N64 controllers, how they have suffered..
holy shit i completely forgot about this hahaha. you know how the pokemon sprites blinked a few times when they got hit? i would always press a in time with the blinks. i was completely convinced it was raising my critical hit rate lol
 
Day 1: What is your first memory of Pokémon?
Looking at some magazines in a shop while on holiday and seeing one with Charmander (and maybe something else) on the front cover. Instant love. I begged my mum to let me buy it but she refused because I didn't play games at the time and she thought it'd be a waste. Soon after, the craze started to take off and I got into it then.

Day 2: What was your first experience with a shiny Pokémon?
Beyond the Gyarados, I caught a shiny Butterfree in the Bug Catching Contest. I was trying to happiness evolve my Eevee at the time so I entered with it so I didn't have any decent moves to weaken the shiny/status it. Eevee got poisoned and eventually got to the point where if the next ball failed then it would faint from poison damage. Somehow, that last ball worked! Butterfree got me third place in the contest.

Day 3: How close have you come to "catching 'em all"?
I had 150/151 in my old Blue file (had Mew, missing Vaporeon) and then stopped caring about completing it until I got White when I managed to complete it properly for the first time. I did it again in White 2 so I could get the Shiny Charm and will probably do it again in Y if there's a decent reward.

Day 4: What was your first level 100 Pokémon?
Either my Charizard or Mewtwo back in Blue.

Day 5: What is your favorite Pokémon and why?
It varies, right now it's back to being Murkrow who has always been one of my top favourites from back when GS was still only in Japanese. The past few years it was Chatot but I've fallen out of liking it. I'm not even sure why I first started liking Murkrow, but now at least, I love birds, love crows and it's been so long that I couldn't imagine not liking it.

Day 6: Which Pokémon rumors did you believe as a child?
Not many. Only other people who I knew played were my brother and next door neighbours and they never believed any and we had no internet at the time. Before I'd even got the games I'd bought a guidebook which listed most of the common rumours and said they were all false. It did list the 'get Mew for completing the Pokédex in the Japanese version' as correct so I believed that untl the internet told me otherwise.
 
There were two rumors I believed were true. The first was that mashing A and B repeatedly would increase a Pokémon's catch rate (I actually found out less than a year ago this wasn't the case). The second was about Mossdeep's White Rock somehow unlocking Jirachi. Man was I disappointed.
 
Day 1: What is your first memory of Pokémon?
My first pokemon memory was of me being upset because I didn't have the option of starting off my game with a pikachu just like ash did on the show. I also remember my first pokemon I ever captured being a Spearow.

Day 2: What was your first experience with a shiny Pokémon?
My first experience with a shiny pokemon (that i remember) had to be the red gyarados at lake rage. I remember going over there and hopping in the water with 1 strong but poisoned pokemon (starter of course) and 3-4 underlings needless to say my first time I got hard bodied but my second time around I came back and captured it. From that moment on it never left my side

Day 3: How close have you come to "catching 'em all"?
I think the closest I've come is diamond when I was only 10-15 pokemon away from completing my competitive pokemon pokedex.

Day 4: What was your first level 100 Pokémon?
My first level 100 was absol simply because I loved it's design so much that I just could help using it and leveling it until it maxed out.lol

Day 5: What is your favorite Pokémon and why?
I have to say my favorite is absol. It's a tough choice between Uxie, nidoking, absol, mespirit, terrakion, and reuniclus but absol gets the pick. I love absol's design overall it's very majestic and yet powerful as well. I also love this poke because it was the first one I'd ever seen use sucker punch and I thought that was one of the coolest moves ever. In fact I loved it so much my first YouTube channel was known as teamsuckerpunch. Another cool thing about Absol is how it's called the disaster pokemon and is known as the harbinger of bad luck when really absol is trying to warn people of a disaster as opposed to bringing it to them.

Day 6: Which Pokémon rumors did you believe as a child?

Only rumor I believed was that if you pressed the a button in ray them with the pokeball shaking you'd have a better shot at the pokemon not breaking out. I still do it to this day just out of habit.lol
 

Celever

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Day 5:
Altaria. You should all know this already (I have an altaria avi, I always comment on how much I love Altaria, you also love Altaria don't lie) but it fulfills all of my criteria:
  • Altaria is cute, cuddly, rather feminine and kinda derpy
  • If Pokemon were real I would love to have one
  • Fits the play-style I love to use the most competitively except for VolTurn, teach Altaria U-Turn in gen 6 please!!!
  • She is sooo underrated! Ask anyone which fully-evolved Dragon-Type Pokemon they would like to use least and most of the time it will be Altaria. Whilst this is understandable in something like OU, UU and sometimes RU (because Druddigon, but Altaria should always be second imho :3) in-game nobody likes using Altaria even though she is actually rather good in-game.
  • Is in Pokemon Colosseum, the best Pokemon game, and Pokemon XD: Gales of Darkness, the second best Pokemon game.
  • Soooo cute!

My favourite Pokemon for a long time was actually Celebi, due to the 4th movie, but I've fallen out of touch with her as of late. :(

I don't have any "least favourite" Pokemon though. There are Pokemon that I really like but I try to see good in every Pokemon. My main issue with Pokemon designs is over-cluttering because it blocks the good of the design with fancy dots... this is why I hate many legendaries. (Also Trubbish is incredibly derpy LOVE HIM! D:<)

Day 6:

I dunno. None of my "friends" likeds Pokemon growing up except a select few... actually there is one which none of you will have ever heard of since my friend made the entire thing up on the spot.

So my friend had a "hacked" copy of Pokemon Diamond. He was quite rich so he actually just scratched some of the data on his first copy and bought himself a second, but still this glitchy game was the greatest thing ever. He told me that in order to get the same copy you had to go to Japan and talk to the guy who creates Pokemon and he gives it to you for £5... yeah... but anyway he said that he met Brock when he went to Japan (he did actually go to Japan, and as a kid I was convinced the anime was real) and that he traded him his Onix, and sure enough he did have an Onix on his game with the OT: Brock. This was because his character was called Brock. Anyway, so this guy met Brock and had a hacked copy of the game with a bunch of Level 100s in it. He convinced me to bring my DS into school and he traded me that Onix and I treasured it for a while until he told me that he made it all up. You can imagine how I felt not having played my new diamond for months because it had that Onix on it...
 
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I guess I believed the "press A and B and some D-pad button really fast to make Pokéballs catch anything" rumour. My cousin even demonstrated it for me a few times, and succeeded, probably due to sheer luck.

I also believed the rumours saying the grass outside Pallet contained really powerful Pokémon (akin to Cerulean cave), but that the developers had put them there as a joke, and you had to hack the game to even go there.
For the longest time, I also thought the move Tombstoner/Tombstony was coded into the games, just that nothing could learn it. I was very disappointed when I found out that the move only has a name, and that's it. Not even a typing or a base power.
Time for me to join this thread. This was also one of the rumors that I fell for. Another one, as dumb as it is, I was told that you had to kill the legendaries to catch them. <-Biggest fail of my life.
 
Day 6: Which Pokémon rumors did you believe as a child?
Pokemon wasn't my first rodeo when it came to the internet rumor mill, so I actually didn't fall for any of them. Or, you know, not fully. I mean, there were some I wanted to be true, but past dealings with stuff like how to resurrect you-know-who in FF7 or how to unlock nudalities in Mortal Kombat seasoned me against even the most outrageous claims.

At the same time, I understand how it got so crazy. In the ye olde internet 1.0 days (when people still wrote out the "http://" on everything and embedded MIDIs were the norm) rumors were a lot harder to confirm and most people were in the dark about whether there really were PokeGods or a way to jump the fence around Pallet and catch wild starters. It's not like today where people crack the game apart and suck out the tender data like an otter eating an oyster (or a Buoysel and a Shellder if that helps) on the very day its released. The 'net in 1998 was more like a loose collection of small "neighborhoods" where no one spoke Japanese or had a Japanese "contact" who could put most of this stuff in perspective. No major meeting ground like 4chan or NeoGAF to quash this stuff as soon as it arose, and no YouTube to back it all up. So when we saw a movie poster for Pikachu's Summer Vacation that had a Marill on it with absolutely no context, people just assumed it was some kind of ultra rare critter no one had found yet. Granted, Gold and Silver were already announced, but you only knew about that sort of thing if you were in the right circles. There was no such thing as "common knowledge" on the World Wide Web.

But all that word of mouth was exactly the type of thing the creators wanted to happen, and part of why the franchise so popular today. The idea that the game is much bigger than it appears on the surface gives people a reason to keep playing and exploring.
 
Haven't been on for a while, so I gotta catch up.

Day 5: Favorite Pokemon is obviously Charizard. I've loved the dude since he swept my rival back in Red version. He may have a 4x SR weakness, but look at him!!!
And look at that Shiny Sprite!!!
He's just always there for me.

Day 6: Honestly, I didn't believe many rumors in my time. But one I did believe was that if you leveled a Groudon or Kyogre to 100, it would evolve. My buddy Trevor first told me of this, and even showed me some concept art he found (no idea where to find it now.) But I remember leveling both of them to 100, and then ta da! Nothing. I was happy with my lvl 100 legendaries, but pissed that they didn't evolve. Lol
 
I might as well just catch up completely!
Day 1: Getting Ruby. It was my first game and I was insanely excited when I got it.
Day 2: Never found one normally. Had to wait until I learned to RNG to actually get it.
Day 3: Not at all, or at least in one game
Day 4: My Rayquaza. Was my most treasured thing at the time. I would not even let anyone touch my game once I had it.
Day 5: Lucario cause he just is a total boss.
 
Day 6 (Pokemon Rumor)
The "Rapidly Pressing A" to catch Pokemon better is a classic everywhere in the world. I remember all of my friends would ask me to catch their pokemon because I could press the A button the fastest in the class. I felt like such a badass when I caught my friend's Kyogre in front of the whole class. Rumors...

Day 2 (Shiny Pokemon Experience)
Now that I remember, I didn't have internet in my house in Mexico until I was 12 or so. This made me unable to research any "Pokemon Tricks" or "Pokemon Secrets" online. So when I saw and caught my first shiny ever, shiny Trapinch in Pokemon Ruby, I went insane and had to tell my friends about it instantly.

For a week in school my friends would mess around with me calling the "monterrey's biggest liar" and so on because they couldn't believe what I said. I couldn't confirm what I was saying because I didn't know how to classify this Trapinch. This was until one day, in the middle of free time in class, with all my friends playing/watching pokemon, I go to the bathroom.

I come back from the bathroom and all my friends instantly look at me and call me, "Kevin look! look!". My friend, Ezequiel, was in the middle of a battle with a shiny Spheal. He caught it, and everybody now believed me. One of the hypest moments in my school history. My friends with internet later confirmed these "shiny pokemons" and everybody started looking for them. Don't know if you guys would believe when I tell you that same friend of mine caught a shiny Pikachu that same day at home.

When game "legends" used to be hype.
 

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