[TAS] Pokemon Stadium - Pika Cup Playaround

This is a Tool-Assisted Superplay/Speedrun (often abbreviated to "TAS") where a player can edit, rerecord, and manipulate a game into doing whatever that person desires. Visit http://tasvideos.org/ for more information.

This run of Pika Cup takes on the battles in entertaining, silly ways full of shenanigans, all with only rental Pokemon.

While TASing this game may seem easy on paper, the RNG manipulation was an absolute nightmare to go through as it appears that the RNG value is very resistant to being cycled around or is very restrictive on the limit of possibilities. When using Metronome, I would always get a random bunch of 50 or so moves per turn which I would get dozens of times, and the game would be very fussy on giving anything else. Often for the same move being selected multiple times, I would also get sets of identical results, suggesting that I'm getting the same RNG value repeatedly.

I'm very curious as to what the size of the RNG value is in Pokemon Stadium. If it's a simple 4 bytes of RAM, that would very quickly mean there are more hypothetical possibilities than real ones when involving all the random factors including damage ranges, accuracy, critical hits, secondary effects, announcer calls, camera angles, Pokemon cries, and more. I wouldn't be surprised if many relevant possibilities can't occur, similar to how wild Pokemon in Red/Blue/Yellow can't ever have perfect stats in most cases. For example, if two Pokemon were both using Metronome on the same turn, what pairs of moves along with secondary effects and critical hits are impossible?

Despite the roadblocks, this turned out to be a fun project, even if it had to pan out differently than I originally envisioned. I think that if one day the RNG is fully figured out and calculated that it would lead to many interesting philosophical debates about competitive play.