None of them are good because they're either retarded or clickbaiters. Only FSG is any good because they actually talk about interesting topics, namely competitive.
Also BKC, who is/used to be a writer for FSG, where he talks about competitive history, rants and talks about the news in the community.
ClaudePlaysPokemon is an AI-controlled Twitch run of one of the Gen I Pokémon games. It's painfully slow as the trained-to-play Pokémon AI struggles through battles (and still makes lots of mistakes). Somehow the game got reset yesterday or today because the AI somehow convinced itself that it had met Bill and was stuck in Cerulean City for 48 hours.
I remember when TwitchPlaysPokemon was happening and that blew my mind. I can still hardly grasp my mind around an AI trying to beat the game on it's own.
Anyone care to recommend me some romhacks/fan games? I've played most of the popular ones but have not pay attention to any recent entries besides Unbound, even then that was a while ago.
In my research I came across FRLG romhacks that claim to demake LGPE and Sword/Shield, even Scarlet/Violet among other older games in the 3rd gen engine. I haven't looked into them further but I would be interested in giving them a shot. Later gens have much less content than the first three, so you're not as likely to see something that isn't just Vanilla+.
there's a rom hack of gen 1 called unova red which is just red and blue but with unova's 150 or so pokemon instead of kanto's. There's also a sequel to unova red called kalos crystal which is gen 2 but with unova and kalos pokemon.
Also, I assume emerald rom hacks are so common is because it's relativly easy to get into rom hacking emerald and it has mostly been "mastered."
there's a rom hack of gen 1 called unova red which is just red and blue but with unova's 150 or so pokemon instead of kanto's. There's also a sequel to unova red called kalos crystal which is gen 2 but with unova and kalos pokemon.
Also, I assume emerald rom hacks are so common is because it's relativly easy to get into rom hacking emerald and it has mostly been "mastered."
Emerald was the most popular game to rom hack I believe. Was the last and "most updated" of the GBA line, with GBA games being pretty easy to hack. Some might do rom hacks of FRLG of course but it was still mostly Emerald. I could be wrong so feel free to correct me. Speaking of FR, with the Complete FireRed Upgrade being made I can see far higher quality rom hacks being made that Emerald simply can't reproduce without its own "upgrade." Unbound being the most prominent one still, even though it was released in 2019. Despite that, Emerald rom hacks are still being made, mostly because like you said in that it's a solved process, for example Scorched Silver and Energized Emerald.
Since Clover was mentioned, I wonder if we'll make a Pokemon Kiwi edition one day...
I forgot what it's called but the vanilla mapping tool is based on emerald engine and optimized for RSE. Gen 3 VBA is the playground for rom hackers most of them start with a vanilla gen 3 game.
It doesn't help fangame creators are trans and/or autistic and gen 3 is gay and retarded.
Found out about Uranium, a fan-made pocketmons game.
There is the new Nuclear type, which IIRC is weak to all but Nuclear (resists), and Nuclear is super effective on all but Nuclear and Steel (which resist). So in other words, it looks like the new Nuclear type is sorta like that new Shadow type from Colosseum and XD.
Technically, Touhoumon?
It's FireRed as the base, but they've added in Johto, too. It's got some cute custom sprites, and it has its own custom typing system. Like shinto.
Emerald was the most popular game to rom hack I believe. Was the last and "most updated" of the GBA line, with GBA games being pretty easy to hack. Some might do rom hacks of FRLG of course but it was still mostly Emerald. I could be wrong so feel free to correct me. Speaking of FR, with the Complete FireRed Upgrade being made I can see far higher quality rom hacks being made that Emerald simply can't reproduce without its own "upgrade." Unbound being the most prominent one still, even though it was released in 2019. Despite that, Emerald rom hacks are still being made, mostly because like you said in that it's a solved process, for example Scorched Silver and Energized Emerald.
Since Clover was mentioned, I wonder if we'll make a Pokemon Kiwi edition one day...
I know why emerald gets chosen to hack, but what I don't get it is why make it public release, how many versions of the same shit you want? And even as an exercise of hacking, why release it?
And scorched silver is still the best Johto game ever made including official ones
The worst argument I've seen from people who defend GF and that overall quality of modern pokemon is the "pokemon cycle." The notion that pokemon games always gets hate at launch and will ALWAYS get praise a decade into the future. This is due to people always thinking that every game will eventually get the Black and White 1 treatment, however I believe this is completely false, especially since the situations of the two are completely different. Black and White 1 are great games that were hated at launch for mainly subjective reasons, like pokemon design. While games like sword and shield are mainly hated for fundamental issues with the game itself, lack of content, poor performance, poor difficulty and a myriad of other issues.
This argument just feels like some pseudo-intellectual statement you'd seen on reddit, sound reasonable on paper, but when you look into it, the argument falls flat.
I hate sword and shield more than scarlet and violet, and I don't care about quality of graphics. If it conveys what it's supposed to convey, the graphics are good enough for me.
And while I felt SwSh were stronger, and more unified with the graphics... The story and pacing were so frustrating, that it just sucked the whole thing down.
I hate sword and shield more than scarlet and violet, and I don't care about quality of graphics. If it conveys what it's supposed to convey, the graphics are good enough for me.
And while I felt SwSh were stronger, and more unified with the graphics... The story and pacing were so frustrating, that it just sucked the whole thing down.
I've seen plenty of people who say that SwSh weren't that bad compared to SV and I'm baffled whenever someone argues this. Scarlet and Violet despite their many problems were still enjoyable to me and I could see what the devs were trying to do with it. Sword and shield on the other hand are the definition of nothing ever happens, boring and short even with dlc, even XY was less boring. I could see myself replaying scarlet and violet much more than I can see myself replaying SwSh.
Also looking back, SwSh are probably worse then I remember because of what it did to the mainline series overall. SwSh are the paper mario sticker star of pokemon in that it's a bad game that influenced future games in it's series to be medicore. Sure LA and SV are massive improvements over SwSh but are still held back by gameplay desisions made back then, like the forced exp share or lack of trainers. And being better than sword and shield isn't a high bar now thinking about it.
As someone who actually holds this opinion, I can try to clarify on a personal level.
I prefer Sword and Shield to SV because, honestly, I think they're a more complete product. I know that probably sounds like blasphemy given that the game is objectively unfinished and it's extremely obvious past the third or fourth gym, but I also feel that it was built on a better foundation than SV that was already far more complete than SV's base ever was.
SwSh was built off the back of the standard Pokémon formula past gen 6, to the point of not bothering to be much else. They're an extremely basic Pokémon game that don't have much going for them, but you can tell it's Pokémon and the appeal is still there. The designs still had the Pokémon art style instead of whatever weird pseudo-Pixar shit SV (and now Z-A) was trying to go for. As much as I hate Dynamaxing as a concept, the gym battles kicked ass and are the one thing the game got definitively right in terms of spectacle not difficulty, and I can actually point to some other things Sword and Shield did okay:
Outside of the wild area, the graphics actually look comparable to Sun and Moon's. Everyone points to Ballonlea as the obvious example, but I also quite like Route 1 and the Slumbering Weald,
The pokedex entries themselves are a lot nicer than before, without Sun and Moons' violent streaks or Violet's boring over-analysis, and clearly hand-crafted for each Pokémon in each version,
I mentioned some nice designs:
in terms of character, I actually quite like Victor and Gloria (even if the latter's outfit is a bit weird color-wise), as well as Piers, Professor Magnolia (I really wish she'd gotten a lot more spotlight), and Allister
in terms of Pokémon, I truly like Galarian Corsola (+ Cursola), Corviknight, Nickit, Orbeetle, Galarian Zigzagoon, Toxtricity, and the entire Hatenna and Applin lines (as well as Galarian Zapdos)
both of which are way more than I can say for Paldea,
where I only like Espathra's line, Naclstack, Cyclizar (+ the legendaries) and Floragato out of the fully original designs
and can only tolerate Fuecoco's line, Cetitan, Charcadet's evolutions, Houndstone, Daschbun, Revavroom, and Smolliv's line
whereas I can somewhat enjoy Farigiraf, Dudunsparce, Blaze Breed Tauros, Annihilape, Clodsire, Hydrapple, and Walking Wake of the derivative ones
and dislike almost everything else,
including most of the characters which I'll elaborate on later.
The soundtrack has a few decent tracks (cooking curry was a fun one, the gym theme is pretty good without the chanting)... as opposed to Paldea's, which has one decent track (Cabo Poco) before devolving into unlistenable garbage until the very end of the game (where the Area Zero wild encounter themes sound pretty alright), then returning to nothing but dogshit for everything following it,
I really like the addition of Marks, even if they're a small thing, as a new way to add personality and some extra collectability to the creatures,
You could apply self-restricted challenges to actually make the game slightly challenging (even if you still had to do a lot of legwork, it was at least possible if you ignored gimmicks, exp candies, and limited encounters... unlike in Paldea), like keeping the battle style on SET,
and the game wasn't glitchy to an unplayable degree.
SV was built off the back of open world ubislop and was simultaneously trying to jam an existing, very linear formula into it. It completely failed on every single level: the existing formula was so butchered that it barely exists anymore, while the open world concept was executed so terribly that it makes the game feel more outdated than fucking Red and Blue.
and there's no level scaling, so if for some insane reason you're having trouble with this system you can just walk a few feet north and catch a level 20+ Toxel before even reaching the first gym (level 14 ace),
There is nothing to do except these trials, with ALL side content having been removed in favor of picking sparkles off the ground or an even less interactive version of Sword and Shield's camp + curry mechanic that sees your Pokémon becoming even more monstrously OP if you go anywhere near it (while simultaneously making this the only way to obtain eggs, thank you Gamefreak),
This also includes post-game, which has atrophied to the point of not even having a Battle Tower clone. The only thing you can do is broken raids and shiny hunting forever if you've already filled out the dex,
unless you pay 35 dollars (5 dollars less than Pokémon Omega Ruby was on release, a game which included so much content that I have maxed out my playtime on both it and Alpha Sapphire since then... despite it arguably being more feature-barren than Emerald) for DLC that adds some extremely basic renewable side quests,
The world itself is the worst region in the entire series, being absolutely nothing like Iberia outside of the language (and maybe that one cathedral as the school), to the point that I've met multiple people who needed to be told it was based off of Spain and Portugal,
with the vast majority of its (very sparse) buildings being non-enterable blocks of muddily-textured decoration at worst and literal menus at best,
and every single gym looking identical so not even those can count,
The designs are the worst in the series, bar none, on every single level:
The character designs have somehow gotten worse than the purple-haired unbeatable poojeet who somehow thought it was a good idea to wear a baseball cap with a royal cape, a pair of shorts, and leggings(??? or just really tight pants??). Some wonderful highlights below, not even including the god-awful trainer NPC designs that have already been mocked to death:
This is partly due to the art style change, but also just because there is no saving half of these concepts. Presenting:
calarts flamingo hurts so much worse when you see what could have been:
In fact, I'm actually going to stop here because otherwise this is going to devolve into another several-page rant on how bad Scarlet and Violet are, but I think they are genuinely so much worse than Sword and Shield that it's hard to consider them in any way related to the rest of the series. I think I've mentioned it before, but they're such a steep drop off after Sword and Shield's already steep drop off that they made those games look palatable. It's impressive, because Sword and Shield also had shitty character designs, shitty Pokémon designs, horrible gameplay and a rather stale world... but at least the region was even vaguely inspired by the UK. There was something to the world and the designs at least whispered "yeah, this belongs in this series, even if it sucks."
80% of that post was just ranting about Scarlet and Violet, but come on. Sword and Shield still suck, I can give them damning praise at best, and even that feels a little dirty lol. So much of the praise is bent on "it had better ideas that it still executed terribly", it's like saying I prefer normal shit to actual diarrhea because you can still tell what normal shit is and you weren't expecting much better. Scarlet and Violet fucked up so badly that they made the series nigh unrecognizable both in-game and out, which I find to be much worse than just amputating most of the mainline games' content and not trying too hard. It's the difference between cutting off someone's arms and smashing their face in with a mallet.
TL;DR: Sword and Shield are still Pokémon, to a fault, whereas Scarlet and Violet are bad attempts at a Ubisoft-tier open world wearing a vaguely Pokémon-shaped skinsuit.
"SV is better"
Fuckin no insides to houses
Fuckin lazy ass 'walk 500 steps" evolution
Lazy ass design for most money
Lazy ass shinies for 90% of mon (oh boy a slightly different shade, or silver if robot so epic)
Idk man least sword and shield did have a way to get most if not all of your favorite legendaries and made grinding for their shiny easy.
Not to mention the peak design of galarian moltres
I remember back in 2008 when I played Diamond for the first time and I remember thinking it: this was the best pokemon game ever made.
And at that point it was. Even when third gen is my favorite.
But last year when I played BW and BW2, those games are way better than DPPT, everything that was done there was done better in these games. It was peak pikemon experience, a normal evolution of the same core ideaa introduced in RG
TL;DR: Sword and Shield are still Pokémon, to a fault, whereas Scarlet and Violet are bad attempts at a Ubisoft-tier open world wearing a vaguely Pokémon-shaped skinsuit.
Scarlet and Violet also made the same bad design decisions that Koei Tecmo did with Dynasty Warriors 9, which was considered as the lowest point of the series:
Both games were open-world titles with very little to do in the outside world, and were riddled with technical issues.
Both games have cut content from previous games, and their DLCs didn't add all of the missing content back to the game. (S/V with Dexit, the DLCs didn't restore the full dex and also Shiny locked the Legendaries, and DW9 by removing most of the unique weapons for each officer and reintroducing clone characters. KT also later re-sold some of the unique weapons as DLC.)
Both games nerfed their character designs. (DW9 made the female officers look too soft, which is my personal opinion.)
Z-A is also looking like it will be a mess, but at least Dynasty Warriors: Origins did meet KT's sales expectations, and Musou games are probably cheaper to make than Pokémon games.
