The Goodball (formerly known as Pokéball in the legacy version and Greatball in the mobile version of Stealing the Diamond) is an item appearing in the video game section of the National Museum of History and Culture during Stealing the Diamond.
The option is based on the Pokéball from the Pokémon game series, and in the original online release of Stealing the Diamond it was actually named as such. In the remastered version, it had to be recolored and renamed due to copyright issues. Its appearance resembles a green Pokéball.
The Goodball is one of four options Henry can choose while in the Retro Room during the "Just Plain Epic" pathway, in an attempt to take out night guards Tim & Joe.
When chosen, a Pokémon minigame begins in which the nightguards choose Joe to fight, and Henry uses the ball to summon a Pokémon, only to get MissingNo, the famous glitched Pokemon. The monster's sudden appearance causes the game to glitch and many errors appear on the screen, followed by a blue screen of death, which results in the destruction of the surrounding area and thus a failure.
This is one of the fails where the fail sound effect doesn't play (the other being the calculator), hinting that the game has glitched. The sign that reads "Fail" also quickly spins after it lands. It is also the only fail where the Fail Counts have random characters rather than the standard "Fail Count" or "Total" for the total fails and "Unique Fails" or "Unique" for the different fails.
Fail Message[]
01100110 01100101 01100001 01110010 00100000 01101101 01101001 01110011 01110011 01101001 01101110 01100111 01101110 01101111 (Binary for "Fear missingno")
Pokémon Battle Transcript[]
"Night guards TIM & JOE would like to battle!"
"Night guards TIM & JOE sent out JOE!"
Go! MissingNo! (Originally Go! Missingno-oshi!)
Achievement/Medal: 100111010[]
When the error messages are popping out, click on any three "okay" buttons before the fail screen displays. Another popup hints at this saying "Press OK x 3."
Origin[]
Pokéballs are special items found in the Pokémon franchise, used to capture Pokémon. Their design is a ball that has a hard shell and one half being one colour and the other being another colour. A white knob on the border leads to a pocket dimension that stores any Pokémon that the Pokéball has captured inside.
The MissingNo is a famous glitch in early Pokémon games. It is caused by the game trying to read the player's in-game name as a Pokémon encounter, resulting in a block of glitched graphics. Contrary to MissingNo's appearance in the Henry Stickmin games, MissingNo is almost completely harmless compared to other glitch Pokémon.
Trivia[]
- There's a popup message hinting that the player has to click the sun in Escaping the Prison's "Sneaky Escapist" route to unlock "100111010" achievement when the "corruption" starts.
- The Steam achievement for "100111010" reads out "6d 69 73 73 69 6e 67 6e 6f 0d 0a," which means "missingno" in hexadecimal.
- The effect is similar to the CorrupTick and the G.A.B.E.N., as these three items destroy the surrounding region during their usage. However, the Pokéball is escapable and the CorrupTick affects a smaller area despite being potentially faster, while the G.A.B.E.N. cannot be outrun when it goes off. All of these have error effects which also change the FAIL screen effects.
- When the MissingNo destroys the area, Joe and Henry are definitely killed, though Tim might have escaped due to having backed off from the battle while Joe decided to handle it.
- Unlike what is shown, MissingNo in actuality causes minimal damage to the software and hardware in Pokemon Red and Blue[1]. In Pokemon Yellow, however, MissingNo can be dangerous, and corrupt the save file due to the game reading garbage data to render its sprite.
- In the mobile version of Stealing the Diamond, the Pokeball was renamed to "Greatball" and was blue. This was changed in the remastered version due to an already-existing Pokeball variant called Greatball (which is also blue) in the Pokemon franchise.
- The Goodball is one of three options to “glitch out” the fail screen. The others are G.A.B.E.N. and the CorrupTick.
- Of the three, this one has the greatest effect on the screen, with the FAIL board stuttering, the Return to Menu and Retry buttons and the death message not upright, the Step Back and Return to Start buttons being animated when the mouse is not on them, and the fail count text in an odd language (except the numbers themselves). The effects are less pronounced on the remaster (with the Fail Count text in basic English) but remain the most drastic.
- The music during the Goodball option in the remaster version of Stealing the Diamond is based off of "Battle! (Gym Leader)" from Pokémon: Red/Blue/Green/Yellow.
- This is the only option to have been changed in all three versions of the game.