Broken Bootlegs is a series covering unlicensed games (also known as bootleg games) for mainly 8-bit and 16-bit consoles. This week’s edition covers an all out Mario-themed Famicom Fighter: Kart Fighter!
Like World Heroes 2, Kart Fighter was one of the earlier bootleg fighting games I played when I first started getting into playing bootlegs. Even before I really knew about the bootlegging scene, I could just tell that Kart Fighter was some sort of import knockoff . That said, it’s an interesting game, especially since it was one of those all out fighters where characters from Super Mario Kart could duke it out.Read More
Broken Bootlegs is a series covering unlicensed games (also known as bootleg games) for mainly 8-bit and 16-bit consoles. This week’s edition covers possibly one of my favorite Famicom fighters: World Heroes 2.
During the prime of fighting games in the 90s, there were a few game characters that I wanted to see duke it out on the screen, including Mario and Sonic. Sadly, this wouldn’t be realized to its fullest extent till Super Smash Brothers Brawl. There was one bootleg game that fulfilled some of those fantasies, though. Not to be confused with game that shares the same name released by AES and SNK, World Heroes 2 by Cony Soft pits 12 playable fighters against each other in all it’s bootleg glory!Read More
Broken Bootlegs is a series covering unlicensed games (also known as bootleg games) for mainly 8-bit and 16-bit consoles. This week’s edition is covers my experiences with my first bit of pirate hardware that originally my interest in playing around with bootleg games and hardware: the Power Joy.
It what seems feels a very long time ago, which probably was a little over a decade ago, I was traveling around going to garage sales looking for anything computer or video game-related like I usually do. I eventually happened upon something very unusual: a white device in the shape of a Nintendo 64 controller with a Playstation 1-styled controller that could hook into the former, and a very odd-looking cartridge that was attached bottom of first controller. Nothing else came with it except a cardboard box that had POWER JOY printed on the side. After buying it and taking it home, I found some batteries to put into it, hooked it up to my tv and after turning everything on, I saw a menu that had “64-in-1” at the top of it. I start going though some of the games like Aladdin, Circus Charlie, Karate, Formation Z, and some light gun games, to name a few. Read More
Broken Bootlegs is a weekly series covering unlicensed games (also known as bootleg games) for mainly 8-bit and 16-bit consoles. This week’s edition covers possibly one of the most well-known bootlegs out there: Somari!
As briefly mentioned in the first entry of this series, Somari is not only is a bootleg of one game, Sonic the Hedgehog, but also redone to star Mario! Developed by Hummer Team, known as Someri or Somari Team for this release, is standard fare of their in-house conversions of 16-bit games to the Famicom. Things are similar enough, while having that A+ bootleg quality one would expect from Hummer Team. With that said, it’s a mixed experience while playing the game. It starts off with the Sonic 1 title screen with Mario’s face plastered on it, which was actually nicely done. While playing, I’ve noticed that the physics were a bit off, just like with other Hummer Team games, which can make timing some jumps and attacks a bit difficult. Fortunately though, is that Somari can spindash! While not cannon to the original Sonic, this does help out during a play-through and can make the game a little easier. The stages are similar to the source material, which is also good, but if you’re expecting something right out of the original game, then you’re in for a surprise. Read More
Broken Bootlegs is a weekly series covering unlicensed games (also known as bootleg games) for mainly 8-bit and 16-bit consoles. This week’s edition is something a little bit more obscure than other bootlegs out there: an emulation of Windows 98 for the Famicom.
It’s a MS-DOS prompt-that doesn’t work!
At first glance, one might wonder how a developer might be able to replicate a 32-bit operating system onto an 8-bit system, and the sad thing is that it’s not possible to do that and have anything work. “Booting up” the cartridge will show an AwardBios startup screen from which the BIOS setup screen can be launched from if the A or B buttons are pressed quickly enough. That screen will only stay for a few seconds before automatically rebooting. Eventually, a login screen pops up to which one can “log in” with the pre-entered, non-alterable credentials. After being brought to the desktop, one can use the d-pad to navigate the mouse though the various items on the desktop and start menu. Upon further investigation, into these programs, one will notice that even though it’ll bring up what appears to be the programs and images, nothing can be done with them at all except to exit out of things to return to the desktop. Worse still, there’s no audio that accompanies this cartridge at all, making the volume slider on the taskbar utterly useless.
Whether or not that these design choices were intentionally made to get a shoddy emulation of Windows 98 made for the Famicom, it’s still interesting to see this out there in the wild. Surprisingly, there also emulations of Windows 2000 and Windows XP out in the wild and are possibly based off of each other. If it included something like Famicom BASIC within the programming, then it might be something interesting to acquire. Sadly though, it’s not included nor is there any known keyboard support for this. Unless you’re a hardcore bootleg collector for Famicom games, I would not recommend acquiring this “game” to play.
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Broken Bootlegs is a weekly series covering unlicensed games (also known as bootleg games) for mainly 8-bit and 16-bit consoles. This week’s edition is the appearance of one of the more well-known bootlegs out there, a pirate port of Super Mario World for the Famicom!
Due to poor jumping physics, expect this to happen quite a bit
Developed by Hummer Team and released in 1995, this bootleg did something that Nintendo developers said that couldn’t be done: giving Mario a dino companion on their former flagship 8-bit system. Surprisingly, the development team did a somewhat decent job in recreating the experience of playing the game so that it’s actually playable. Surprisingly, features and items like Yoshi, Fire Flower, and Cape Feather all work just about as they did on the original game. The music is mostly faithful to the original tunes, though some of the instrument choices can be a bit hard on the ears. Unfortunately, but understandably, the level layouts that were put into the game were either partially or completely redone, and enemies were either not included or replaced with another to help with system slowdown due to too many objects on the screen at the time. One such enemy replaced is the giant Bullet Bill replaced with a series of three Podoboos. As for system slowdown, this is most noticeable while playing though the Ghost Houses, as at times, the screens are quite populated with Boos.Read More
Broken Bootlegs is a new weekly series covering unlicensed games (also known as bootleg games) for mainly 8-bit and 16-bit consoles. For this week I’ll introduce what bootleg games are, along with a review for A Link to the Past for the Famicom.
Something seems…off
Sometimes these types of games are an unauthorized port of one game to another system, a ROM hack of existing games that were commercially distributed, or could be original games that use copyright characters without the owners permission. One of the more infamous examples of a bootleg game that’s out there is Somari.Read More
As a kid having grown up during the 90s, I got to experience the height of the console wars in full swing: Nintendo vs Sega. Both of those companies duked it out for the dominance of the console market, with several other competitors such as Atari with their Jaguar and NEC’s TurboGrafix-16 lagging severely behind. Unfortunately, with growing up in the US, gamers such as myself missed numerous releases. Some of those were either not localized from Japan, or the translations of various games that did make it over were severely butchered by such things as Nintendo’s no-religious imagery/text policy, or had copious amounts of Engrish. Possibly one of the more famous examples of Engrish was the localization of the Sega MegaDrive game Zero Wing, which spawned one of the earlier memes of 2000/2001.
