How to Spot FAKE Nintendo Games - Buyer BEWARE!!

Mel geez here and I am back again with Kelsey how's it going it's going pretty well how about you I'm not doing so hot I accidentally bought a reproduction fake game Oh No well it happens to a lot of people even collectors season collectors you will find these on eBay Etsy even in your local game store Game Stop conventions sometimes they don't even know it there are a lot of red flags that you might know already but there's a lot of smaller ones too that may not give it away so easily I know I'm really looking forward to this video because like I said I've fallen victim to it so I think it's gonna help a lot of people yeah and today we're gonna be talking about NES Super Nintendo Game Boy Game Boy Color Game Boy Advance and des those are the most commonly duped things but there's all kinds of other ones too it would just be like a three hour video so awesome so I'm looking for Chad let's take a look [Music] correct me if I'm wrong but you being the co-owner of two retro gaming stores here in seattle paint guerrilla games you probably have to deal with this more than most people we definitely do there's a lot of people who come in and try to trade in games that are bootleg fake reproduction anything like that they're not always necessarily trying to scam us it could just be that they have no idea what they have and I see that pretty commonly actually so this is really good for you to know all of these things cuz I mean they could have gotten past our line of defense and ended up in the store so you need to come prepared with two things that's this is a try ring screwdriver this is used for Gameboy Advance primarily but also for some of the Nintendo consoles and this is called a three point eight millimeter game bit this is used for basically everything else NES Super Nintendo Game Boy Game Boy Color these are both like Nintendo tools they usually use for all of their consoles and stuff like that and they're like five dollars a piece on eBay or so you need to bring these with you wherever you go where you think you're going to be buying games game stores conventions anything like that even if you're meeting somebody off of Craigslist you should have them with you when you get your package from eBay and immediately look at it and make sure it is real if anyone tries to tell you you can't open it because it's gonna like decrease the value or something stupid like that don't buy it big red flag yeah huge red flag even in a retro store liquor yeah absolutely I always want people open the games well I usually do it myself for him but sure yeah so these are tools that you need to have and that'll be able to tell you the real meat of this which is the circuit boards which is the easiest tells but you do have a first line of defense and that's the labels and the plastic you're typically gonna have a cheaper plastic on a reproduction or a bootleg it's pretty hard to tell on the video but when you feel them in your hands if you have a legitimate one with you and you compare it to the other one they usually feel just more brittle and cheap it's kind of hard to describe they'll also sometimes be missing things like where there's usually Nintendo engraved in it it'll have nothing or it says Gameboy it will say game or something like that sure so there are some tells with that you also want to make sure the label is glossy it should be very very clear that I mean all of the fonts and images and everything should be very crisp shouldn't be any blurriness it should have the de Tendo seal of quality on it in the US it's an oval and in European regions it's a circle I have had some people think that they have a bootleg and they really just have a European release because they may see oh hey that's different never seen this yeah yeah so you should know that as well fonts are a really really big deal it seems like nobody knows how to reproduce the correct I would be the easiest thing right now yes nobody knows how to do that so you'll typically see something slightly wrong with the fonts when you're looking at a reproduction cartridges too so we're gonna start with NES games which are very commonly faked especially for really expensive titles like little Samson and dinosaur peak and that kind of stuff there's a lot of people who try to pass these off now sometimes with in the case of this they actually are nice about it and say reproduction at the bottom here but the label otherwise is actually pretty close so I was mentioning to you it looks almost nicer than the original yeah yeah this one's still glossy it's got the correct fonts the correct artwork on it and there's no like super obvious other than where it says reproduction which the people who are trying to scam you will not have reproductions on it this one's pretty close so I can understand if you take this one and you want to actually take it apart and actually in this one the screws on this have Phillips screws on it so yeah that's not correct and so here's what a legit metal storm looks like and here's a reproduction looks like now not all of them look this obvious I'm pretty like oh okay those are nothing like so sometimes you will have the same shape and it'll be the same color board but there's still a lot of ways to tell if you see these chips right here these are the roms so this right here with this kind of bigger window with tape over it this is called an EEPROM erasable program program will reave oh yeah read-only memory oh my gosh I can't say that so these are ones that you can just kind of flash any game onto and this is what's really common and these NES games and Super Nintendo games because they're so easy and cheap to do if you've watched John rings videos he uses these of course he's not trying to scam anybody but but you'll see these a lot you'll also see sometimes like wires on the board no wires and then a little bit later in this video I'm gonna mention that there are never any glob top black solder globs on any Nintendo boards that are on yet really any boards that's kind of a lie this is Mario Kent this one does have it but it's only the black box Nintendo games that could have these and they're usually pretty even right here looking you'll also be able to sort of tell the difference here in the quality of the pins it's a little bit hard to catch on video but Nintendo use copper because it's really conductive and usually the reproductions use 10 it's cheaper so you can tell kind of a difference one is a lot more shiny and Capri looking and this one is almost silver yeah you can kinda see that difference there the other thing is a lot of these reproductions have what almost looks like a like they've been laser-cut like they're very kind of sharp on the edges here and well circuit boards are pretty sharp in general they'll be extra so they they feel like they've been laser-cut so there's quite a few tells here obviously this one they're not trying to fool anybody I mean this is retro stage 2015 I mean these are yeah this one is not trying to fool anybody but I mean if you tore the label a little bit here and you wanted honestly myself I thought that font is so small there I don't know if I would actually you know pick that up I mean I assume that this whoever made this is trying to not trick people yeah you know by putting that on there initially but you never know it's it's easy to make the mistake right and the other thing you might see if you don't see one of these eproms here with the with the windows on them this one has tape over it to kind of like you can't see it as well and to protect it but sometimes they won't have the tape over and it'll just be this big open circle they'll also like stack another on top of it so it looks legit hmm except it has like two levels to the board there's never any two levels to a board that's a that's definitely a reproduction Wow yeah so that's I mean that's most of the tails right there you're literal best defense is just googling metal storm circuit board and you'll be able to see what it should actually look like it will warn you that there are occasionally things like on some of these chips one might be manufactured in Korea and one might be manufactured in Japan that's still okay sometimes they did get chips from different sources and different companies so as long as it looks the same other than that that's totally fine they also have Nintendo like in this gold font here on the board of all of these as well as like a not a serial number we call like a product number on all of these and you can always google that too and make sure that that's correct of course you could fake that as well but that's it that's another but they often don't huh yeah I mean there's a lot of things to remember when you're making a reproduction and I want to attempt to people miss one or two and that's all it takes well how many people open them up I mean usually you bought it by then right and I mean I'll tell you right now even I have just assumed that and you know years ago but I just assumed that a store checks to make sure it's not fake and so I don't bring I didn't bring my tools with me and I've been duped before so hmm it does happen all right well let's take a look at the Super Nintendo this is a real earthbound it's pretty big this is fake earthbound there's a there's quite a few differences yeah namely the size yeah so the other thing is a lot of these RPGs have these batteries on the board and they're soldered onto the board and kind of see on the back where they're actually like attached this one was like a separate piece this is like a piece you can get at RadioShack to install a battery on something and that's a pretty different process that to my knowledge has never been done on a cartridge they're always just soldered onto the board with these little wings that are on them here so that's pretty easy I would say yeah we have it open it is right yeah once you once you've opened these and that's why it's so important to have these tools yeah yeah I need to get some of those yeah all right so let's move on to Game Boy yes let's do it all right so now we're moving on to the handhelds of all the handhelds the Gameboy Color and the Game Boy are probably the least likely to be duped but still happens a lot so I think right off the bat you should tell me all of the differences you noticed between these two copies right here well yeah this one looks like a game I might actually want to buy this one just looks distorted and weird yeah so there's a lot of things obviously no one's gonna really be fooled by this the colors wrong right I mean the label is wrong maybe that's not quite as obvious to everybody it's missing also the text up here yeah exactly so there's always like engravings of some sort on Nintendo games you should recognize what those are on the Gameboy once they say a Nintendo Gameboy up on the top here and it's engraved and nice and it's got a little PM trademark symbol but the bottom there so once again the biggest tell is gonna be on the inside and for Game Boy games that seems to be really freaking obvious so like I said earlier Nintendo does not use those glob top big black solder globs on any of their stuff except for the like two NES games you mentioned but they basically don't use that so anytime you see that it's fake that's it you can you can call it a fake and you can walk away you don't have to do any more digging and that's usually pretty obvious and they don't try to hide it so these ones can be pretty easy honestly once again you've got that oh yeah the battery on this you can tell it's different yeah this is supposed to be the same game pokemon yellow actually uses a CR 1616 battery it's a slightly smaller size than what they're using here and it actually says that on the board most of the Pokemon games in the Game Boy Color generation at least red and blue use a larger battery it's a 2025 I remember correctly so this one it'll say the battery size on there and then this one of course it's in some like weird cage looking thing I don't know what they did with that but like I said it so I soldered onto the board that's true with Super Nintendo and all of that as well they don't ever have a weird like holder phone like in this okay so I have a little test for you I want you to tell me which one of these pokemon emerald games is legit all right you want me to look like a fool here so so to be fair I never owned this I had fire rat okay so I'm not really super familiar with this but out of all these it seems like this is the obvious one that would not be correct yeah and this one actually came through the store was a little kid okay wondering why his Pokemon emerald didn't work and I felt really bad for him telling him that it was a fake okay you've narrowed it down oh man okay this one this looks too dull there's something about the label that does not look legit also the I mean the color of that just looks off it looks and doesn't look strong to me these two here these are tough this one's shaken but that just means it was a you know play on the playground right huh I think this one at least looks like the nicest one that would be my answer and you'd be correct and that this looks like the nicest one huh but it's still a fake thank you but this is certainly the closest at least they got the fonts right on this and the color of the cartridge but it just doesn't have that metallic oh you're right all the pokemon games are like metallic rather than just glossing okay so be is all you can tell as soon as you open them they've got that black blob and I want to say something about Gameboy Advance games this is usually my tell with how to immediately say okay this is probably real if you look at a nintendo gameboy advance board or or gameboy really it has this nintendo here in this font it usually has a copyright and then there's the product number right there and you can actually see that without opening it look at it like this now it's interesting is your doom cartridge actually had that and it's the correct font and everything I mean this is really if you didn't open this and you still saw this printed on the board it's pretty it looks pretty legit because when I first showed it to you're like are you sure that's big yeah yeah and some of your subscribers pointed this out I mean it has a typo on the label it says nineteen nineteen thousand nineteen yeah or something I didn't notice when I first saw this yes these are little things and it's a little bit blurrier than normal but they got all the fonts right they got the stamping right on the back the font of the Nintendo that's stamped in is a little incorrect but I mean that's it that's a smaller nuance thing so I think if you were gonna get duped by a game at least you did okay yeah funny about this is it so you know I I thought I did my homework like I bought it from a base seller that had thousands of good reviews and not coming from China yeah absolutely and the other thing too is that when I got this home I played it for a week before I even knew it I mean the game is on here it plays like normal I was like I would have never have known it was talking to me but I did pay full price for this this is not a cheap game yeah you know it's kind of if you'd found it for $10 you product probably would have been a lot more yes way more than ten bucks yeah all right so finally we're gonna be talking about games which are getting more and more fakes every day I see tons of these listings on eBay so you definitely have to watch out for these because they're getting a lot better at it so I have another test for you this time I promise one of these is real because wannabe was yours this is Mario Kart on the DS one of these should jump out at you pretty quickly I would think so here's the thing about this I don't always sit there and look at the DS cartridge right you may not know what the no I mean honestly I I would be tempted to pick this one but I know it's not because of labels on crooked right right but I mean I don't remember if there is Mario on it or not that's that's pretty funny right yeah so once again this is the box art right alright that they just kind of compress or actually this one's funny because it's got the English seal of quality on in the ESRB English I mean American Nintendo seal of quality and the ESRB which of course is American but when it says you are on the bottom yeah they didn't even think that one through all right so for this these ones that are left home I can't just check the back - oh boy yeah that's tough let me know if you give up okay well cheese okay so what's funny about this is actually one of these fake ones is mine it was something I must have just bought from an expo or something I didn't think to really check carefully because it's a cheap game okay yeah so I never thought about it so one of these incorrect ones is mine and it's very very close this one is mine you can see the Nintendo logos on these have just a slightly different font here's the real one you see the font difference in these I know it's so intricate and so hard to tell so that's why these are really these ones are getting a lot harder you do something to open up there's nothing I mean you can try these open but you'll have to glue them back - you know they don't have a nice little shot the other ones did see you just want to look at all of the engravings on these with the real one you'll see the slight difference in font where it says ntr zero zero five and patent pending again these are these are small things so it's important to have a reference of some sort and that's why eBay listings are so dangerous because the lighting could just be bad absolutely or the camera is funky you know I also have Pokemon platinum here and your biggest giveaway here is just the label is darker on this one again I will caution you if you are buying a game or a lot of three games especially icy pokemon platinum Mario Kart pokemon soul silver put them on heart gold white black all of these like especially pokemon and mario games super super commonly faked ones if you're buying something and it's too good to be true it is it is even if it looks really legitimate from the listing well this has been an eye-opener for me I actually got to be any easier to tell and this is really cool not when you get to be yes I know I'll see pretty obvious ones like on the back of some of these it will say like nint Ando instead of Nintendo yeah you have an example that is so funny yeah actually one made it through one of my employees that says Nintendo on the back nothing really but it's fine so yeah there's a lot of different ways you can tell but some of them are pretty difficult so of course bringing these will help you with everything except yes and then for Deus have a reference with you know my biggest piece of advice just pick up a dollar game at gamestop you know style savvy or something like that guitar hero right and and bring that around with you and make sure the fonts match because that's really gonna be your biggest defense on that one that makes sense so this is obviously very nintendo specific yeah and so we didn't really even touch on like Sega or you know a that stuff and that stuff gets faked too especially like saturn and dreamcast and turbo graphics and stuff i mean those things definitely do get faked but by and large I would say Nintendo's and especially Nintendo handheld consoles are the most faked and bootlegged reproduction that kind of stuff well let us know down in the comments what you thought about this video and if you would like us to do another one of these where we do focus on some of the other systems because we could certainly do that I think that'd be pretty interesting I might need someone to send me some fake games don't come in your story often not know not as often because they're for the CV ones I mean it's like it's pretty obvious when it's a reproduction label so I haven't really seen very many convincing fakes huh interesting well cool well where can people find you on the Internet you can find me on Twitter at Cal fluent or you can follow my podcast at game blitz show we're also on iTunes and YouTube and Google Play and all that fun stuff that's right and also I'm gonna do a shout out to your store pink gorilla Gamescom so if you come to Seattle definitely go to their store bring your tools you can open up well let you yeah alright guys thanks very much for watching this video thanks for subscribing my channel and take care Kelsey and I have done a bunch of videos together including some pretty cool ones like the wonderswan guide that's right you don't know about the wonderswan you're gonna wanna check out that video we've also done a Nintendo DS guide where she bought 50 Nintendo DS's for that video it thinks she might be kind of crazy I'm just saying so you're definitely gonna want to check out my channel and be subscribed new videos every single week

Channel: MetalJesusRocks

Views: 1,834,810

Keywords: metal jesus rocks, metaljesusrocks, metal, jesus, console, system, review, gameplay, video, game, cartridge, reviews, history, retro, retrospective, gaming, collection, collector, Nintendo, PCB, NES, SNES, Super Nintendo, fake or real, real or fake, help, Game Boy, Game Boy Advance, GameBoy, GBA, DS, tools, tips, tricks, secrets, reproduction, counterfeit, phoney, phony, fake, games, spot, Kelsey, PinkGorilla Games, How to Identify Counterfeit, Counterfeit, imitation, bogus

Id: TqwDN-njSls

Length: 21min 8sec (1268 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 09 2016

Reddit Comments

[u/prematurely_bald]

I purchased a copy of DS Tetris off eBay about 10 years ago. It didn’t fit quite right in the DS, the plastic felt “cheap”, the label had some strange markings, and the blurb on the back of the packaging looked like someone printed off a Wikipedia article about the game. Same for the game manual. Definitely a bootleg, and not a very good one.

Informed the seller and she claimed ignorance and refunded me immediately, but I wonder how many of these are out there.

[u/IronhideD]

I did a post a while back about repros vs real.

[u/eXoRainbow]

I see a lot of retro gamers buying stuff on the internet. How many of you check if the games are real?

[u/shadow1psc]

Do I have to worry about repros as much when buying SFC titles? Not SFC titles fan translated and put into SNES cases and listed as such, but is there as big a market on repros in the SFC world?

[u/Ploddit]

I don't buy a game unless clear photos of the PCB are included or I'm buying it in person and I can open the cart.

Compare to pics here.