I'd suggest Infinite Fusion.

As the name suggests, it's the one which lets you fuse Pokémon. Lets you get both the nostalgia hit of familiar faces while spicing it up by literally remixing them.

 

Ah, I should have said, I need it to work on a Mac. -_-

Can't do windows virtualisation on the M1.

 

I would suggest open emu for the mac: https://openemu.org/. Then, you grab the ROM and open using openemu to play

 

I do know Mac emulators, but some of these games don't use roms. From the FAQ:

"Can I play it on Mac?
Yes and no. The game is only compatible with Windows, but it's possible to run it on Mac by using Wine or a Windows emulator. This will affect the performance however."

 

Not sure if anyone plays Pokemmo, but they just released Johto the other day.

 

Over the past few months, I've played:

- Insurgence, again. It was nice, a lot of fun playing with the delta types, notably spider-Metagross, ice/electric Gardevoir, and water/steel Haxorus

- Pokemon Añil. A pleasant if somewhat forgettable Kanto remake. Not very difficult, has a wonder trade feature which is very easy to abuse. Send in a truant Slaking and receive a legendary

- Radical Red on hardcore difficulty. It's been a long time since any game has held my attention for this long. There's something masochistic and addictive about this. It took me weeks to be Koga on my first attempt, and for some reason, I wanted to try again.

Over and over.

Sometimes without randomiser, often with ability randomiser.

Don't have it in me to attempt a nuzlocke or deathless run, but I've finished the game with 4 mons, and will try the E4 with 3 only on this current run

Granted, I have some absolutely broken pokemon, such as Meowscarada and Dragapult with huge power, which I believe doubles their attack stat

In the last run with four mons, it took a lot of tries to get through the E4, and even more than all those combined to get past the rival champion fight

It's an unfair mode to play on. The bosses have access to all moves, abilities and terrain/weather, while you're left without setup moves like d-dance or calm mind, and there's permanent weather/terrain + an additional effect in many gyms


For example, it's always sunny fighting Blaine and water moves don't work

Or Koga with a permanent tailwind and trick room Sabrina. Both require tanky pokemon, but Koga's a fair bit harder

 

Been a minute! I've played a bunch more romhacks. In no particular order:

Pokemon Elite Redux
A romhack of Emerald which puts everything it can into teambuilding. IVs are maxed, EVs can be assigned, you can click a few buttons to get every single mon on a route, there are regional forms, there are options to just make Megas permanent, you can (re)learn any move from the Pokemon's own menu. There's built-in randomizers, there's no more money since all healing items are free, and all items are replenished and your team is healed at the end of every battle. You can level and evolve mons straight from the menu.

Also: each Pokemon has four abilities now. One of these can be switched around between up to three possibilities, while the other three are static. These range from canon things like Strong Jaw (extra power for mouth-related moves) to getting an extra type grafted onto the mon to combinations of these and more. Things get really absurd.

I kind of wish that they'd replaced the story, though. It's a complete rehaul wearing the skin of Emerald for some reason, and that doesn't sit quite right with me. Still, the kind of game that's fun to just theorize about broken combinations.

Pokemon Evolutions
Basically just a tech demo. Impossible to find, which is (I've heard) intentional. Every mon evolves two more times. Default Kanto otherwise. Boring, really.

Pokemon Pisces
A completely original romhack based on Emerald which is also a sort of sequel. Has a completely original dex, but I wasn't especially impressed by any specific mons. Some neat ideas and some really obscure evolution methods, but I played it in an earlier version just after release where entire towns were left empty. Probably has improved since then but the ending especially felt like an enormous slog.

Others I've played in the same vein:
Pokemon Quarantine Crystal
Crystal romhack that replaces the entire dex and very little else.

Pokemon Weird Type Fun
FireRed romhack. Changes every type to something else - there's no "Fire" type but there is a "Time" type and a "Knight" type and a "Love" type and... Sprites have all been changed from vanilla to accommodate the new types, which is neat. Otherwise it's just vanilla FireRed. Same group that made Pisces.

Pokemon AlteRed
FireRed romhack. Changes every mon's typing and availability, otherwise nothing else. New sprites. Same group that made Pisces.

Pokemon Hearth
Just a demo at the moment with three gyms. Looks promising, though, in that it's got a unique art style and seems to be making a lot of being set in an earlier time, in a region based on ancient Japan & China. Spotted only one regional variant so far but presumably others will follow later.

Super Mariomon
Romhack which uses Mario enemies as the Pokemon. Actually pretty intricate, and it includes puzzles and the like. Feels almost exactly like a Mario game in writing, or at least how I remember those games being written.

The following are all not romhacks but instead fangames made in RPGM:

Pokemon Flux
By the guys that made Uranium, except with most of the edge out of their systems, it seems. Has interesting Z-move like mechanics which you can compose yourself, but I'm not a big fan of how they're implemented. Lot of content out but not actually complete yet.

Pokemon Comet
Standard fangame, with a bunch of regional templates. There's a new kind of evil infecting the Pokemans nearby and you get involved. Don't really recall much else, but construe that as a lack of negatives rather than anything else.

Pokemon Hollow Woods
A demo on the longer end. Has a plotline where you're the child of a local Senator who's probably doing some corrupt shit. Has a few regional variants here and there. Roughly the same kind of game as Comet, I think.

Pokemon Independence
The plot is about being a streamer or something who'll get famous by winning the league. Starts out with a cutscene where the professor explicitly calls you his boyfriend, thereby achieving a suddenly-gay reveal speedrun of a few seconds. Really didn't click with me and didn't even get to the first gym.

Pokemon Skyquake
Has a full dex of fakemon. There's not really much to say about the rest of it, it's fine, but the fakemon designs were all fairly basic and the execution left something to be desired.

Pokemon Bioterror
I played this, apparently. Title is edgy as hell and so is the plot description, but clearly not edgy enough that I actually remember anything about it.

 

I'll generally try any rom hack, but man, fakemons just don't do anything for me. You have over a thousand real ones to choose from these days.

 

I'm the exact opposite. I won't really bother to try any hack that doesn't at least have a few regional variations nowadays. Seems bizarre to me, that you're willing to step outside the line of official games but demand that they don't try to get too creative.

 

I guess it makes a difference if you've been keeping up with the official games or not. I haven't, and I really don't care and don't need them to add any more mons and that goes for fan games as well. I actually think the quantity of mons is the most bloated part of the franchise already and there wouldn't have been as many complaints about the designs of gen 4 and 5 mons back when they came out if Gamefreak had stuck to some smaller target figure per gen (gen 5 sets the record- 6, 7, and 8 had fewer, but 9 went back up). They had scrapped pokemon from the first 2 gens and I am not able to find any after that, though it's possible they no longer release information about scrapped designs, but I honestly wouldn't be surprised if there are no scrapped designs. They must just think that more mons is better as long as the games can contain all the data for them. Some rom hacker could put official pokemon in the games and I would have no idea if they were fakemon or not; I stopped trying to keep track in gen 5.

 

Generally, I'm a QOL fixes and stat tweaks rom-hack kinda guy. Modern pokemon in older generations or bumped difficulties. Drayano, Polished Crystal, stuff like that. The base of the game is always fine for me. I've always been a bit of a basic bitch.

 

I've dabbled a while back with a few romhacks, and yeah, I just don't really get fakemon. The pokemon designs have never been the worst bit of the game - sure, there's some I don't really like, and would avoid using, but there's options on that!

And, tbf, I changed my mind on my favourite mon after a Nuzlocke. Towel the Gastrodon soloed Cynthia. I'm pretty sure it was my first playthrough, and I still maintain Gastrodon as definitive top-tier. Would use again.

QoL features are super important, but I also want that slight difficulty that pokemon felt like it used to have. Playing the new ones is just easy enough, without having to powergame, that they're not quite as fun. I understand GGG's "friction" a little bit more.

 

Red's level 82FuckYou Pikachu shit on me as a kid in Pokemon Silver lol.

Then in Heart Gold/Soul Silver that little yellow fuck has a light ball