Pokémon Spinoff: Pokemon Stadium: Enhanced Rentals

[buggford]

As a kid, Pokemon Stadium gave me hundreds of hours of fun… and pain and suffering.

See, I was never able to beat it, because I didn't own the transfer pak. As a casual player, the rental Pokemon just weren't good enough.

That was my inspiration for this hack, which improves the available rentals. The aim is to make Stadium easier to pick up and beat, by giving you access to strong Pokemon and team customisability, without the need to train up various teams in a separate game.

Every single Pokemon now has a much higher chance to reach the Hall of Fame.

I have enhanced the rentals in two key ways.



1. Statistical buffs

The hidden source of difficulty in Pokemon Stadium is the statistical advantage given to the AI. Not many people realise this. Your fully-evolved rentals will be stuck on 0 DVs and pitiful StatEXP, while the enemy trainers (particularly later on, in round 2) will have decent DVs and, eventually, maxed out StatEXP.

While the enhanced rentals are not perfectly trained, I have made them significantly stronger. Fully evolved rentals will now have roughly average DVs (as opposed to 0). The final bosses still have superior stats to the player, but the gap is smaller than before.



2. Movesets

I have edited 738 rental movesets across the different formats. These movesets range from standard competitive sets*, to wacky or gimmick sets.

While movesets are drawn mostly from vanilla movepools, you will notice some exceptions. I have added tradeback moves in some cases. Occasionally I have included straight-up illegal moves, if they fit a Pokemon thematically. This can give particularly weak Pokemon an extra leg-up.

My hope is that the available selection accomodates for different playstyles. If you have fun with set-up or stall strategies, those options are there. If that's not for you, there are plenty of alternatives.

*Note competitive sets differ between Stadium and regular RBY formats, given mechanical differences. Nerfed Hyper Beam, buffed Substitute, etc. See this summary: https://www.smogon.com/rb/articles/stadium_guide

Original PokeCup Nido:


Enhanced PokeCup Nido:


That's about it. Good luck, have fun!

BPS file: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/15sXOjFiq9OSrwV3xzKYSG_hLSssColtg?usp=sharing

Must be patched to Pokemon Stadium (USA).



Let me know if you have feedback or suggestions. I am open to making edits if people have ideas to improve movesets.

Credits:
Froggy25's Pokemon Stadium Editor
Smogon, for documenting the history of Gen 1 formats and providing moveset inspiration.
Blue Kaizo, for some moveset inspiration.

 

[Inner Rhymes]

You have no idea how badly I've been wanting a ROM hack like this to come into existence. As a kid spent several hours on stadium but didn't have access to a copy of R/B/Y and had no choice but to rely heavily on rentals which often made me rage at every loss, hahaha. Thank you so much for sharing this! I do hope you have plans on releasing a rental update for stadium 2 as well.

 

[buggford]

Glad to hear I wasn't the only one haha.

I'd love to do a Stadium 2 hack, but that will be more difficult due to lack of editing tools for that game. We'll see...

 

[MK_Lazy]

Hi, I can't patch the game. It always says I have the wrong rom, I tried with 5 different roms...
Can someone help me please?

 

[buggford]

Hi, not certain what's going wrong. I used Marc Robledo rom patcher if that helps. You also need to patch the BPS to a USA version. Unfortunately I can't really help you beyond that... Good luck.

 

[MK_Lazy]

Thank you it worked with Marc Robledo rom patcher.
I was using Flips. I don't know why it didn't work, it worked fine for a Mario 64 rom...
Anyway thank you again!

 

[Slowbro91]

Is there something like this but for stadium 2? I found one on romhacking.net but it has really boring rest talk movesets. I was hoping for something a little more interesting.

 

[buggford]

I would LOVE to hack Stadium 2 but I can't figure out how. There are no editing tools, and seemingly very little research into offsets. So for now it's just a dream.

 

[TheEndOfTheRoad]

Hey Buggford, will there ever be a sequel to this or some kind of extension? Such as a hack of Stadium 2?