Pokémon (InstanceClass, 7)

From Compile Worlds

A Pokémon is basically any and every animal appearing in the Pokémon series. In fact, midgets, plants, rocks, goths, banana splits... hell, even freggin' punks can be Pokémon!

Pokémon can be caught with a variety of Poké Balls. While one can carry up to 99 (999, as of Generation IV) of each type of empty balls as they like, one can only carry six Pokémon at once, for no apparent reason. Further Pokémon get teleported to a PC. They must have the Soul accessory (and a wireless laptop) equipped, I guess.

Totals

Each generation of mainstream Pokémon games added a new bunch of beasts to the cast. The first generation had 151; the second added 100 for a total of 251; the third added 135 to bring it up to 386 (the number we all love to hate); the fourth added 107, giving a count of 493. It's rumored that another seven or eight Pokémon were planned but ditched from the last of these, which would have made 500 or 501 respectively. And now that Pokémon Black and White is out, 156 more have been added, making a total of 649, which once again falls just short of the traditional n-hundred-and-51. But as long as Nintendo doesn't go bankrupt, there'll be literally over 9000 Mons quite soon.

The Pokémon counts also directly influenced game glitchability. At first, the games used a single byte to store the Pokémon's number, so there were 255 slots in all. That meant that the first generation had a whopping 104 slots available to glitch Pokémon, such as the infamous Missingno. - and their abilities ranged dramatically, conventional or otherwise. However, the next generation only had four slots not allocated to Pokémon, and of these was used for eggs, so there was very little variety and the three remaining glitch Pokémon displayed no useful traits. By the time the third generation came around, the Pokémon number was increased to 16 bits, but a simple check was added in to replace any unused slot with a question mark.

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