I've been covering Pokémon ROM Hacks extensively over the years, and the last 6 months have seen a majority of them, many of them featuring full-blown games with deep storylines and a hell of a lot of AI code, but now and then a short one pops outta nowhere, and today that's one called Pokémon Snake.
Pokémon Snake originally started out as a test for a completely different hack, thinking nothing would come from allowing hundreds of Pokémon sprites to follow you, and the developer known as ranbpa0 first tried to break the game by forcing as many Pokémon to follow him as possible to see how far the emulator could go, but that one task, to break the emulator, triggered an idea in ranbpa0's mind to create a game from this challenge in the likes of the original Snake, which we all know from the Nokia 3310.
So, Pokémon Snake was born, a FireRed ROM Hack still currently in Beta and open for testing via ranbpa0's Discord channel for free, allowing you to attempt to break a high score between Viridian City and Pallet Town. Each step means another Pokémon Sprite will follow you, and there's hundreds to get through if your emulator/device can handle it. It's a simple game, but it's fun, addictive and allows you to view a bunch of sprites at once in a unique manner.
There are still a few bugs, and sprites don't look quite correct at this moment in time when you're far into the game with hundreds spawned, likely due to the use of AI to assist with its development, or its my emulator not dealing with it well, which is something the developer is trying to fix.
The developer has added the ability to change the music in the game using the shoulder buttons if you're using it on a GBA, or L/R on your emulator, which is a nice touch to stop it feeling repetitive. Please do your own due diligence when downloading ROMs from Discord or other websites. I have tested this ROM using AfterPlay, and so far, my Mac is still alive.
