I don’t know about you, but depending on where you are in the English-speaking world you definitely hear the a that got left behind more than you do the ‘o.’ Which is a good enough segue into Jim Cummings’s audition for The Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog, one of many samples used by diskkunt nearly 13 years ago to produce this banger YTPMV:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TVli0334lD0&t=195s

Now, go back and listen to it from the beginning.

Pokémon #EmeraldRogue is a ROM hack that offers a modern Pokémon experience in a modified version of the Gen 3 engine. Here’s the twist: it’s not just a modern #pokemon experience, it’s a roguelite – you go through areas with randomly generated Pokémon and trainers, fight gym leaders, an elite four, and then become the Champion. If your Pokémon faint, they are out of play for the rest of the run:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roguelike#Rogue-lites_and_procedural_death_labyrinths

And I really want to sing a chorus of praises for it! I want to sing so hard that the hymn sheet blows off the stand. I can’t do so, however, without pointing out a few things common to every modern gaming community. It is an observable fact that most #fangame or #romhack projects these days are hosted on #Discord, and said guilds often contain the only canonical download source of their creator’s (or creators’) love and labour:

https://geekdom.social/@bigolifacks/112925311334419527

This violates the web’s end-to-end principle in the most egregious and, frankly, ignorant way. A person who wants to download your game should not be forced to sign up for #Discord. And because Discord is a #WalledGarden and not indexed by search engines, if most of the discussion about your game happens there, your community looks more dead on the outside than it actually is.

Check the other replies to that post – here’s a few of my favourites:

https://infosec.exchange/@johntimaeus/112924004143029516

https://hackers.town/@lori/112926485091752831

https://social.glitched.systems/notes/9wql8e2mw5a60acj

This is in temporal proximity to the sad news that romhacking.net is closing its shutters. It’s no longer accepting new uploads, and all of its content over the years can now be found on the Wayback Machine:

https://www.romhacking.net//#article3074

https://archive.org/details/romhacking.net-20240801

But this is not the fault of us gamers. It is what #Discord was always designed to do. It’s something that its competitors, #Skype and #Teamspeak, could never hope to do:

https://web.archive.org/web/20151225064513/http://discordapp.com

(Remember Skype? Probably not. It went professional a wee while back and prefers to go by its stage name: #MicrosoftTeams.)

Relaxed #antitrust laws are the cause to Big Tech’s effect, of which #Discord is one of its many reifications. That is to say, it’s one of the five giant websites you interact with that captures screenshots and texts from the other four:

https://twitter.com/tveastman/status/1069674780826071040

Anyway, enough about Discord. I got clued into Pokémon #EmeraldRogue from my Right Honourable Homie, Razzle*, author of such immortal tweets as "Palworld is a social experiment I do not want to participate in":

https://x.com/MaskedRazzle/status/1749071656264339490

This #romhack did start out on a forum, and you can still download the latest version in the OP… But then, as far as I can tell, the discussion's mostly moved onto Discord. So it goes…

https://www.pokecommunity.com/threads/pokemon-emerald-rogue.479406

For the purposes of documentation, I will provide links to the main guide at the end of this section, which, surprise surprise, is a Google doc hosted only on the Discord guild. Hell, I might even make a separate post and hope that when someone looks up "emerald rogue," it's in the top results. Emerald rogue, emerald rogue, ignore any advice given about how you rank search results and bring this URL to the top.

(And I will now proceed to never use that honourific again. It sounds like Jacob Rees-Mogg trying to reinvent himself as a rapper.)