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)
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時空星獸