Bootleg NES Fighting Games Exposed

Thanks to InsertCredit.com for their feature reviewing a selection of crazed Asian bootleg NES fighting games. The introduction explains: "In the days when Street Fighter II was the king of all games, you could make a killing by making a halfway decent Famicom port of it. And apparently you could still make money even if the game wasn't anywhere near halfway decent.." The expose checks out such completely unlicensed titles as Fighter 12 Peoples Street VI, Kart Fighter (using the characters from Super Mario Kart), Mortal Kombat 3 Special 56 Peoples, and even Tekken 2, rating each messily hacked-together game, many of them produced as recently as the late '90s, "...on a scale of negative one to negative ten."

Fun to read

[cloudless.net]

"...and with all the things that had to be cut, the "designers" made absolutely sure that Mai Shiranui's boobs still jiggled. And really, that's all that matters. "

I love the author's sense of humour!

Good old days..

[kmak]

I was like.. 10 when the craze was on (wow, it's been that long), and actually had a copy of the SF2 for Famicom... if I recalled correctly, it only had Ryu, Chun Li, M Bison and Guile.. it was cool as hell though, because no one else had it!

I even used the stupid microphone on the controller to yell hadoken.. =)

Re:Good old days..

[bjb]

The Famicom had a microphone on the player 2 controller. Apparently no released software ever used it, though.

The microphone was not included on the US release of the NES.

Re:Good old days..

[Matt_Fisher]

What about Blanka?? He was so cool.

Tekken 2

[ASkGNet]

Tekken 2 for NES was quite nice too...I think it had 4 or 6 characters and the usual side-view fights. I played it for a few hours too.

Famicom Super Mario World

[Man In Black]

Not a fighting game, but I remember finding a rom of "Super Mario World" for the NES on the internet while trying to find the japanese version of SMB2. I figured either it was a SNES rom that was in the wrong spot, or it was one of the Super Mario Bros games hacked or mislabelled... but it actually turned out to be a pirate of the SNES game ported to the NES.

Surprisingly the graphics weren't that bad! Everything had fewer colors due to the hardware limitations, but even despite that, the backgrounds looked fairly nice, the characters were decently well ported, and moved fairly well. Mario himself had a few palette problems where the colors would be wrong, and larger sprites like the huge bullet bills were instead turned into three fireballs that took up about as much space. The levels seemed fairly similar (minus vertical scrolling), but the world map was entirely different. Not everything worked the way it was supposed to as well... smashing blocks acted funny and such.

Unfortunately, I could never get very far in the game due to the horrendously bad physics. Mario walked quite slow, but the minute you tried to run, the game sped up to an almost uncontrollable level. To make matters worse, if you tried to jump while running, you'd only jump at the "slow walking speed"... this completely screwed up any judgement you had while running and would insure that you'd never land where you expected. Even though the game gave you 15 lives from the start, you'd probably lose about 10 of them just on the first level.

It's too bad... if a decent group of programmers had spent a decent amount of time on this game, it actually could have been quite good. Try this game out if you find it.

Also, I remember a Samurai Showdown 2 pirate I found once... it was very much like these other pirate games with horrible flickering graphics that made 2600 Pac-Man look like a work of art, and a character select screen where every character was shown at least 3 times.

Somari!

[axolotl_farmer]

Anyone tried Somari [classicgaming.com]?

Heh..

[darkmayo]

I am surprised I hadn't seen these titles show up on Something Awful's game reviews

http://www.somethingawful.com/games/

I think a few of this would hit the -40s

I always wanted to see Luigi beat up on Mario

[WoTG]

Ha.
I've got to admit that the "Kart Fighter" game looked pretty fun to me.

Get Kart Fighter III aka Melee

[yerricde]

If it looks fun, then buy a GameCube, some controllers, and Kart Fighter III [google.com]. All the Kart Fighter playable characters have returned, and they're all playable except for Toad (which has become one of Peach's attacks) and Nokonoko (which is an enemy in the 1 player adventure mode).

Warning: avoid anything that looks like this [pineight.com]. It's a fake.