happy birthday Game Boy!

Well the Game Boy is 25 years old today, and to celebrate... here's a hastily prepared release of a Harry Potter game! (yay?)

A Chinese version of this game (albeit not the original) has been dumped for quite a while now, but here I have the English version. This was dumped from a cart with no protection whatsoever, which looked absolutely 100% identical to a cart I'd previously tried to dump which did have protection. I actually only bought the second one because it came with a box; I thought I might as well at least try to dump it in case it turned out to be a different revision or something. and I'm glad I did! because I can now bring you:

Harry Potter II

For those of you not familiar with the dumped version, Harry Potter 3, this is a horizontal shoot-'em-up seemingly developed by Vast Fame, although for some reason they didn't use their own (usually excellent) music and instead "did a Sintax" and stole some from somewhere else. Fortunately they had better taste than Sintax, so they didn't just rip off GBC Lemmings again; they took the soundtrack from Parodius, which is pretty great in its own right, and fits the game well. Vast Fame even steals better than everyone else.

amusingly way back in 200-something I released my own translation patch for the Chinese version, so you now have two English versions to play with - mine wasn't perfect by any means, but, well, here's a comparison of the first couple of scenes in the intro (mine on the left):

(you can also see in those screenshots that the pictures were all cropped for the official version, seemingly due to the way the font was stored)

anyway, have fun:

download - Harry Potter II (Unlicensed, English).zip

(note that it's now named Harry Potter II rather than 2, based on the title on the box/cart; BBD's one is also known as "Harry Potter 2" so I'd like to distinguish them in case I ever dump that)