The last couple of Game Boy games I've featured here have been in Chinese, mostly because these things are usually made in either China or Taiwan and it's generally easier to find them in those places (plus there are agents who will forward stuff onto you, which are a rarity in most countries). But there was a huge market for Game Boy games elsewhere too, and it'd be a foolish semi-legitimate game developer that didn't take advantage of it. So it was that Sintax ended up producing English (and apparently sometimes German) versions of most of its earlier games, from knockoffs of popular franchises to obscure Chinese history-based titles that you would think had no chance of selling in the rest of the world. And here's one of them! Shaoling legend: hero, the saver (lack of capitalisation not mine, for once)

The presence of a small cut out piece of train ticket here is a mystery that will confound mankind for years to come. Also it's because my camera was refusing to focus on the fairly subtle embossed Sintax logo on the back and I wanted to give it something contrasty to pick up on. Which worked, so there.

You may also notice that there's a place for a battery on the PCB but no actual battery - when I got the cart, there was a battery in there, but given that the game doesn't actually save anything I used it for something else. So why was it even there in the first place - did they reuse a PCB from some other unsold game, or what?

The intro seems to mostly consist of digitised photos, I'm guessing stills from some Chinese movie or other. And, naturally, with this being the English version, some text I can actually understand for once! Sort of.

Year621 A.D., Sui dynasty, because of the tyranny, lost support of people, no enough power to control the whole country. Then, many excellent men emerged and attracted groups of fighters around them. come the time the wisest man, the emperor.

Lishiming, King of Qing, executed the command of Liyuan, the emperor of Tang, kidnapped the emperor of Sui to control othe warlords. but the warlord Wangshichong, coronated him the emperor, and build the Zhe kindom. He settled the army in the bank of Yellow river and wanted to destroy Tang. In Zheng kindom, Lishiming worked as a spy and knew the troops of Wangshichong has crossed the Yellow river unknowingly. However he couldn't get out from Zheng. luckily, He met the martial monks of Shaolin temple. These monks saved his life, finally with the help of monks, Lishiming returned back to the region of Tang and took his army defeated Wangshichong.

At last, Lishiming, king of Qing, became the first emperor of prosperous Tang Dynasty, and the Shaolin temple, the only place got access to practice martial arts.

"Fantasic ShaoLin Kungfu" it is, then. Consistency was never really their strong point.

Four characters. oh the excitement. Jue Yuan is the most shaolin-ish, Li Shi Ming manages to look totally stylish when he's fighting, Cheng Yao Jin is the requisite big dude with an axe, and Qing Qiong has a pretty awesome sword + arrows combo thing going on.

- 621A.D the endof the sui dynasty, the world was in discorder. Qing king of the Tang, LiShiMing in order to united the An Ancient Name for China, led the army fight the troops of the Zhen beside the Huang River. The high-ranking miltary officer of the Zhen Vulture mete -

So anyway, here's something you wouldn't expect based on the last Sintax game I covered here - this thing is actually good! Like, seriously. It's a beat 'em up, basically just a reskin of one of their Three Kingdoms games, which itself was probably a BBD production. But there's an experience system, and bosses and combos and special moves and stuff, and most importantly it's actually fun to play and everything. Not something you could say about Bynasty Warriors. The graphics are mostly quite nice, and the music is stolen (from where, I forget - KOF maybe?) but fitting, unlike, say, this.

- On Huang River decisive battle, the troops of Turk appeared from back while the Tang Gone to win, LiShiMing forced to retreat into the Tai Yuan city. The city was encircled layer upon later by the enemy. Qing King carried out a clever device, requested the thirteen stick Buddhist monks of Shao Lin monastery to sneak attack the army of Zhen in right, the Tang's troops out of the city, The city. The Turk demon was killed. -

Some of the stages are a bit overlong mind you. It can get a bit tedious given the amount of HP they give the enemies from stage 2 onwards - it'd be nice if there was a save function to break things up a bit, which their earlier games running on the same engine actually had, but this inexplicably doesn't. Also, enemies can sometimes have an irritating tendency to wander off the side of the area and take their damn time finding their way back again.

And Stage 2 is as far as I could be arsed covering here, because I got a game over right at the boss, which sends you back to the start of the level. Did I mention the levels are long?

That last random Chinese Game Boy game turned out to be an original, even if not a particularly good one... So I have a good feeling about this next one too! Presenting DRAGON QUEST 9:

That text in the blue there says "Crystal Version". Crystal Version? Hmmmmm. I have a strange feeling this will have some degree of significance, but I'm not exactly sure why...

Oh and here's what the PCB looks like, just because. I'm being fucking thorough here.

Incidentally, this game was published by a company called Xing Xing Technology, also known as Li Cheng, also known as Winsen, also known as Yongsheng, also known as Niutoude. A lot of names for an entirely legitimate business there. This is number CBA043 in a series of far too many - but other carts from this company have turned up various original games, stuff by Vast Fame and Sintax and who knows who else, so there's bound to be something interesting in here, right? so let's start it up!

well that's a scruffy looking title screen but okay

Oh for fuck's sake.

Bringing you something a bit more interesting this time - a game by Sintax, the ridiculously prolific (Possibly 100+ games! Although probably only about ten different engines between them) Chinese developer/publisher of mostly Game Boy Color stuff. This is one of their later games, and there was a noticeable drop in quality towards the end - their earlier stuff seems to have been developed in conjunction with BBD, which I guess is where most of the talent was.

Don't be fooled by the GBA style case here - it's actually a GBC game, so it runs in GBC mode on a GBA and doesn't work at all on a GB Micro or DS.

So, Bynasty Warriors (Advance) 5, then! BYNASTY WARRIORS. Just saying like.

As is customary for Sintax, this is basically one of their previous games with different graphics, namely their port(?) of Dragonball: Advanced Adventure, "Dragonball Z3", which I've never played (but have seen the back of the box of, at least). They really didn't try too hard to disguise it, considering it says "Gokou" RIGHT FUCKING THERE ALL THE TIME. The music, on the other hand, is... from the Game Boy Color version of Lemmings. Sintax used that music for everything. It's not even any good! Strangely enough the one place that music isn't used is the intro, which is completely silent and consists of four static pictures, depicting some badly digitised fire, four people who probably aren't in the game, and a map of China. Totally not rushed or anything, oh no.

To their credit they have at least tried to capture the whole speedy attacking thing of the original game, but the mechanics are obviously hugely simplified to the point where all you get is a regular attack, a three-move combo type thing, and a jumping slash if you attack while airborne (although good luck hitting anyone with that). Its lack of any sound effects for your attacks also detracts from it quite a bit. The gauge on the right fills up as you kill enemies and when it's full you can do a sort of spinny move by pressing up and B or something, but I don't have a screenshot of that mainly because I can't be arsed.

The first two levels are similar, lots of brown, basically looking the part for a bad Dynasty Warriors knockoff. They're also fairly linear, with various generic enemies and the obligatory health-restoring meat scattered around, although there are some irritating leaps of faith over insta-death pits mixed in, and the second chucks in dogs and dragons for you to fight alongside the standard dudes.

The third is a lot more mazelike than the previous two, complete with lots of security cameras like there were everywhere in ancient China (I'd say Sintax was making some kind of point about the levels of surveillance in modern China, but I'd probably be giving them too much credit). But I couldn't find the exit, and then I fell down a pit (oh you know those games where you can't tell which pits lead to a lower part of the level and which lead to your death, i just love those games)

And that's that! Suffice to say it's not a very good game. I don't know how many levels there are beyond the three I encountered, but I didn't see any bosses or anything. Their(/BBD's?) first two Shin Sangoku Musou games were way more enjoyable, so you should probably just play those. Or try to track down Dragonball Z3 if you want to see what their original pre-bastardised bastardisation of Advanced Adventure looked like.

... no thanks.

okay, I'm going to kick all this off with something fairly simple, purely so I can knock one out before bed (hey stop giggling, this is serious) This is what you might refer to by the portmanteau-tastic term Famicom Multicart, a variety of thing of which there are many millions on this planet; ever since someone in Taiwan back in the 80s had the bright idea of bootlegging several games for the popular Famicom on a single cartridge, they've never stopped rolling off production lines across Asia and beyond (maybe).

This particular example I got brand new from Taiwan around 2003-4 or so, with thanks (and many apologies) to the non-English-speaking seller who I undoubtedly frustrated to no end trying to communicate with using Babelfish, and it has no less than 16 games crammed into its turquoise plasticness. It's a pretty good selection - nothing too common for these carts, a nice variety of international super-hits and weird Japanese obscurities. And it's no. 1681, in a series of... who knows?

Its menu calls it "HIT TV GAME TOP 16 IN SUMMER" and credits it to "NIPPON BACKUP STAR" which apparently has existed since 1994 - Google returns nothing though... until now! just to make sure: Nippon Backup Star, I said. Backup my Nippon Star. Someone must know something about these guys, surely.

As I mentioned it does have quite a nice collection of games, though you wouldn't quite know from the menu - it goes something like this:

1. Village of Hell = Makai Mura (Ghosts & Goblins)
2. Life Force
3. Rush ('n) Attack
4. Goonies 2
5. Hector 1987
6. Dirge of Fighter = Tatakai no Banka (Trojan)
7. Kerra Rest = Terra Cresta
8. Bomber King
9. Castle Vania
10. Fantastic Soldier (: Valis)
11. Jardy Quest = Guardic Gaiden (Guardian Legend) (!!)
12. Close Shave = Magnum Kiki Ippatsu
13. Treasure Hunt = Elnark no Zaihou
14. Animal Academy = Attack Animal Gakuen
15. Ninja Arshoro = Ninja Kun: Ashura no Shou (the arcade version was released as both Ninja Kid 2 and "Rad Action". it is indeed pretty rad)
16. Mr Carjefu = Kakefu kun no Jump Tengoku, Speed Jigoku (Kid Kool) (Which I like, damn it)

What kind of interests me about this cart, though, beyond its game selection, is that its presumably a Taiwanese production (you're fooling nobody with your "Nippon" business) from when Taiwan's once-mighty Famicom industry was on its way out, hamstrung by the declining popularity of an aging console, cheaper products from China and more restrictive copyright laws. Lots of later Taiwanese carts came in this kind of turquoise shell, from generic multis to original Hummer Team stuff like Shisen Mahjong 2 and their 15 in 1, and if a late Taiwanese cart didn't use one of these it was probably the long blue end-protected "TV Game Cartridge" type (which I'll probably show you at some point in the future).

Its PCB looks surprisingly well-made, fairly sizeable using several actual chips and everything, which is a rarity among carts made after the late 90s - I don't know whether this was Taiwanese companies trying to compete with China on quality (since they couldn't compete on price), or old PCB stock being stuck in a new shell, or them just doing it this way because it was easier (for a presumably smaller print run), or what. Either way, kind of interesting. Maybe.

Anyway, for the final word on this matter I'll turn you over to the cart's hidden plastic robot face:

Okay so I've decided I'm going on a bit of a different tack with this thing for a while - although I do still have a few big-ass projects and other various things planned, I've been pretty busy lately and I've become conscious of the fact that I'm accumulating all this interesting (well, to me) crap that I never mention anywhere aside from maybe a brief post on this forum, and I might as well post something about it somewhere.

It's mostly the kind of stuff that I'd previously stick up on one of my youtube channels and have done with it, but video capture/editing/conversion is the bane of my total entire existence and I really can't get satisfactory results from anything at the moment, so for now I'll be doing this through the medium of blog post. i can pretty much guarantee there'll be something in there you haven't seen before. And you can tell I'm totally serious because I hacked on an extra bit to the shit old script that runs this site and everything. happy end of the world everyone!

I was kinda hoping to have something to post for Christmas but that didn't happen. Sorry! I have like ten things in the works pending laziness as usual so, hey, you never know what might happen in 2012.

Got another new GBA dump today (thanks Azathoth for the cart!) but don't get too excited, it's no Digimon Sapphire. It's something I saw in Turkey many, many years ago, read somewhere that it's "like a weird Space Invaders clone" and never found again. Until now! presenting:

Star Wars 3

A very simple GBA game. With nothing to do with Star Wars. It may well be a homebrew game that some pirates released on cart, but I don't recognise it - anyone? The ROM dumped as 32mb but I got it down to a gigantic 8kb - anyway give it a try:

download! Star Wars 3 (Unl).zip (4.13kb)

could it be? another new dump? :O yes! and, I believe, the first playable dumped GBA pirate original ever ever. so take that, internet!

it's a platformer, it's by Vast Fame, it's based on Digimon and it's awesome. it is of course:

Digimon Sapphire!

those of you who have seen my youtube channel may well be aware that I've had its counterpart (well I say "counterpart", it's not even the same genre) Digimon Rury/Ruby for a while and I've never been able to dump it, but I bought this one recently from Volumerates and amazingly it dumped and was playable the first damn time! So I'm guessing either this was a reprint without protection or Sapphire just isn't as well protected as Ruby was.

Anyway I like this game a lot. Like, I think it's genuinely good, not just "good for a pirate" or what have you. It's a Digimon based platformer with three selectable characters, all of which can turn into some big dude if you press the R button (can you tell I don't know Digimon) and there are bosses with engrish dialogue and all sorts. The sprites apparently are ripped from Digimon Battle Spirits but hey. And Vast Fame's music is awesome as usual, even if they are only using the GBC sound hardware for this one.

Now this rom does have certain ... issues, mainly that while the actual game data is only 4mb big, the ROM itself is 32mb. The rest of the ROM is filled with 4mb blocks of either the game repeated, all 00s or a pattern of bytes, I've been tinkering with it for a while and it seems to be laid out like this:

1. Game
2. some repeating pattern of bytes
3. Game (duplicate of 1)
4. Pattern again
5. Pattern
6. 00's
7. Pattern
8. 00's

blocks 2-4 and 6-8 don't matter but the pattern at 5 has to be present, I'm assuming for some failed copy protection routine, and it has to be in the right place (1000000h), so all you can do is trim off blocks 6-8 - the last 12mb - leaving it at 20mb which is kinda an odd size for a GBA game. So, fuck it, I'll just release the whole 32mb dump as is, at least it's playable. It compresses down to under 2mb anyway so size is only really a problem if you're playing it on a flashcart. And hey, maybe someone out there can figure out a solution to get it running in its correct size.

download! Digimon Sapphire (Unl) [p1].rar (1.93mb)

Update 7 Aug 2011 - This version of the game seems to be a bit different to the original, the credits are missing and on the real cart it crashes after every level (though not in emulators) so i'm going to label it as a [p1] (ie a modified pirate copy, since that apparently is what it is)

In other dumping related news cah4e3 has dumped a couple more of my Famicom carts namely Waixing's port of Zelda: Link to the Past and this 12 in 1. You might also want to check out the PGC Forums if you aren't already a member there, a whole bunch of new MD and SNES games have been posted recently. or if you aren't interested in that you should check it out anyway!

i own, like, loads of plug & play consoles, but not many of them are as interesting as the Samuri. why? because it's a damn Hummer Team plug & play console, that's why! So maybe you should check that out, if you're interested in either obscure plug & play consoles or Hummer Team.

and if you are interested in obscure plug & play consoles you might also want to check out my secondary youtube account where i've uploaded a few videos of games off them. I'll also probably upload a video of the games on the Samuri to either that or my main youtube account at some point.

I've just released a translation patch for the Game Boy Color game Harry Potter 3. so, if for some reason you ever wanted to play this thing with its small amount of text translated into English.. enjoy! if you notice any bugs or anything (except the palette issues mentioned in the readme, which were in the original) let me know.

i'm actually going to start using the official neofuji twitter account that i registered back in april or something. because i'm always totally on the cutting edge of a few years ago. yay! maybe in 2015 i'll actually display the twitter feed on the site somewhere too.

well in the last minute of the first day of 2011, i just remembered to post this. so yay happy new year etc etc. im sure at least *some* of the shit i've got planned will make its way out this year. woo!

from crazy santa

[INSERT VAGUE PROMISE OF FUTURE UPDATES TO COME]

just moved hosts, everything should be the same as before (hopefully a bit faster) but if anything's broken let me know.

i definitely still have some updates in the pipeline (honestly) but in the meantime i've also been uploading a bunch of shit to youtube of late, mostly undumped unlicensed gameboy games, so you should totally check that out. also if you're at all interested in pirate/unlicensed/taiwanese/chinese console games of any variety the Pirated Games Central Forums (which i designed the theme for, yay) and Bootleg Games Wiki are definitely worth a visit.

just a quick sort of survey... esque thing - if you're using IE6 to view this site, could you leave a comment on this post? looking at my stats it seems to be the most popular individual browser version used here, but I know this site is visited by a lot of spambots - the no. 1 referrer at the moment is a porn site, i guess either thats spam related or they mistakenly linked here and i'm getting a lot of disappointed visitors at the moment :D

so i'm just curious to know whether lots of my human visitors are genuinely still using IE6, or if its proliferation is just down to spambots faking their user agent. thanks!

btw genuine updates are most definitely nearly here this time. Probably.

you should totally all go out right now and buy the latest issue of Retro Gamer (the one with Rainbow Islands on the cover, which surely makes it worth buying anyway). theres this whole article about the Gamate by Damien McFerran, with assistance from yours truly :D

in related news I am definitely going to update the whole Gamate section soon. i swear!

Okay, I just added the long-overdue ability to browse through these posts by page (and by category too, even) because if I keep up this trend of actually posting stuff rather than just saying "hey I updated x, go look at it", I guess people might want to read it. Well, stranger things have happened. And that old "temporary" list of links to posts wasn't really cutting it for actual reading purposes, especially given my tendency towards completely useless post titles that only vaguely hint at the posts' subject matter. Like this one!

There'll probably be a couple more changes on the way, and I've cleaned up quite a lot of the code behind the scenes (before messing it up again with the aforementioned update) so as per usual if you notice something broken, let me know. Even if it's only slightly broken! It might be a sign of much greater brokenness to come.

Cah4e3 has dumped one of my Famicom carts, the Asder 20 in 1, which is totally awesome. get it here! Its a multicart by Asder with a few previously undumped games on it. Can't say I ever paid that much attention to Asder/NTDEC/Mega Soft/Caltron/etc etc, but they made some reasonably fun shit over the years, much of which is represented here (you won't find any of their later/larger games, mindyou). Bastards ruined Pokey though.

I actually recorded a bunch of footage of this one before it was dumped with the intention of putting it on youtube, but you might as well just play it for yourself now. so yeah! do it.

Okay, this might be a long one. I've been looking into something probably not very many people are aware of, in this age of emulators and whatnot (especially when some of the games it concerns are damn near impossible to find in cartridge form): the dubious phenomenon of .. custom gameboy boot logos!

So, a brief explanation. For a piece of software to run on a Game Boy, it must contain a copy of Nintendo's logo identical to the one in the console's internal ROM, and that logo will be displayed at startup; this was presumably done for similar reasons as Sega's TMSS, in that it forces any unlicensed producer of cartridges (whether a pirate or an otherwise legitimate unlicensed developer) to include the Nintendo logo in their games, theoretically committing trademark infringement in the process. These measures were particularly aimed at Taiwan, which at the time had no copyright agreement with Japan but did allow Japanese companies to register trademarks; this is why you'll often see Taiwanese pirate games with company and console logos removed but everything else intact. (It's also one of the many reasons NTDEC - Nintendo Electronic Co - ended up with a massive lawsuit from Nintendo, while its competitors mostly escaped.) But, fortunately for unlicensed developers, Sega's TMSS didn't hold up in court (in the US anyway), which I'd guess rendered Nintendo's Game Boy efforts largely pointless too.

Some companies, though, (whether they believed it legally necessary - which it may well have been in some places - or they just wanted to stick two fingers up to Nintendo) managed to replaced Nintendo's logo with their own. This works because the Game Boy reads the logo twice: once to display it, then again to check it against its own stored copy. So the cartridge provides the custom logo for the first check, then Nintendo's for the second - you can see this being exploited in this video. The Game Boy Color performs the check differently, which breaks older mono games using this method (eg Sachen's) but only checks the first half of the logo, hence why you'll sometimes see GBC games that only modify the lower half. Others still managed to replace the whole thing, though. Inevitably the GBA came along with yet another modification to the checks, but every GBC game I've tried seems to sidestep this by feeding it the standard Nintendo logo.

Now, emulator users will probably be unfamiliar with all these logo shenanigans; the GB's internal ROM was only dumped recently, and even those emulators that do make use of it (such as MESS) don't emulate the hardware trickery employed by these carts to display a custom logo, so you'll only see Nintendo's in any case. But the alternate logo is, usually, still present in the ROM at 0184h (sometimes accompanied by an entire secondary header, sometimes just the logo itself); if you use a hex editor to copy 30h bytes from that location over the real Nintendo logo at 0104, you can see the custom logo in any emulator that would otherwise display Nintendo's. Even if the game won't boot.

Anyway, I've tried this on pretty much every unlicensed Taiwanese/Chinese GBC ROM I could get my hands on, and here are the logos I found:

A Taiwanese unlicensed GBC developer. This logo appears in most of its GBC games (the mono GB ones were by different people entirely, and the current ROMs are cracked in any case). "Most", because some of the later ones have...

This! Top half Nintendo, bottom half Hot Kid (which was a brand name used by Gowin sometimes). And they so nearly pulled it off, too.

Another Taiwanese unlicensed developer - the makers of Shi Kong Xing Shou, which I dumped recently. Aside from the games explicitly credited to VF already, this also appears in Rockman DX3 (Zook Hero 2), some Three Kingdoms game (in GoodGBX it's "Shawu Story", but some of the alts are a different game entirely) and Super Fighter S ('99). The first two were pretty much already known as VF games anyway, and Super Fighter S was kinda speculated to be one based on leftover graphics in their other stuff, but hey its nice to have confirmation.

Only used in Soul Falchion, which is also pretty much accepted to be a V.Fame game .. wonder why they didn't use their own name, though?

Waixing! A fairly prolific NES developer, but next to nothing is known about their GB stuff. The only game I found with this logo is "Legend of Heroes", which doesn't seem to boot in any emulator.

An obscure one, this - try searching for it. as of this writing there's only a smattering of spam, OCR errors and GBC roms misinterpreted as text. Appears in E'Fighter HOT, Garou: Mark of the Wolves and Dragonball Fight 2005 (a title hack, not sure what its real name is). All fighting games based on Takara's GB KOF engine.

SACHEN®
Okay, I don't have a screenshot of this one. But Sachen used custom logos too. Yep.

The developer credited for quite a few GBC Sintax games. This particular logo shows up in Harry Potter and some versions of Metal Slug 2001.

First encountered in "Final Fantaxy IX", which I own, and am currently trying (and failing) to dump. Also used in "San Goku Shi - Act C" (rom name), which also happens to be called "FF9" in its fake header. Hmmmmm.

From "Zelda Shi Kong Zhi Zhang", which is encrypted, so I have no idea what it is. The header name is Digimon, though, so it could be a reference to that rather than a company name.

And we're onto the cheap edits of the Nintendo logo. Woo. This one is in "Bokujou Monogatari GB2 (Unl)" (that's the rom name; its nothing to do with Harvest Moon really, I'm not sure what its real name is), "Dragonslayer Chapter - Surrounded" & "Sky Dragon" (again, rom names), Harry Potter 3, "Heroic Sword", one version of Metal Slug 2001, and one version of Final Fantasy X: Fantasy War. Doesn't seem to be a great deal connecting these games; maybe a few different developers used this one?

Christ. Really? Yeah really. Yiutoudz. Appears in another version of Fantasy War, and King of Fighters R2. These were both at least published by SKOB (and its fantastically named Chinese affiliate "Super Huge Dragon"), but other SKOB games seem to retain the Nintendo logo.

I don't think this is supposed to be anything. It's just not supposed to be Nintendo. But it still pretty much is. Ah well! Mostly, if not exclusively, used by Sintax, it would seem, in the likes of "Castlevania EMO Demo" (rom name), "Saishuu Gensou" (rom name again), Shin Sangokumusou 2, Zhong Zhuan Qi Bing, Ice Age, Ice Age II, and Pokemon Sapphire.

As far as I'm aware, Yong Yong games (ie the characteristically awful ones) don't have custom logos, if you were wondering. Or if they do, I can't find them, and I don't care about Yong Yong enough to look. And that's that! Maybe.

i recently took delivery of four undumped, unlicensed gameboy color games, along with something to - in theory - dump them; three of them either didn't dump properly or have some kind of copy protection. (i suspect the latter; i know certain other unlicensed gbc games had to be cracked, which is a bit of a pain in the arse. if you can help with this, please contact me!)

but one - a 12 in 1 multicart - at least yielded a working copy of its first game. which is something! so i hereby present my first rom release:

SHI KONG XING SHOU (時空星獸)

approximately translated, "space-time star beast". also known as 星空神獸, for some reason. also, the multicart menu calls it "spatio monoster", while in the header it's "timer monster", but i doubt it ever had an official english name. it was originally released in 2001 for the game boy color by v.fame of taiwan, generally considered (at least by me, and the two or so other people who consider such things) the best unlicensed developer on the system.

it's an RPG, very similar to pokemon, but somehow spacier. i think the monsters appear after a meteor storm, but maybe they were there all along. hey i don't know! it's in chinese. but it seems pretty cool. and if you've played pokemon it shouldn't be too hard to figure out the gameplay, because it's, y'know, the same. there are a few variations on the concept - you apparently join up with seven other people, each with their own monster with some kind of special skill, but I haven't played very far yet so I'm not sure how (if at all) this ties into the usual six-monster team setup the game employs.

there seems to be a glitch with the "pokedex" (which, by the way, has space for 152 monsters, one more than the original pokemon games. take that, nintendo!) which i can't reproduce on the original cart: after saving in the second town, it fills up with a seemingly random bunch of monsters you haven't actually caught. so i'm not sure if this is an emulation problem, or it's a bad dump. i suspect the former, because it doesn't seem to happen in no$gmb, but if it's the latter, i apologise! i'm also labelling this as a multicart rip because it may or may not be identical to the single cart version (i think the menu code might be buried in it somewhere); hopefully someone will be able to dump that too at some point, and we'll have a "proper" version.

download! Shi Kong Xing Shou (Multicart Rip) (Unl) [C].zip (714k)

(btw, I've made a couple of changes to the site's CSS to accommodate this update, if this has broken it in your browser let me know)