Tomy/Mani licensed 4 in 1

Even though I'm mostly just going to cover unlicensed stuff here, every so often I might come across something with the Nintendo Seal of Quality on it that's just as obscure as anything the likes of Sintax might turn out. Did you know there were two different officially licensed Gamecube cassette players? Seriously.

This thing here isn't quite so odd - it's a licensed multicart, made for the Chinese/HK market only, with four Tomy games on it: Ganbaruga, Raijinou, Zoids & Miracle Adventure of Esparks. It was actually released by Nintendo's HK distributor Mani (even though their name isn't on the cart itself) along with at least one other, containing Taito games. Presumably this was their official attempt to compete with the pirate multicarts flooding the market - but given that I've never seen one of these before and pirates are all over the place, it seems to have been met with minimal success. Interestingly Mani made it themselves in China, though - all other regions' licensed Game Boy games were made by Nintendo in Japan.

new dump! Chong Wu Xiao Jing Ling: Jie Jin Ta Zhi Wang

Well! One thing I've been trying to do for quite some time is dump all the various weird Game Boy games that have come my way over the years; usually this fails due to copy protection or weird cart hardware or other stuff, but every so often a cart surrenders its contents without too much hassle (usually thanks to a game being re-released by a different company that didn't care so much about protection). And this is one of those! In Chinese it's snappily titled Chong Wu Xiao Jing Ling: Jie Jin Ta Zhi Wang (宠物小精灵 结金塔之王) which translates roughly to Pokemon: King of the Golden Tower. ALthough the title just calls it Chong Wu Xiao Jing Ling, and then maybe you could call it "Pokemon Pikecho" too? oh these games and their consistency.

It's an RPG developed by Vast Fame (which are totally the best kind), based on the same engine as another one of their games, Digimon Pocket. I think Digimon came first though - there's a massive Digimon on the game over screen, for one thing. Oh yeah, and the header says Digimon. Just call me Sherlock fucking Holmes. It has also seen an English(?) version called Pokemon Ruby and probably had an earlier release in Chinese with a different name, too - this cart I dumped it from dates from about 2005, and is part of a line of otherwise mostly generic and/or title-hacked pirate carts identifiable by that "酷" (cool!) character in the top left. As is (sort of) tradition with VF, alternate versions feature entirely different music, for some reason - aside from the intro, the entirety of my dumped version's soundtrack comes from Shi Kong Xing Shou, but the English version's is entirely different.

Anyway, enjoy the game! I had to change precisely one byte to get it working in emulators, so I dunno if that means I'm a terrible person that totally ruined its integrity or what - I've uploaded both versions in any case, [Fixed] is the one that works.

Update 5 Aug 2012 - I'm going to abandon the GoodGBX-esque naming scheme for now, it kind of implies I'm adhering to a standard that I really have nothing to do with ... ROMs are the same though

Chong Wu Xiao Jing Ling - Jie Jin Ta Zhi Wang (Unlicensed, Chinese) [Raw Dump].zip
Chong Wu Xiao Jing Ling - Jie Jin Ta Zhi Wang (Unlicensed, Chinese) [Fixed].zip

week 1: the verdict

So this site has been up almost a week now - maybe I'll just google it and see what people think

Oh thanks Google :(

Company Profile ~ Vast Fame

Something I'm going to do to start things off here is post brief-ish profiles of some of the various companies involved in this sort of things - some will get more in-depth features later along the line, but most of them haven’t had much written about them at all aside from a few forum posts and articles on a certain wiki, so hey!

Let’s save the best until... first(?) with everyone's favourite unlicensed Game Boy developer, Vast Fame (廣譽科技 in Chinese, also sometimes abbreviated to V.Fame or VF if you like). According to their own old website, "Vast Fame was founded in 1998 by a group of young people with a passion for Game Boy software" (aw don’t you just love them already? these people care) but lets go back a bit further than that.

Vast Fame was not these passionate young bastards' first foray into the games industry - they had their roots in a group of companies around the Taichung area of Taiwan (also spilling out into mainland China, sometimes), centring on console developer-turned-king of bingo Gamtec Corporation. Many VF staff came from Chuanpu Technology - a Mega Drive developer also tied to Gamtec which closed in 1996 with the decline in 16-bit consoles - and a few were seemingly from Gamtec itself. However the Gamtec group had a history of Game Boy development going back even further than that, with a series of mono games produced around 1993 for Gowin and/or Syntek (more on those later) crediting Gamtec/Chuanpu-associated staff, which later showed up on a multicart alongside VF GBC titles.

The first game from Vast Fame as we know it is fairly unclear - they were definitely involved with both Zook Z (1999) and Super Fighter S (unknown year, but a version is dumped with a “99” added to the logo, so we can assume 1999 or earlier). The latter is, essentially, a major hack of Takara’s official GB KOF games, in colour, with extra characters, new music, a new intro, new backgrounds, and new other stuff... but examining the ROM reveals it’s actually based on another, earlier hack of those games, called “King of Fighters 97”, which is basically KOF 96 with characters from 95 added in - that game uses the PC Paint fonts favoured by Gamtec-linked companies (probably supplied as part of a dev kit from Gamtec itself) so it’s probably safe to assume at least some VF staff worked on it, but I have no idea if VF itself existed as an entity at that point. Another possible candidate is the famous-ish Smurfs hack (Pocket) Monster Go! Go! (Go!!), thought to date from around 98, which has just about the best graphics of any hack I’ve ever seen, and again features a PC Paint font on its options screen.

From its fairly inauspicious start making hacks (albeit good ones) of other peoples' games came the VF we know and love today - Zook Z may have been their first original game (well, okay, as original as a Mega Man clone can be) and it would be followed up by RPGs including Shi Kong Xing Shou & Shui Hu Shen Shou, platform games like Zook Hero 2 and Devil Island, three more Takara-engine fighting games, a couple of board game-games and a few Digimon and Pokemon games that even saw release in English (... of a sort). Many of these games rank up there as some of the best ever produced by an unlicensed console developer - with a few bugs ironed out and the “inspirations” less blatant they could easily have been quality licensed titles. In no small part this is thanks to their excellent music, mostly (all?) from composer Liao Yishen, believed to be a pseudonym for this guy.

Vast Fame survived at least into the GBA era, possibly around 2003 or 2004, with its games for that system including the genuinely excellent Digimon Sapphire, the Engrish-tastic Digimon Rury/Ruby, a new Zook game called Rockman & Crystal, plus Lord of the Rings, Super Robot Wars and Three Kingdoms games. Maybe more! It was also around this time that they collaborated with fellow Gamtec-connected company Sintax on another GBA game, based on “Digimon Adventure” for the SNES, which Sintax proceeded to recycle about 10 times over like some terrible Godfrey Ho movie, because they’re classy like that. But I’ll cover that whole debacle some other time.

And that, I guess, is where the Vast Fame story ends. Or does it? YEAH PROBABLY. but we'll see.

dream & adventure in underground

welcome! (to the fantastic underground!) (yes i've quoted japanese mr. driller packaging twice now and i've barely started, what of it!)

THIS thing you're looking at is a brand new and entirely amazing site set up to shine the world's brightest terrible after-market lighting solution into some of the most obscure corners of the amazing pocket-sized world of handheld gaming. unlicensed games! weird consoles! bootlegs! and other stuff, possibly, if I feel like it! stuff that only, like, five people have heard of. but no longer!

now due to various timing/laziness issues the associated youtube channel has been around for a good few months, despite the site itself not existing in any meaningful fashion, so you can look at that for an idea of the sort of stuff i'll be covering on here. there's also handheld stuff on my other website, Neo Fuji, some of which I'll be updating and moving here at some point in the future (probably)!

so grab your gameboy, or your expensive phone with its gameboy-style case and installed gameboy emulator, and let's drill!

(PS - apologies to anyone using IE8 or earlier or another older browser, some things probably aren't going to look the way they should - I don't have time to sort all that out just yet, sorry!)