300th Review Bonus: NES ROMhacks, Unlicensed and Pirate Multicart games

The NES enjoyed an incredibly long lifespan in Japan and thanks to the relative ease of reproducing games on cartridges at the time, it's most likely the console with the most piracy and unlicensed games and hacks that's ever existed. Whilst playing NES games for the 12 Days of NESmas, I've been using a combination of a real NES console, a 100 in 1 Game Boy Advance Multicart with a variety of NES games on, and some Powerjoy Famiclone plug and play console which also accept Famicom cartridges.

(From top to bottom; NES console with GBA 100 in 1 cart, NES controller and Zapper, Twin LightBlaster Joypad
PowerJoy Famiclone console, Powerjoy 64 in 1 cart, Yoshi No Cookie and Mappy Famicom carts, 100 in 1 Famicom chip
Blank NES cart housing a Honeybee Famicom to NES converter and Rolling Thunder chip, and Castlevania for the NES)

Of course many of the games on pirate multicarts are indeed the games which they purport to be, and are exactly the same as their licensed counterparts. What I'll be covering here though is those games which aren't so legit. Some of these have already been covered in my 2014 April Fools review of the GBA 100 in 1 cart, but there's plenty of interest across the other pirate goodies. Notably in that review; Mario and Luigi was a ROMhack of Nuts & Milk, which I'll be reviewing later today. We'll begin on the Powerjoy plug and Play unit, which has 7 games built in. 6 of which are legitimate NES games.

Diamond Tetris

If you've ever felt that Sega's Columns was lacking in monuments to liberty, then look no further than Diamond Tetris. All the fun of Columns, with the Statue of Liberty watching over your every move, and taking up almost as much room as the entire field of play. On the left hand side there's what's presumably the New York skyline, but surprisingly the game plays pretty well apart from the random monument insertion. There's a definite theme in pirate games of wanting to play Sega's games on Nintendo or vice versa.

Moving on to the Powerjoy 64 in 1 cart, there's plenty of misnamed games and sprite hacks including Dig Dug ft. Hello Kitty, and of course at least 4 versions of Circus Charlie, cleverly disguised as Gladiators, Charlie and Pony and Big Top! But of course I'm only interested in legitimately ROMhacked or pirate games.

Aladdin III

Having missed out on hearing about Aladdin's apparent sequels, I was surprised to find Aladdin III on this cart, featuring a small turban-clad boy in shoot 'em up action against birds, ninjas and various other enemies. Particularly of note was the 3 second music loop which I can only assume represents the number of wishes a genie grants. There are actual bosses in the game if you can get far enough and it plays like a regular shoot 'em up, albeit with poor hit detection.

Pendamar

Have you ever wished Mario was a Panda? Ever think the music behind Super Mario Bros needed to be 1000% worse? Well then I've found the game for you. It's literally a horribly coloured, unnecessary and wholly offensive sprite hack of Super Mario Bros. This is the least fun you can have with the code that makes up a classic and enjoyable game.

Fire Dragon

The first truly enjoyable unlicensed game; Fire Dragon is only a simple port of Snake, but there's so little that can go wrong that the creators have actually released something that's at least playable. Unlike many other versions of Snake, the player is required to collect a certain number of 'things' (no clue what they're meant to be) before moving up each level. The controls are surprisingly responsive and for this sort of thing, it's best to savour the bearable titles.

There'd be a few more here since I have the Powerjoy chip as well, which contains even more games, however at least 60% of the games on that cart either feature a blank screen, Circus Charlie, Twin Bee, a random level of Adventure Island, or look like the picture below. Something that I've come to accept with pirate NES carts is that some things just won't work. Like 2 player mode.

The final set of games are from the Twin LightBlaster Joypad and seem to be a collection of Famicom ROMhacks amongst other things. Pendamar makes another appearance here, there's Circus Charlie with Bonk as the main sprite, and various versions of F1 Race. Unfortunately here I could only find two games of interest to round off this 300 review celebration.

Matching

Apologies for the picture quality on this one, but I couldn't find much on the internet simply searching for "Matching" so I can only assume this is a pretty specific pirate game. The aim is to match all of the cards in the time limit, and players are even treated to a nice 8-bit rendition of Twinkle Twinkle Little Star whilst playing. The game sucks, but there's a cute anime witch girl on the left, so I guess it can have some bonus points.

Strange Pop Pop

I was intrigued by the title, and so slightly disappointed to find that Strange Pop Pop was literally just a version of Tetris where the bricks are nearly the same colour as the game background, making it almost impossible to strategise. The music is repetitive and annoying, and Tetris literally exists on the NES and every other console under the sun anyway, so someone choosing to play it on here would have to be so out of gaming options that even a Virtual Boy is not available. 

Overall from this experiment we've learned not to trust games by their name; lest we be surprised with yet another version of Circus Charlie, Adventure Island, Twin Bee or any other small game that can be crammed onto a multicart. We've also learned not to trust the amount of games advertised on the cart, 100 in 1 is more like 30 in 1, 30 that don't work, 30 that are the same game, and 10 which we just made up and programmed in the last 5 minutes. 

Still, if nothing else NES pirate multicarts are fun to look through, and that's what gaming's all about. Thanks to anyone who's read any number of my 300 reviews so far, we're going to keep going until there's no more games left to review!