Zero4 Champ

Zero4 Champ is the stirring tale of one man, his dream of being the best drag racer in Japan, and his crippling addiction to mail-order porn.

It is also one of the earliest Japanese road car racing games with officially licensed vehicles.

Hidden Text/Revisional Differences#

There are two versions of the game: the original release and a later "1.5" version. The latter adds this Shift-JIS note at the start of the ROM helpfully explaining the reason for its existence:

ZERO4 CHANP Ver 1.5   1991/3/19 ﾊﾚ   VS ﾓｰﾄﾞﾉ ｵｰﾄﾏ ﾉ ﾌﾂｺﾞｳ ｦﾅｵｼﾀﾈﾂｶﾞﾃﾞﾃ ﾀｲﾍﾝﾀﾞｯﾀ  ｿﾚｦｵｼﾃ ﾔｯﾀﾎﾞｸﾊ ﾅﾝﾃ ｴﾗｲﾝﾀﾞ!! ﾋﾗｻﾜ ﾐﾁﾔ 

The "Sunny" bit is indicating the weather on the day of writing, a typical feature of Japanese diary entries.

As stated, this revision was created to fix a bug: in the original release, cars always use a manual transmission in VS Mode. However, this applied even to the Eunos Cosmo, the only car in the game that is available exclusively with automatic transmission. The updated version correctly uses an automatic transmission for this car when it's loaded in VS Mode.

Oddly, "Michiya Hirasawa" isn't listed in the credits. The only known individual by that name in the game industry was a sound programmer at Technos Japan at the time, suggesting this is someone else.

Unused Enemies#

The parody RPG battles that occur during the security guard job normally only feature two enemies: the Thief and the Metal Thief, the latter parodying the Metal Slime from the Dragon Quest series. However, the game loads graphics to VRAM for another enemy type, and even has text for its name: the Bococho (ボコチョ), which is, uh, heavily inspired by a well-known creature from another famous RPG series. This was perhaps a bit too blatant an infringement, and the enemy wound up being cut. The scripting to display its name was removed entirely, and there doesn't seem to be any animation frame state for displaying its sprite.

The palette it's shown with here is the one used for the Thief enemy and may or may not be correct.

Additionally, the game is programmed to be able to handle battles with a Mouse (ネズミ), which functions identically to the Thief. While mice appear behind any doors that don't contain a Thief, they aren't actually fightable. It's possible that they were originally intended to be real enemies, a concept eventually realized in the game's sequel.

Unused Music#

Change the byte at 0x22962 in the v1.5 ROM from 0x20 to 0x21. This will increase the maximum selectable track number in the sound test from 31 to 32, revealing that there is one additional track at the very end of the list: Chocolate Ball (チョコレート　ボール). It's a very blatant knock-off of the Chocobo theme that was intended to go along with the cut Bococho enemy, and even the title is an obvious reference (チョコ and ボ together spell チョコボ, "Chocobo"). Like the enemy itself, it was presumably removed from the sound test for being too legally dubious.

Unused Items#

The game contains text for an item called the Exhaust Finisher (エキゾーストフィニッシャー), a real-life auto part (specifically an exhaust decoration), which would have been received from Imamura. However, it only appears to have very basic placeholder handling; modifying the game to force Imamura to give one shows that it triggers the same messages as the Lucky Tires, and doesn't appear in the Items menu or Part List afterward.

Unused Graphics#

During races, the game loads a sprite graphic for the letter "R", which would be displayed on the HUD to indicate a car in reverse gear. The game doesn't provide the ability to shift into reverse (understandably, considering it would be quite useless in a drag racing game), so the graphic isn't used.

Code actually does exist to manage an additional gear position at the bottom-right of the shifter, which may have had something to do with this feature, but forcing the game to use it simply displays the gear as "N".

Unusual Censored Terms#

The game has an internal list of censored terms that the player can't use as a name (will be displayed as "XXXX", accompanied by a censor bleep). Most of these are sexual vulgarities not worth enumerating, but the list also contains a number of amusing joke entries that are mostly related to rival game companies.

Note that these will be censored no matter what combination of hiragana and katakana is used to enter them.

みなよし

なむこ

こなみ

せが

たいとー

じゃれこ

えにっくす

ばんだい

ひゅーまん

ふぁみこん

Unused Text#

フライング　は
3かいで　まけになります

A message which would have been displayed before races to explain the false start penalty. There is script data that sets this message up for display, but it appears that it's immediately overriden by the "please head to the starting line" message, suggesting its omission may have been accidental.

Sound Test#

Enter みかのへそ ("Mika's belly button") as a name.