January 11th: Around the World

- Got convinced by Aar to try the Battle Tower sometime tomorrow, so started making some preparations for that.
- It took longer than I would have liked, but I got over 10,000 Coins in the coin game.
- Spent my coin game winnings on Thunderbolt instead of a Porygon. One day, I will have the highly-polygonal Porygon, but not today.
- Used the TM on Peep to replace Discharge.
- Determined that the other Pokemon we would take with us to the Battle Tower would magically appear in out boxes.
- Checked out the Global Terminal. Recorded my time there.
- Watched three battle videos, checked out trainer rankings, looked at some dress-up pictures (now I get what those are for), and explored the box contents that people were sharing. Basically, did all of the online functionality in the Global Terminal except the GTS since I already did that.

YouTube Screen Recordings

Apparently, winning 50 battles in the Battle Frontier on Wi-Fi in a row will award the Pokemon with a ribbon. We decided that the goal for the Tower would be to have me use one of my Pokemon so that it can get the special ribbon, then hack in three others to make things more possible for us. We hadn't worked out exactly who those other three would be yet, but I knew exactly who I was bringing to tow through the opposition and get that ribbon.

Peep. Switching out Discharge for Thunderbolt put her in probably the best spot of anyone in the team. A strong Electric move and an outside ace in Signal Beam both make good use of her great special attack stat and give her good type coverage. Light Screen also acts as a helpful defensive buff for herself and her team. Strength is also there. Also, I just got very attached to Peep over the course of time. I want to take a shot at getting that ribbon and she's the one that I'm going to bring along for it.

I finally got around to trying out the Wi-Fi functionality in the Global Terminal. I remember watching at least one battle video using this functionality back when the WFC services were still hosted by Nintendo. I may have also done one GTS trade at some point in 2010, according to the Box contents of my original save. There's one fairly unremarkable looking Zubat with an OT of "ASH" (all caps). There are other traded Pokemon in those boxes, but all of those were from NPCs. The only way I think that Pokemon could have gotten to my boxes was by GTS trade. My trade for Squirtle during this save was either my first 4th Gen. GTS trade since 2010 or my first 4th Gen. GTS trade ever, and I'm not entirely sure which one it is.

Anyway, I think the battle videos are probably the second best part of the Global Terminal, falling short of the GTS. Being able to share replays of battles fought is the type of feature I wouldn't have expected on a DS-era Pokemon game, but it's there and I think that's great. Being able to share images from the dress-up thing is also a nice bonus. I don't really get why the Box sharing feature doesn't let you see more details about the Pokemon it contains. Overall, the Global Terminal was a great addition and I would have really enjoyed being able to use it more if I had unsecured Wi-Fi in the early 2010's.

It's ironic, in a way. The reason I wasn't able to use the Wi-Fi functionality in the past was because Nintendo's implementation didn't include provisions for networks with WPA/WPA2 passwords. Now, after they've shut the service down, modders were able to work with a different flaw in that same implementation to get DS systems to connect to an unofficial WFC replacement. What prevented me from using the Wi-Fi service in the past is the reason that an alternative Wi-Fi service can be used today. This somewhat reminds me of the Gears of War 2 bug that causes Xbox Live accounts with corrupted GoW2 achievement data to immediately crash the game, with using another bug in the game to copy clean data from one Xbox Live account onto the other one being the only known fix. The only way to work around the bugged code is to exploit a different bug in the code. Simply incredible.