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?
Is it the same music as in the two Three Kingdoms games? If so, then it's from Drururuaga.
(If it's the same music as in the Final Fantasy X bootleg, on the other hand, then that would be KOF95.)
Yeah, it's KOF95.
(Also this whole "lets do lots of blog posts" thing has kind of been placed on hold for now due to various commitments, but it'll probably be back on in about two weeks. sorry!)
Oh god, those sprites are horrible reskins from True Three Kingdoms. Hopefully they gave you the same 4-hit basic attack in this game, instead of limiting it to 3 like they did in Metal Gear Solid II. :/
Is there a rom dump of this? I've played a couple of Sintax beat-em-ups and found them quite to my liking.
I'm pretty sure that those digitized photos are from more than one television serial/movie. The story was actually dramatized in Jet Li's first film, Shaolin Temple, although it doesn't look like any stills from that movie made it into the game.
@Qiezei - Yeah, you get a 4-hit attack in this one.
@GoldenPigsy - No dump, sorry. I've tried, but like most Sintax games it's either copy protected or it uses some weird mapper or something. :(
@GoldenPigsy -- dumped as of 07.03.2013: http://hhug.me/?post=36
kusoge