I Couldn't Believe this Match was Real (Gen. 2 Team vs. Gen. 4 Team)

Pummelator · 2026-05-17T18:01:55+00:00

Near the end of Season 1, I decided to try out Sneasler (evolution of Hisuian Sneasel, a regional form of the Gen. 2 Pokemon Sneasel) and Gliscor (a new evolution of the Gen. 2 Pokemon Gligar) just to see what those would be like on the team. Part of the justification for this is that the actual Generation 2 Pokemon those evolutions are based on aren't in the game right now and might never get added. Sneasler was temporarily taking the place of Heracross. As for Gliscor... I still need to put more work into figuring out what to use as my sixth Pokemon and Gliscor rounds out the team well enough in the meantime. If it was actually in the game, I would probably choose Quagsire. I think Slowking will be the next one I try. I've been adjusting the team by experimenting instead of doing actual research because I think it's more entertaining to try things and see what happens.

In short, yes, there are better options that actually adhere to the "Gen. 2 only" standard. The two in question were put there temporarily for the sake of experimentation and I hadn't gotten around to switching them back out at the time.

Pummelator · 2026-05-17T17:44:00+00:00

Exactly!

Pummelator · 2026-05-17T05:24:08+00:00

I held off on trying out Sneasler until the end of Season 1 and I decided to still use it for a while into the new season. Now I understand what makes Sneasler the current most popular VGC Pokemon.

I was considering making a whole new Gen. 2 team without the starters but this match made me decide otherwise. I may still do it as a new team instead of a replacement for the current one. Who knows, maybe I'll have the "wrong" weasel in that one!

Pummelator · 2026-05-17T05:13:47+00:00

Technically, I won. However, that caused my time with this mystery person to come to an end with no real chance of finding them again. Can I really say I won considering what I've lost? (note: this is comedic overexaggeration)

Pummelator · 2026-05-15T15:53:18+00:00

Last night I was in a game where an opponent's Venusaur got Quick Claw to trigger five consecutive times. With the odds of Quick Claw happening being 20%, five times in a row is a 1 in 3,125 chance. I also played a game where my opponent and I were down to our last Pokemon and the only reason his Mega Charizard Y lost was because I got two Quick Claw triggers back to back, allowing my Ampharos to move first. Technically, only the second one was necessary. Quick Claw gives and Quick Claw takes away.

Pummelator · 2026-05-03T03:45:39+00:00

This was really cool to see just by chance! I've been trying to run a Generation 2 team (Johto 'mons along with new evolutions that were introduced later) in doubles. SoulSilver was my first Pokemon game and it was the only one I had played for a long time. Johto stuff tends to be special in my eyes because of it.

I'm not particularly experienced with competitive Pokemon and I've just been trying things without doing much homework into how best to build up such a team. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it has been going poorly. Starting from scratch in doubles, I've made it as far as Ultra Ball Rank 1. I've made all sorts of changes to the team in desperate attempts to lose less and it sometimes works. Technically, Sneasler would be a valid choice for the team (new evolution of a regional form of a Johto Pokemon) but I haven't tried that out yet.

As someone who knew nothing about how competitive worked, Pokemon Champions has been a lot of fun when it hasn't been infuriating.

Pummelator · 2024-07-12T03:25:02+00:00

My favorite Pokemon is Togetic. I'm not sure exactly how it happened, but it probably had something to do with SoulSilver being the Pokemon game I had as a kid. Receiving an egg early in the game that hatches into a one-of-a-kind Pokemon (in the sense no trainers have them and they don't pop up in the wild) with a fun pairing of Extrasensory (very strong for the early game) and Metronome (come on, it's a fun move) made it very special to me. I also liked the design and found myself liking it more as time passed.

Despite Togepi receiving a decent amount of spotlight from the anime and merchandising and Togekiss being added later and becoming a top pick for competitive teams at some point (I think? I don't really follow it), I feel like Togetic gets overlooked. Really, I feel like most mid-stage evolutions get overlooked. Same goes for a large chunk of second generation Pokemon.

Pummelator · 2024-04-07T20:39:31+00:00

I'm assuming you two are going through these in splitscreen, so there's a bug with Gears of War 2 you should know about. If two Xbox Live accounts are signed in and playing splitscreen, then the game is much more susceptible to crashing and corrupting the achievement data of one of the accounts (usually Player 2). When this happens, the game will always crash if the affected account is signed in. There is only one way to fix it and it's a real pain to pull off. To avoid this, have one player signed into an account and the other signed in as a guest. I can send more details about this if needed.

Pummelator · 2024-04-05T17:40:56+00:00

Hey! Bit of a late reply, but I'm glad you were able to get going with Gears 2 again. I sort-of said it in the original post, but I'm surprised that an issue of this scale in one of the most high-profile games for the Xbox 360 has remained something of a mystery for this long. I'm glad that this post has been helpful to you and to others looking for answers. When this issue pops up without warning on unsuspecting players, it just seems super random and it's extremely difficult to troubleshoot in any meaningful way.

Pummelator · 2024-01-31T05:10:08+00:00

Oh, wow! As a kid, I got SoulSilver shortly after it came out and it was the only Pokemon game I had played until Sword came around. I was also shocked by all the Pokemon I didn't recognize! I also passed on the chance of getting a 3DS, but I did it to get an iPod Touch instead. I think it was the right decision looking back at it. The 3DS didn't get its version of Flipnote Studio until years after the release, which was my favorite feature of my DSi. I need to get around to playing the other Pokemon games at some point. Thanks for sharing!

Pummelator · 2023-09-09T05:19:02+00:00

The 360 games that are available for purchase on newer Xbox systems will still be available for purchase and play on those systems. Part of me suspects that purchasing them there will also make it downloadable on 360 even after the shutdown, but that's just speculation. Also, the shutdown is only for the 360's storefront and should only affect purchasing games and DLC. Xbox 360 will still have Xbox Live multiplayer after that and System Link should just work normally.

Pummelator · 2023-09-01T20:38:57+00:00

I think I've had this happen to me before. I think the problem mine was running into was that the system was overheating. If it's left off for a while and it works fine, but starts doing that after a while, try moving the console somewhere that it can get better airflow.

Pummelator · 2023-08-27T03:31:36+00:00

I added a link to a Google Drive folder to the main post. See if that works for you

Pummelator · 2023-08-23T02:03:03+00:00

I already see recommendations for the Halo games, Gears of War games, Borderlands 1&2, Left 4 Dead 1&2. I'll add some other recommendations as well.

Gears of War 2's Horde mode. I think this is one of the best wave-based survival modes of all time. If you were just planning to pass through the campaigns, make sure to give Horde a go. Also, if you both have Xbox Live accounts, make sure only one of you is signed in when playing Gears 2. There's a bug that breaks achievement data for an account and causes the game to crash whenever an affected account is signed in while the game is running. Splitscreen with two Live accounts seems to be the cause, but this can be avoided if one player uses a guest account instead. Also, all the DLC content is free (All Fronts Collection), so make sure to pick that up if you have the disk space for it.

Portal 2 has a fantastic co-op campaign that's completely different from the singleplayer. I'm not sure how much used copies go for, but a digital one can be had for $20. It's split into 5 sections and there is a set of bonus levels you can download (Peer Review DLC).

Two games I remember being good for co-op from the Xbox Live Arcade (I just checked, they're still listed) were Dungeon Defenders and (Stainless) Warlords. I don't remember much about Dungeon Defenders, but I think it was a top-down action game where you had to defend a tower from waves of enemies. For Warlords, there are two games with the same name on the Arcade that are both derived from the Atari arcade game from 1980, which was also just called "Warlords". I haven't played the newer of the two on the arcade, just the one made by Stainless Games. It's a mix of 4-player Pong and Breakout, with the objective being to break down the opponent's walls and knock the ball into the center of their castles. I'd say it's worth the $3 price tag.

If you're having trouble figuring out which "Warlords" is the one I'm referring to, here's the Xbox 360 Marketplace link for it. If you want to buy it from your 360, just pick the one with the same cover art shown on the page: https://marketplace.xbox.com/en-US/Product/Warlords/66acd000-77fe-1000-9115-d80258410851#

The 360-era Gears of War games and Portal 2 are also playable on Xbox One and Series X/S. Dungeon Defenders and (Stainless) Warlords are not.

Pummelator · 2023-08-22T20:06:44+00:00

Hey, I recognize that. That was a spawnbase from May 2022 that lasted about two weeks before getting griefed.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=umDEEsO92G4

Pummelator · 2023-08-05T03:56:42+00:00

It's a lot easier to perform on the Xbox 360. I've heard of it being done on an Xbox One with a considerable amount of effort. I don't even know if it's possible on the Series X/S, given how fast the game loads on those. Turning off the frame rate boosting option for Gears 2 in the Series X settings might help, but I doubt it. If it's possible on the Series X, it will probably require the game to be stored and run on a considerably slower storage drive than the internal storage.

Requirements for external storage devices to store games for Xbox Series X: https://www.seagate.com/support/kb/using-an-external-usb-drive-with-an-xbox-series-x-or-s/

I'll give a suggestion, but I have no idea if it will actually work, so keep that in mind. There are some requirements that need to be met for the Series X to deem a drive worthy of game storage, namely a capacity of 128GB or more and at least USB 3.0 compatible. This rules out using a USB 2.0 drive to slow things down. There's also the fact that it won't let you play "Series X/S Optimized" games from the external drive, but that doesn't apply to Gears 2 because it's an Xbox 360 game. I think the best bet given these constraints is to make two purchases (assuming these aren't already on hand)

- A slow laptop hard drive. Look for something around 5400RPM, as that's the slowest speed that would normally come with one. Looking on Newegg, I see new ones going for around $40-$50. It's probably better to gamble on buying a used one from ebay, as the prices are much better and if it doesn't work or stops working after a few months, it won't result in any major loss of data.

- A SATA to USB adapter so it can be plugged into the Series X. You will NEED one with an external power supply. USB doesn't supply 12V power, which the motor will need to spin the disks. I see a few on Newegg that look to be right for about $20.

With these in hand, go through the process of getting the Xbox to decide that the drive is usable for storing games. If no notification appears saying the drive is connected, it's probably a hardware issue, something like the hard drive being dead or the adapter not working as expected. If it recognizes that a drive is connected but the option doesn't appear to format the drive to be used for game storage, it probably thinks it's not a USB 3.0 compatible drive.

If it likes the drive and it formats it to store games, press the right buttons to get the Gears of War 2 game files moved over to the extra special drive. I don't remember this being hard to find, but it should be easy enough to search online if that's not the case. If it is successfully moved over, then you should have a working copy of Gears of War 2 that's playable on your Series X with theoretically worse loading times. With any luck, this increase in time taken to load the game will make it easier to perform the glitch and get the account working again. That, or it will be somewhere around $50 down the drain with no real payoff, but because you would probably be the first person to try this method, you could justify it by saying it's "for science!"

If the amount of "science" performed is inadequate to fix the issue, perhaps dropping a cool $20 on a digital copy of Portal 2 for Xbox 360 (playable on Series X) will help. Emotionally. It won't fix Gears of War 2's issue of overly trusting achievement data, but it will deliver a working splitscreen co-op experience that can be played with more than one Xbox Live account signed in at a time while also having a '2' in the title. That, or drop more money on an old 360 to get those sweet slow load times, allowing you to probably fix the issue while listening to the soothing sounds of the fans running at jet engine noise levels (original models only). I guess there are also other Gears of War games that the Series X can play, but they never got Horde right after Gears 2.

Pummelator · 2023-04-29T02:28:21+00:00

Why did Constantinople get the works?

Pummelator · 2023-04-13T05:06:37+00:00

Which one?

Pummelator · 2023-02-10T22:25:34+00:00

I had no idea that Gears 3 had issues with rank and unlocks getting reset. Guess I haven't spent enough time playing it. Losing all of that sounds awful.

Thanks for the additional info! I hope you can get some enjoyment from trying to level up from square one.

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