Käpt'n Blaubär: Die verrückte Schatzsuche

Käpt'n Blaubär: Die verrückte Schatzsuche
Developers: Similis, Shin'en Multimedia Publisher: Ravensburger Interactive Platform: Game Boy Color Released in DE: January 10, 2001 This game has a hidden developer message. This game has hidden developer credits. This game has hidden development-related text. This game has unused graphics. This game has unused text.

Käpt'n Blaubär: Die verrückte Schatzsuche is a German-exclusive puzzle game featuring Käpt'n Blaubär, better unknown in English as Captain Bluebear, a blue bear who is also a ship's captain.

Sound Credits

Martin Wodok's sound engine and Manfred Linzner's compositions are credited at 0x20030.

GHX Sound Engine
   Ver.00530    
(c) 2000 SHIN´EN
 Code: M. Wodok 
Music: M.Linzner

Song Index

Located at 0x23193 is an index of songs and their names that may suggest a sound test.

SONG
0: EMPTY............
01: START LEVEL.....
02: LEVEL SELECT....
03: LEVEL OK........
04: OPTIONS.........
05: MAIN TUNE.......
06: MAP.............
07: SHINEN..........
08: SHINEN WEG......
09: TITLE BILD......
10: INSEL 0.........

The text found in the game has no line breaks, so some are inserted manually here. Also, those periods really are periods. 2E and everything.

DMG Font Characters

About half of the font at 0x23600, used for the GBC-only screen on monochrome Game Boys, is never seen. In addition to the F, Q and Ö (not shown), all of the digits and most of the punctuation is unused. Some of these glyphs are relatively nonstandard and include a sword, a smiley face and various arrows.

Level Names

The puzzle maps in the game are uncompressed and essentially "human-readable": each is simply a 16*15 grid of bytes, which lines up with the traditional 16-column view in hex editors. As such, the stage in a hex editor is recognizably similar to the way it appears in the game, at the expense of a massive amount of space that's simply not used. Notably, each stage also has a name in its header; and they're in English, to (das) boot! Individual stages aren't named during gameplay, and it appears the developers stopped giving them unique internal names after a certain point as they eventually start repeating heavily.

An additional oddity is that Todesklippe stage 11 and Schatzinsel stage 1 (both SKULKER internally) are exactly the same puzzle.

Todesklippe stage 11	Schatzinsel stage 1

The first set of puzzle maps is found from 0x30000-0x32CFF and the second runs from 0x34000-0x36CFF.

	Klippen Küste	Todesklippe	Klaubauter Eiland	Stieffelolmen Riff	Seeschweine Bucht	Schatzinsel
01	THE BEGINNING	A BIT TRICKY	STAY FOREVER!	BACK FOR GOOD	KEYS ON KNEES	SKULKER
02	STILL EASY!	HANDSOME	STAY FOREVER!	BACK FOR GOOD	KEYS ON KNEES	BRIDGES 4 YOU
03	BROKEN ARROW	STAY A WHILE!	STAY FOREVER!	BACK FOR GOOD	KEYS ON KNEES	TURN AROUND
04	FOOLED!	THE LETTERMAN	STAY FOREVER!	BACK FOR GOOD	KEYS ON KNEES	MO SPIRALS
05	WALKABOUT	BAD FISH	STAY FOREVER!	BACK FOR GOOD	KEYS ON KNEES	KEYS ON KNEES
06	TWICE THE FUN	GOOD FISH	STAY FOREVER!	BACK FOR GOOD	KEYS ON KNEES	KEYS ON KNEES
07	DR.JONES SHIP	THE SPACESHIP	STAY FOREVER!	BACK FOR GOOD	KEYS ON KNEES	KEYS ON KNEES
08	THE LOCK	KEYS ON KNEES	STAY FOREVER!	BACK FOR GOOD	KEYS ON KNEES	SANDHOME
09	THE LOCK	DUAL CREW	STAY FOREVER!	BACK FOR GOOD	KEYS ON KNEES	KEYS ON KNEES
10	STAY A WHILE!	KEYS ON KNEES	STAY FOREVER!	BACK FOR GOOD	KEYS ON KNEES	OLYMPIA
11	KEYS ON KNEES	SKULKER	STAY FOREVER!	BACK FOR GOOD	KEYS ON KNEES	THE LOCK
12	TURN OR DIE!	TURN OR DIE!	STAY FOREVER!	BACK FOR GOOD	KEYS ON KNEES	THE LOCK
13	TOXICS SPIRAL	THE LOCK	STAY FOREVER!	BACK FOR GOOD	KEYS ON KNEES	THE LOCK
14	ROXBOX	STAY FOREVER!	STAY FOREVER!	BACK FOR GOOD	KEYS ON KNEES	THE LOCK
15	ROXBOX	MAZE-O-MANIA	STARBUST	BACK FOR GOOD	KEYS ON KNEES	THE LOCK

Several of these stage names appear to be references to games and scene groups. TURN OR DIE! may be a reference to the classic game Skate or Die!, STAY A WHILE! and STAY FOREVER! refer to the famous digitized vocal line in Impossible Mission and DUAL CREW is a scene group active at the same time as Abyss (see below).

Nasenbär Insel stage select

Nasenbär Insel has a fully functional stage select screen and even graphics for its name (it's not a font). Trying to load a stage either crashes the game or loads a bunch of garbage. Not really suprising as there are no stages for this world.

Reference to Shin'en's Origins

Shin'en began as the scene group Abyss. Spanning from 0x80000-0x83FFF in the ROM is the repeating string AYS!. Readers can copy and paste that 4096 times to get an impression of what it might look like.

(Source: devin)