Zook Man ZX4 (Chinese: 路克人ZX4) is a bootleg Game Boy Advance game developed by Vast Fame. It is the third known game in their Zook series, and is loosely based on the Mega Man X / Rockman X games. An English version of the game was released in 2003 as Rockman & Crystal.
Overview[]
This game is considerably hard, due to your small health bar and bosses needing to take a significant number of hits to take damage. (However, power-ups and health tanks are still fairly common item drops.) The game spans eight levels including an intro stage and a final boss rush. There's no real ending to the game; after the last boss in the boss rush level is defeated the game immediately cuts to the credits. Several enemies are taken from Mega Man X/Rockman X, Mega Man Zero/Rockman Zero, and Megaman 8/Rockman 8 with the bosses being either recycled from previous Zook Hero games or being edits from other official Mega Man/Rockman games. The main character's design is based off of the first game except he has green hair and a headband.
Releases[]
Three releases of the game are known to exist. Of these three, two of them are Chinese versions. Zook Man ZX4 is likely the original release of the Chinese version, and copies of this version are reported to have been seen in Taiwan and mainland China. The other Chinese version, named 洛克人大戰 - 水晶版, would be released in mainland China by Kongfeng. The only confirmed in-game difference between this version and Zook Man ZX4 is the updated title on the title screen.
Rockman & Crystal[]
The English version of the game, Rockman & Crystal, was released in 2003. The title used in-game is Battle Network Rockman Crystal, and all dialogue is poorly translated into English. The box and cartridge label use the same cover art used for the Chinese releases, and it comes with an instruction manual, most of which is also in poorly written English. Compared to the original Zook Man ZX4 version, the music in the English version has slightly different instrumentation.
This version of the game has been documented online on the English-speaking internet since the 2000s, with scans of the box and manual, as well as pictures of gameplay and recordings of the music having been made during that time period.[1]
Preservation and emulation[]
Attempts to create a ROM dump of the English Rockman & Crystal version of Zook Man ZX4 go as far back as 2009 and 2010, which were done using contemporary dumping hardware. Due to the copy protection used on the cartridge, all of the earlier dumping attempts resulted in ROMs with repeating chunks of incomplete data, and no attempts to circumvent the copy protection to properly dump the game were made at the time.
The first dump of any version of this game to be released on the English-speaking internet was of Zook Man ZX4 on June 26, 2016, which was accomplished using a bespoke method of dumping the raw, copy protected ROM data on the cartridge from a Game Boy Advance console with a link cable and custom software. This ROM would also be released alongside ROMs of Vast Fame's strategy RPG Jue Zhan San Guo and the original English release of the bootleg GBA game Digimon Ruby (Digimon Rury). Around the same time, emulation of the copy protection mapper required to run the aforementioned ROMs was added to the mGBA emulator in its nightly builds. Rockman & Crystal would finally be properly dumped and released on September 12, 2018.
As of writing, both Zook Man ZX4 and Rockman & Crystal can only be emulated with mGBA. No public dump of the Kongfeng release is available, although a private dump circulated on the Chinese-speaking internet is known to exist.
Gallery[]
- Main article: Zook Man ZX4/gallery
Trivia[]
Vast Fame copyright notice in Rockman & Crystal and Zook Man ZX4 (unused).
- Although they are never used, the game's ROM contains two sets of tile graphics containing Vast Fame's logo. The first one is for a 2003 copyright notice explicitly crediting Vast Fame by their Chinese name (廣譽科技) and features a small version of their logo. The second set of tiles is for a larger graphic of Vast Fame's logo and Chinese name, likely intended to be used as a splash screen like in Vast Fame's self-credited Game Boy Color releases. The presence of these graphics confirm Vast Fame as the developers of this game.
- The bosses, enemies, and the floor of some stages are mostly taken from Mega Man X/Rockman X, Mega Man 8/Rockman 8, various other Rockman games, and even bosses from previous Zook games (the Mechanical T-Rex sub-boss and Abandoned Armored Robot boss show up in the game).
- The Zero-like character that appears in the intro, title screen, and credits sequence is called Midoll (米多爾), or Meduoer in the English version, and only appears in-game as the boss of the intro stage.
- A good chunk of the music used in the game are remixes of songs found in Super Fighter 2001 Alpha although there are new original compositions made for the game.
- The sounds effects are taken from the Game Boy version of Konami's Parodius Da! and Megaman Xtreme.
- The title of the Kongfeng release roughly translates to "Rockman Great Battle - Crystal Edition" in English. This is possibly the origin of the names used for the English version (Rockman & Crystal and Battle Network Rockman Crystal). It is unknown how the Battle Network name ended up being used in the name on the English version's title screen.
- For a time, this game was unofficially referred to as Zook Hero 3 on the English-speaking internet due to it being the third known Zook game by Vast Fame. Coincidentally, unlicensed game developer and publisher Sintax would release their own entry in the Zook series in 2004 that uses the English name Zook Hero 3. Due to Sintax having known connections to Vast Fame (i.e., Sintax using one of their sound engines in their own Game Boy Advance games), this entry was possibly authorized by Vast Fame. Unlike Vast Fame's Zook games, Sintax's Zook Hero 3 is very obscure even in the bootleg/unlicensed games community, in part due to both the Taiwanese and mainland Chinese (SUPER洛克人) releases being extremely rare and its lack of documentation. The game would only be dumped publicly for the first time in 2024, albeit as a cracked ROM that runs in most emulators.
References[]
| Zook games |
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| Games by Vast Fame |
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