Zook to the Future

Back in 2007, the dumping group Sky League announced a certain game to be released on May 1st of that year.

But that release never happened. And the game has remained elusive. Until now! 17 years later to the day, we can finally bring you:

路克英雄傳3 / Lu Ke Ying Xiong Chuan 3 / Zook Hero 3
aka SUPER洛克人 / Super Luo Ke Ren / Super Rockman

Dumped by dhx and yy小龙虾, many thanks to you both!

This is a game with many names, but the one that might have grabbed your attention is "Zook Hero 3". That would make it the third entry in Vast Fame's Zook series! Vast Fame themselves had released Zook Hero Z and Zook Hero 2 for GBC, and then Zook Man ZX4 for GBA, and that was it. But that seems to leave a gap in the numbering, doesn't it? So is this a long-lost game from Vast Fame?

Well... not exactly. The team that stepped up to fill the gap was not Vast Fame themselves, but Sintax. So this is a Zook game, but it's not exactly a true Zook game. As far as I can tell, Sintax probably had permission to make it; they had a relationship with Vast Fame, being part of the same group of companies linked to Gamtec, and there is precedent of their collaboration in the form of Sintax's GBA titles, which made use of Vast Fame's sound driver and music. Also, if there was any doubt that it is supposed to be a Zook game, and not just another Mega Man clone, the box for the Taiwanese release of the game actually says "Zook Hero" in English.

This game was released in 2004, when Sintax was past their prime, but hadn't quite descended into the lows they'd reach in the subsequent years. Accordingly, it does make a serviceable effort to mimic Mega Man (but not Mega Man X) gameplay, and makes the fairly neat addition of a Metroid-style morph ball move. But it inevitably doesn't come anywhere close to reaching the high standards of Vast Fame's original Zook games. The music is taken directly from the official Game Boy Mega Man 2, so it at least comes from an appropriate source, but that is considered one of the poorer soundtracks in the series and again it doesn't really match up to Yishen Liao's work on the original Zook games.

Of course, Sintax would never pass up an opportunity to recycle a game, and this one would be reworked into the already-dumped Metal Slug game Yuenan Zhanyi X, but that version is actually cut-down and simplified from the original, lacking a stage select, save system and subscreen. Another reskin based on Crazy Arcade retained these elements. however. Sintax would then go onto produce a more tenuously-linked fifth game, Luo Ke Ying Xiong EXE5 aka Luo Ke Ren X5, which was simply a reskin of their previous Castlevania title.

But, regardless of quality, this is still a semi-official entry in one of the most famous unlicensed Game Boy series, and undeniably a significant work as a result, with a ROM dump being sought-after ever since it was first teased by Sky League. So I'm incredibly grateful to both dhx and yy小龙虾 for making it possible to bring this game back to the world, and finally fill a longstanding gap in the Game Boy canon.

Note that in this case, we don't have a raw dump, only a pre-cracked version. In order to play it on hhugboy you'll need to set unlicensed compatibility mode to "disabled", as it's not able to auto-detect that it's not protected. Other emulators and flash carts should support it with no problems.

Enjoy!

Lu Ke Ying Xiong Chuan 3 (Unl) (Chn) [C] [Cracked].zip

Scans

We also have some scans from yy小龙虾, this is the mainland Chinese "Super Rockman" release. The title screen and game content is identical in all versions.