Topic: Pokemon Rom hacks and fan games

I've considered making a post about this for a while. Since I was told we are allowed to talk about them(sorry if I was misinformed) I figured "other gaming" because its not really Nintendo, since its about games fans have done. For those who don't know, rom hacks are heavily modded games built off of the skeletons of existing titles. Taking something like Pokemon Fire Red, and changing the story, wild pokemon encounters, trainer levels etc... and fan games are - as you might expect - games built from scratch, or using something like RPG maker.

There is no small number of these games around and the quality varies wildly. Something like Pokemon Liquid Crystal, a remake of Pokemon Crystal built on the R/S/E engine but incorporating many new features, new story content, a more challenging level curve, and even the physical/special split that didn't originally exist in gen 3 is an example of an expertly crafted and extremely fun hack. There are joke games too. Pokemon Snakewood, another gen-3 hack is basically a Pokemon Zombiee outbreak with brutal "Fakemon" zombie Pokemon and crude humor. Then you can have all sorts of games made with RPG maker too. I saw one - though I forget the title - that was a hybrid Pokemon/final fantasy game with an interesting story about 2nd gen becoming 3rd gen and each generation change being because the gods(the creators) are reincarnating the world.

Currently I am playing a pretty vanilla hack called "Storm Silver". It is basically Soul Silver, but with a significant rebalancing of the difficulty and Pokemon. It all enables all Pokemon, even mythical Pokemon like Mew and Celebi, up through 4th gen, to be obtainable in game in fairly logical manners. It also made changes to buff some weak Pokemon, eliminated trade evolutions, and altered movesets to make Pokemon more in-game viable. Anyone who has played Pokemon knows some Pokemon just randomly get almost no useful moves. The hacker also added some content in otherwise dry areas of the game. Such as between the 5th and 6th gym. In the original game you would often fight them almost back to back, but in this hack, Team Rocket attacks the Safari Zone and you team up with several side characters in a series of tag battles vs the Rocket admins. It was pretty cool. Finally all trainers have more challenging and logical teams. Gone are all the 1-2 Pokemon low level trainers. Most trainers have between 3 and 5 Pokemon of moderate level for the area and evolutions that match their levels. Finally all gym leaders and other boss battles have full teams of good Pokemon, with defined strategies. The ice gym leader used a dedicated hail team for example. Also gone are the trainers with Pidgey, Pidgey, Pidgeotto. Trainers have diverse teams, even if they favor certain types. This is enabled by Pokemon from gen 1-4 all being in the game. The guy who did this hack has done it for games in gen 3, 4 and 5 to my knowledge.

If you are like me, and are a big Pokemon fan, but have been let down by the last couple of games, or just want more content, take a look at what some of the fans have done. There is cool stuff to be found. (No links though, that's against Nintendolife's rules I believe)

Have you played any Pokemon hacks or fan games? Got any suggestions?

As long as people don't offer links to download them (they're roms after all), I think it's ok if people want to talk about them.

What do the other mods think?

@Meowpheel I asked about it in the help section a while back and was told it was okay to talk about them. Just no links allowed. Also think you commented there too. lol

I don't know anything anymore, the rules here are all weird. lol

@Meowpheel It's fine. I contacted Ant about this a while back, and the rules are still up to date:

4. [/b]Unacceptable Content[/b]
a. Do not discuss current gen emulators/homebrew; It is permitted to constructively discuss the use of flash carts, emulators and homebrew software when in the context of previous generation(s) hardware. We ask that you do not link to any resources for illegal copyrighted content such as where to download ROMs and we reserve the right to lock, edit or delete any threads or comments we feel stray too far into an illegal or legal grey area.

So no current gen emulators and homebrew, and no links to illegal copyrighted content. I believe this includes Pokemon ROM hacks. However, you can still talk about them.