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Even though it's argued that their existence corrupts quality work and takes food from the mouths of developers' children, the allure of bootlegged videogames is undeniable. With their bastardized graphics, gameplay and audio, these stolen and often sloppily modified console games give the morbidly curious a window into the minds of madmen. After all, creating unofficial, low quality "fakes" of popular videogames is like dunking the fabric of reality into a toilet and wringing out the turds into the hands of naïve (or desperate) gamers worldwide. By and large, the business of bootlegging console games has resulted in frowns and disappointment from players everywhere, but even a corrupt system can occasionally deliver something weird enough to be beloved. Read on to discover 10 of the oddest cartridge games to ever hit a console.
10) Piranha
This Pac-Man hack skins the game with an underwater theme, complete with edible aqua prey and crazy octopi predators. Just like a true free-roaming fish, the game's hungry red protagonist is (mostly) unbound by walls in his new environment, which is a neat twist on the originally railed courses packaged in Pac-Man and Ms. Pac-Man. Of course, some may find this aspect of the board construction heresy - especially those who've spent (wasted) years of their life memorizing the patterns necessary to master the game. Everyone else can simply enjoy the weirdness.
9) Kart Fighter
In a time predating Super Smash Bros., Kart Fighter would have been hailed as the glorious gaming achievement that it truly is. However, time has taken its toll and players now have access to relatively obscene amounts of processing power and a plethora of property crossovers at their disposal. Still, the game gets an "A" for effort, mostly because unlike the kid-friendly SSB characters, the Kart Fighter combatants look genuinely angry. And why shouldn't they be? They're too cool to be a bootleg.
8) Somari
Maybe it's the fear of being dethroned as the king of consoles or maybe it's a side-effect of plopping an 8-bit sprite into a 16-bit world, but Mario seems much more anxious than he probably ought to be in this protagonist-replacement title. Sonic's characteristic impatience just doesn't fit Nintendo's number one plumber as Mario wears Sonic's extreme speed rather sloppily at the hands of the bootleg programmers, who seem to have plopped a discolored Super Mario Bros. 3 sprite set onto the blue blur. Perhaps if the pirates behind this travesty had played around a little more with the idea of a full-fledged Sonic/Mario hybrid game, this bootleg would have had some merit. Unfortunately it's just a cheap swap.
7) Rockman X 3
It's Mega Man (or Rock Man as they call him in Japan), as you've never seen him before: sucking. Terribly. It's not that his signature iron buster has been replaced by perpetual boomerang-slinging in this early NES rip-off - that's par for the course in the series - it's just, why go through the trouble of ripping off the blue bomber if you're not going to steal Capcom's codes? Almost all of the graphics are ripped off from other side-scrollers. Things look vaguely futuristic and the music has that "club joint gone terribly wrong" midi vibe, but it's very clear that it's a damaged and inferior clone. It even has a lazy fake title since Rock Man X 3 is an actual game made by Capcom. Get it together, bootleggers!
6) Bio Hazard
No, that's not a typo, this fan-pirated NES port of Capcom's appropriately compound-worded "Biohazard" (Resident Evil in America) is a wonderful mesh of outdated gaming tech that simulates the gameplay found on Gameboy Color's Resident Evil: Gaiden. Note how the "authentic" character sprites, maps and weapons (seemingly recreated from PlayStation's original RE) are completely stripped of their horror aspect when washed in bright colors. It's almost as frightening as an army of undead Lego men - or an appalling misrepresentation of everything RE stands for.
Tags: Batman, Bootlegs, Darkwing Duck, Harry Potter, Mega Man, Pokemon, Resident Evil, Rip-Offs, Super Mario
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