What would have been the HOTY (Hack of the Year) of 2020-2024

[Dr. Seuss]

I'm at work. It's Friday. I have finished all my tasks for the week, and I'm bored, so I just remember the yearly competition we used to have.

So yes, back in the day, PC used to have an annual competition to choose the best romhack of the year, which was named HOTY. The competition ran for several years until 2019, and the last winner was Pokemon Coral. As far as I remember, the competition was dropped in 2020 due to reasons I forgot (I was part of the staff in 2020, but honestly I don't remember what was the reason of stopping the competition. I think it was due to the lack of availability of reputable judges with enough free time to play the games).

So let's assume the HotY was never stopped. What would have been your winners? I clearly have my favorites. Some hacks weren't released on the year chosen, but the rules of the HotY stated that they could participate as long as these were updated during that year:

- HotY 2020. Pokémon Unbound: Like someone said in Reddit, "This game has so many features, that now every romhack without these looks so outdated to me". And it's so true. Unbound is one of the greatest complete projects that has been made. It is incredible how Skeli managed to make a game with so many QoL features in a time where decomp projects weren't so popular. The only cons of this project for me is that there are parts where the plot becomes so edgy that makes you not take the characters and dialogues seriously. The rest is perfect, and should have won in 2020



- HotY 2021. Pokémon Radical Red: Nowadays I've seen so many people complaining that we have too many QoL romhacks that don't propose anything new. I don't think that way, and consider it is good to have enough options to choose from. Back in 2020-2021, it wasn't common to see that kind of projects with a high level of QoL changes. Radical Red was one of the first projects to introduce plenty of improvements over FR, and even making one of the hardest romhacks to the current date. I consider this as the best project of 2021.




- HotY 2022. Pokémon R.O.W.E.: This one of my favorite projects. It is Pokémon Emerald, but open world. It may sound something that doesn't deserve a lot of attention, but trust me when I say it has a lot effort and attention to detail. Offering a lot of difficulty and customization options. The game is made with decomp, so it comes with a ton of stuff that only decomps allow to make easily. 2022 didn't have that much options to choose from, so I think ROWE would have been the clear winner.


- HotY 2023. Pokémon BW3 Genesis: Before making a GBA romhack, I used to be a binary GBC hacker and even released a GBC hack that looks like sh*t and it is actually sh*t years ago, and I abandoned it because GBC was so frustrating due to the huge amount of limitations. Thanks to the completion of the decomp repos, now hacking GBC isn't that tedious like it used to be during the past decades. Even with that, it is unbelievable how good this game is. Graphically looks stunning, and there are parts so detailed that even GBA romhacks don't have that level of details. This demake/sequel required tons of work that should have been awarded with a hack of the year in 2023.



- HotY 2024. The Pit: In my opinion it is the second best project of 2024, but the first one (Pokémon Emerald Seaglass) doesn't have a thread in PC, so it is impossible to nominate a project that wasn't released in here. So clearly the winner in my opinion would have been The Pit. An excellent romhack that makes use of decomps to make something completely different. it has soo many changes that at times you don't believe this was made using a GBA Pokémon game as base. The game itself might seem like something simple, or like a simple battle facility from the Battle Frontier, but it is incredibly fun to play. It would have been great if the game had a full story to play, but the game as it is offers a big challenge.




What do you think? Do you also miss the HotY competiton? I consider that thanks to decomps and user-friendly binary tools, making a romhack has become less tedious, and despite the GBA games are over 20 years old already, there is still a big base of players and romhackers interested in it. And we already have good contenders in case of a hypothetical competition, like Super Mariomon or Emerald Imperium (And my hack, GS Chronicles that is set to get a full release in late 2025).