Let's start with the broad stuff - The layout. This wasn't the layout I originally had for this iteration of Sandy Version, that was more basic HTML stuff. Aside from the view window being comically small on a modern browser - Double checking the HTML I believe I designed the site so that no horizontal scrolling would be required on an 800x600 display but was primarily targetting 1024x768 - if the random plugins like the Weather In Hell thing still worked it'd probably hold up aside from no-one viewing the web in 4:3 any more (and even when I moved to a 1280x960 display it started to look very small). The actual layout itself is a table (Layouts back in 2001 were pretty much always either tables or, if you hated your audience, frames), including the scrolling within a fixed viewport.
The names in the Info section are also from after the fact. I think I named various arcs around the Comma arc.
All in all, I think that while this is a rough start for the version, with a lot of the first two battles being regurgitating what at that point had become Pokebattles cliches, by the end of this set of 6.01 battles, Sandy has a definite sense of identity as a verison distinct from the other - at the time - 80 versions on the Network.
That identity might have, at this point, been obtuse references, overly long battles, too many Narrators, and tortured gags that sometimes sidetrack battles and other times shortcut them, but it was an identity.
Battle 1: A hero's beginning
I have no clue where the name Meeman came from. With Dave, I just went for a fairly generic name that popped into my head.
My Narrator dialogue was incredibly clunky originally, with the Narrator Narrating itself saying it, and I think the Narrator at this point was using caps a lot more than typical, in Gen 1 battle narration, or how I write Narrator lines now.
Looking back, I quite like that Meeman somehow doesn't notice the Narrator, or being in a void, until this is pointed out to them.
"NARRATOR SAYS that MEEMAN is in SANDY BEACH VERSION!" - This battle was written before Sandy was added to the network, obviously. Originally Sandy Version would have been Sandy Beach version, but was rejected from the Network as such because Sandy Beach isn't a colour (I believe it was Jason who suggested going with Sandy instead). This is definitely for the better.
I don't entirely know why I went for a Heavy Chunk of Metal as Dave's only Pokemon in the first battle, and I probably extracted as much comedy from that as possible over the initial run of Sandy.
It feels like there's a good gag with the sequence following HECHOFME using MAGNETIC METAL that suffers from verbosity.
I think Dave stealing Magnemite could have been handled in a less clunky way. Heck, had he accidentally done so when withdrawing HECHOFME I think it might have made the 'very attractive' double meaning read better.
More or less everything after METHTOLO fainting probably should have been cut (Particularly since Methtolo is chatting with the Narrator during them), but I'm verbose enough that I'm not sure I'd have avoided over-explaining the battle now.
Battle 2: Drabness's end
Apparently, at the start of Sandy Version I really overused the PB confusion gag, the spelling sucks ("new be" indeed), and it also goes a bit overkill towards the end. This Battle basically consists of a load of PB stock gags of the time. Thunder missing and still causing damage is a neat gag, I guess.
Battle 3: Tripple Trouble and Even More,
And suddenly I discovered title case. No clue what's going on with the punctuation at the end of the title - If that title wanted punctuation, surely it should be an !. Likely a typo.
One huge difference I've been doing between how I conceived of the Narrator in the original Sandy Version and the current Sandy Version first shows up here - Modern Sandy's Narrator is omnipresent, and most of Sandy's residents have never known life without it, thinking that without the Narrator there'd be infinite stasis. With Classic Sandy, however, the Narrator was only ever in one place at any one time - And I think this is true of all the Narrators at least before Narrachu took over the version.
This is also the first time I did anything with the PB stock confusion gag to advance the battle. Where it occurs in the first two Sandy battles it feels "Well this is in Pokemon and other PB versions, I should be using it"
Imposter Nurse Joy is kind of neat as a concept, this is the first use of Team Rocket, and yet again I see I'm not following through with status effects.
I also like the core of the double meaning of ear piercing, though I'm not sold on the James insult to end it, even with how PB at the time played down his intelligence. There definitely needs to be a difference for the third, I'm just not sure 'looks even more stupid' was the right variation.
I'm not sure that being self-aware of the lack of originality present in the comedy makes the 'recycling' of jokes better or worse.
I'm also noticing just how... Horrifically complicated... the actual battle is here when you eventually get to it. Ash, Jessie, James, Meowth, and Imposter Joy on one side, and Dave, Chansey, and Pikachu on the other. This at the best of times gets tricky to track to write, and tricky to track to read. To do that as the third battle, before Pokémon even had 2v2 battles, was... Unnecessary (Particularly with Meowth and Ash just kind of randomly turning up. Ash as a gag, Meowth... I guess it thematically makes sense). I still sometimes do 2v2 these days, but I'm not sure I'd be comfortable doing more than 3v3 (and the one time I did that, Ben used all his Pokemon at once, and the Guards he was fighting only had themselves. And this is... 5v3. And, no, I don't think it helps that the Narrator joking about how hard this is to keep track of.
Using the curiosity killed the Meowth gag twice isn't necessarily bad, but I'd probably have tried to work it in a third time to do a twist on it, or just used it one time, if I were writing this now.
"NARRATOR was STARTING to LOSE its VOICE!" might have been funny if the battle hadn't gone on for another 9 lines of narration following it, but with the length of the battle, I'm not surprised I decided to make it a cliffhanger.
Battle 4: Doubling the Trouble Up,
...Wait was I doing commas between battle titles and the date the Battle went up? That was certainly a formatting choice.
The 'maze made of maize' gag would work better if I'd spelt maize correctly.
"This battle is already convoluted, let's throw more combatants at it" is certainly an... Approach... to writing, and there is a certain comedic potential to the audacity of this nonsense. I also like the subversion of the Pokémart owner opening a temporary battle shop, mind, and the surrealism of the shop being renamed a tomato because a spellcheck decided that 'TEMBATPOK' is similar enough to 'TOMATO' that I probably meant that. (...Spelling and grammar-checking tools are much stronger today than they were back then, so some of the 'wrong context' spelling errors that I've been noticing here might have been caught if I were writing with the same command of the English language I had back then)
I remembered making the "Dolly is a Clone" gag referece to Dolly the Sheep, I just forgot that I cloned the Narrator using it.
Battle 4 ending with a battle between two Narrators is... Very Sandy...
Battle 5: Plot Appears
...Yeah apparently having a comma between the title and the date was just something I was doing, since three times in a row is way too often for me not to be doing. Word to the wise - If a formatting choice resembles a typo, it's probably a bad formatting choice.
Speaking of typos - spot the possessive when it should be plural.
If I were writing this today, I'd probably swap the lines "CONARRATOR has A PROPOSAL!" and "CONARRATOR is A COUNCIL!" - While that's the order of the answers to SVWebmaster asks in the order he asked them, the dialogue would flow smoother with the Council of Narrators clarifying that it's a council before bringing the proposal, and I don't think that would hurt the follow-up gag with Council being the Council of Narrators family name.
It feels like there's a smoother way of setting up the subversion of signs reading things and this sign literally reading a book, and while I like the core of the 'several weeks used pass' leading to them dying due to passing away gag, I'm not in love with the connective tissue between setup and punchline coming from SVWebmaster asking for clarification.
Ah, the Life Cereal gag, literally stolen from Red version.
I recall "In twenty Battles" being something I expected to be the first major story arc. Rather than getting wrapped up as quickly as it was.
...So, was "mater not" a typo, or did I really think matter and matter were spelt differently almost 22 years ago? With my spelling, I wouldn't like to guess - I do like the 'Matter not; won't be matter if destroyed' gag, though.
Three Narrators in a single scene, and somehow that scene has exactly zero jokes in its 15 lines, unless 'Battle ran away' counts as a joke. Despite the number of jokes that do nothing but add length to the battle earlier, meaning I wasn't averse to writing jokes that just existed for their own sake.
Battle 6: As Happy as a Narrator
I'm not sure why Narrator In Training was using so much capslock when explaining that Dave is stuck in Sandy if it's destroyed as an incentive - while I overused it for Narrators back then, it isn't usually as bad as that.
No clue why NarratorIT evolved, either. I do like the idea of Dave evolving into Spikey Dave because he had a point, though.
...A creature getting sucked through in a battle with said hyperlink into Yahoo is... The sort of thing that basically can only happen in PokéBattles... And might be less grounded in reality than most versions were willing to go for.
I'm really not sure why I had my characters as chatty as they were after fainting or falling asleep, which at this point in Sandy was a consistent problem. I do like the idea of a Narrator evolving from happiness, and checking this plotline was written before Gold and Silver was released in the UK, though I may have known about happiness-based evolution from coverage of the games from places they had released at that point so I'm not going to claim I predicted that mechanic.
Battle 6.01: I Need to get Microsoft out of the Battle Numbers
Post text to Battle 6, basically.
And mostly in 'story mode' which... Honestly, I quite like how this iteration of Sandy just flipped between. Should probably be quotation marks around SVWebmaster's speech in story mode even with it getting its own text colour.
Less keen on how this plotline ended in a whimper - There probably should have been something resembling a climax with haunter_uk, Narrator, and Narratora. I also appear to have forgotten to put jokes into this entire thing, outside of a Robot Wars reference.