Sometimes people react to these kinds of things with bafflement that these things weren't discovered and fixed before the game was released, but... it took millions of people playing the game over twenty years to notice anything off with this; no wonder QA didn't.

I've trained a team to level 100 a couple of times since - I did on Sapphire and Black 2 - but I don't think I ever did on a game that actually had Charizard.

So I think my Charizard on Z-A just became my first ever level 100 Charizard, after all these years.

This! Is! Illegal! Consent for processing personal data for advertising must be freely given because I want personalized ads (I don't), not coerced because the only alternative is to cough up money! Fuck all the way offffff

You produce content shilling a client to whatever standard meets the minimum threshold to not get rejected by the unscrupulous blogger who is being paid to publish it. I produce thousands of words about Game Boy glitches for free because I am a giant nerd. We are not the same

As someone who makes actual research-backed high-quality content (that sometimes provides actionable insights and at other times is just fun for nerds), I'm always peeved by the implication that whatever marketing slop these spam farms want to push would actually qualify.

Surely the only reason a website exists is to make money off publishing stealth advertisements; no reason to even ask if that's a thing they do, just what their price is. If the person who receives this e-mail doesn't handle that, forward it to the guy who does, who must exist.

Oh yeah, they're definitely bots. What gets to me is more what this represents about the state of the web, with the assumption that these marketing companies can basically expect to contact any arbitrary website and be able to pay to get it to publish their advertising slop.