This game was dumped by taizou at Handheld Underground, as Li Cheng re-release version called "Gangdan Wuyu II(means Gundam Story II in Chinese)" and finally I found out what the original version looked like. Those lazy Li Cheng guys couldn't bother more to get rid of that "IMPACT" on the title screen!
A Chinese page with some picsThe REAL Super Robot Wars IMPACT is a Playstation 2 game came out in 2002. SKOB previously tried to port a Sega Saturn/Playstation game "Super Robot Wars F Final"(and the result was rather disastrous), which was an earlier entry in the same Super Robot Wars series. However, if you guessed that this would be their later attempt of porting a Super Robot Wars game from that, you're wrong.
Despite being named Super Robot Wars IMPACT and borrowing the label art from the original game, this game has nothing to do with SRW IMPACT. It is an original game heavily based on SD Gundam G Generation F, a Playstation game. Well, both Super Robot Wars and SD Gundam G Generation series feature Gundam mechs, and actually they look and play quite similar but they are never the same. And it looks like SKOB failed to catch the difference...
It looks like this game recycles the engine used SRW F Final, and they did some modifications to make it play more like SDGGF, such as removing spirit command system and adding the ability to purchase/sell new mechs. Graphics and character stats are all taken from SDGGF, and all these things actually do make it look like being faithful to the original. Oddly, musics are taken from various SRW games rather than SDGGF.
As you keep playing, you'll realize SKOB just failed to represent the gameplay of SDGGF properly. The Morale point and Unit performance grade work in SRW-ish way despite all other stats are directly taken from SDGGF, and now the game is completely broken. Gundams and other cool-looking robot mechs are usually WAY weaker than rather pathetic-looking planes and tanks, and killing some random enemies as soon as possible will make your further attacks deal ridiculously high amount of damage, making the whole game a piece of cake.
The game is 20 stages long, and the story follows the events of 1979 anime "Mobile Suit Gundam" rather loosely. One neat feature is that this game lets you play back previous stages(with dialogues omitted) for training your pilots, giving out something to mess around even after you reach the final stage.
The ending sequence doesn't show any info about the developers - just a bunch of Chinese text with starry background.
The current "Gangdan Wuyu 2" dump has some emulation issues - most emulators crashes at stage 2 and 13. taizou's hhugboy handles those stages properly but fails at stages 6, 9 and 17. I had to use Visualboyadvance for those stages(I tried bgb first but it failed), and while VBA lets you beat those three stages it still had some issues like garbled map graphics and destroying main save data after the stage map is loaded.
