Unlicensed / Bootleg NES Games (Nintendo Entertainment System)

if there's ever a neglected section of my game collection it's the unlicensed nes games if you've seen my nes games collection video i do mention these bad boys briefly and honestly that's all they usually are to me a brief oh yeah does exist before moving on to other games they look weird most of them don't have end labels so i forget even what games i own a majority really struggled to work with either the original nes or the model 2 top loader and most of all 95 of these games are straight up garbage just poorly programmed poorly designed derivative cash grabs trying to barnacle their way onto the behemoth ship that was nintendo at the time i don't have a huge collection of unlicensed games and that's almost entirely because of my disdain for them like it's bad enough i have official games like color a dinosaur or best of the best karate which i never play and that cost way too much money but to spend even more on bootlegs that contain even a quarter of the quality of a shitty game like metal mech just sounds so depressing don't get me wrong i probably will still buy more because you know that collecting addictions got to be fed somehow but i assure you instant regret will set in most of these games i didn't buy they were either gifts from friends unloading their old collections or they were kind of thrown into lots for other games i actually wanted but even with that warning there are a few titles here that i think are good have an interesting backstory or at the very least are kind of fascinating to look at their cartridge just to pick apart all the bizarre design choices let's start with the most famous unlicensed games those made by tengen good old tengen this company is famous with game historians for basically reverse engineering nintendo's hardware so they could make their own unlicensed cartridges tengen games all came in this black cartridge with this weird slant here at the end of all the bootlegs these seem to have the least trouble circumventing the nintendo's lockout chip this is the only one i owned growing up gauntlet and to this day i cannot remember where it came from i'm pretty sure some other kid in the neighborhood let us borrow it and then never ask for it back which was both his gift and his curse i mentioned the tengen games a bit in my nes games with alternate cover art video because yeah there are official cartridges with slightly different artwork to accompany their bootleg buddies here we've got temple of doom pac-man both miss and mr gauntlet rbi baseball and the most famous of all tetris the other four games are identical to their legit counterparts but tengen tetris has a totally different look and design even if yeah it's still tetris the graphics and colors are worse especially as the blocks connect but it does offer more gameplay modes including versus the computer competitive two-player and even two-player co-op no way i'll definitely come back to this later when i make another best two-player co-op games video all in all the tengen games i have are pretty decent they're maybe not quite at super mario level or anything but they are definitely several quality steps above something like castalion or funhouse next we've got the comerica games which are either gold or silver i should have mentioned this when i discussed tengen but how annoying is it that the labels are upside down here like yeah they're oriented correctly when you insert them into the original console but why buck the trend like if you're breaking down what made official games good or bad in terms of design why would flipping the cover image take precedent over i don't know in labels so i can tell what game i'm looking at these also have the infamous crater on the back with this weird switch that lets you choose between position a or position b whatever that means i've never tried these switches before as i've never really had any trouble getting these gains to work but obviously there was some reason for this more strange to me is this mystery shape next to it what does this do is this so if you stick it in the nes it can latch on and never let go micro machines is often cited as the best unofficial nes game and yeah it's pretty good just good old top down racing with a multiplayer capability and lots of different stages characters and vehicles i wouldn't rank it above rc pro-am or galaxy 5000 but it's pretty solid ultimate stuntman is wow i get what they were going for here with the eagle and the explosions and all but how impractical is this dude's shirtlessness buddy your nipple has been shredded off also what's up with his hair it looks like a pretty standard crew cut that went full emo halfway across his head the strangest thing to me about this cover is whatever's happening down here at the bottom what is this in the full box art you can see it's a green and pink squid that's down there sucking them off but why crop it this way on the cartridge just bring the bottom up a bit or zoom out a little don't just leave these mystery shapes cut off here definitely my most massacred copy is mig-29 me they got this one good two stickers on the label two on the sides and even the remnants of another on the back they even stuck the infamous be kind rewind reminder on here perfect i'm a kroger man through and through and i wish to god we had had video games at my local stores here in atlanta i would have helped my mom with any grocery shopping she needed just for the chance to bruise something even of the quality of mig-29 finally there's all these quattro games which are four-in-one titles separated into sports adventure or arcade styles of gameplay man there really should have been a fourth quattro game just for symmetry's sake quattro adventure is a series of very simple collecting type games that remind me of old pc titles from the 80s and early 90s they're pretty awful but definitely playable here's something i never noticed though somehow they switched up the selection order so that if you choose boomerang kid you get robin hood instead and vice versa it's an adventure cartridge you didn't think it'd be that easy did you quattro sports has baseball tennis and [Laughter] they did it again selecting bmx gives you soccer and vice versa now they're just with us this bmx game is hot garbage and every serve i attempt in tennis either goes out or drops directly at my feet but the soccer and baseball games are actually pretty fun either that or they're so easy that i think they're fun what about quattro arcade did they figure out the menu yes you did it cj is a really awkward platformer stunt buggies and go dizzy go are both pac-man clones and sixteen renegade is a vertical shooter in the 1942 vein of the three quattro cartridges arcade is by far the weakest each of these quattros is pretty terrible but as a kid i would have loved to have any of them simply because having four mediocre games is way better than having one karate kid here's a rad one chiller released by a company that won best name at the 1990 namesees awards american game cartridges chiller is a light gun shooter which starts off innocuous enough in this graveyard but later stages feature these bizarre torture chamber scenes where you shoot the limbs off of these helpless victims gross there's a lot more to say about this but i'm not really set up to record light gun footage yet so i'll have to save this for another time i will say i love this cover definitely going for an iron maiden look with this clearly ripped off font and a well drawn horror scene lifted straight off an airbrushed van a detail i never noticed till now because of how dark this composition is is the carving on the headstone dead people are cool um i guess if you say so now we're getting into the wackiness with the american video entertainment games these come in black and all have the unnecessary press here circles printed upside down at the top for all the people who inserted these games into the nes and couldn't figure out how to make them come out again they also have this strange corner cut off thing weird i mentioned impossible mission 2 briefly in my recent pickups video and yep it's an ok run around and grab stuff game wally bear and the no gang is the infamous anti-drug title where as wally you try to get your friends off drugs i remember there being more enemies in this game but i've been pedaling to the right for five minutes and everything just repeats on a loop like the background of a flintstones cartoon dudes with attitudes is trying way too hard to make you think this is some cool game with cool guys doing cool things instead it's just a weird arkanoid style game with some of the most obnoxious sound effects on the nes venice beach definitely wins the horniest cover award i mean think about the perspective here you'd have to be laying down underneath the net to get this view how awkward also i love the way they tried to place this net that seems to stretch on for eternity it's trying to mimic the perspective of the shot but instead looks like it's a ring around the earth and these two girls are just playing slap ball with patty cake rules ah color dreams check it out i've got a perfect gradient of color decay starting with baby blue and shifting slightly into this greenish turquoise all these games are terrible but the covers are definitely in the they're so bad that they're good territory master chew and the drunkard hue isn't too atrocious but the posing of this dude makes no sense like he's kind of moving left but jumping forward to the right simultaneously but also into the foreground with his floppy goofy ass clown shoe flying at you captain comic is just an odd choice all around it's a comic book character who's space age but he's in a medieval dungeon what kind of game is this no this kind of game i like how there's an owl and a bee busting through the walls like animal kool-aid men robo demons is the strangest of them all but not for any real interesting reason it's just what the is going on here dented head cyclops octopus sure hiding behind this wall even though it's clear he's not only visible but has already been spotted yep mini chrome versions of the main character why not my biggest issue here is the resolution is so shitty i can't make out for the life of me what's happening in this hole in the wall or with these flying dudes it's like he drew it on a stamp took a picture with a motororo flip phone posted it to a website and then saved it again for maximum digital muddiness either that or they just used some really cheap printing for their labels and yeah that's it never mind all that other stuff speaking of labels why is captain comic the only one whose label is inverted okay finally we've got the bible games from wisdomtree i've got two copies of bible adventures one in black and another in blue which was a gift from my buddy mark who apparently initialed the game himself so no other christian kids could steal it from him this game has been pretty well documented but it's basically three bible versions of mario 2 with hilarious visuals they're all awful but man this cover would have sold me even as a non-believer but not nearly as much as exodus journey to the promised land holy this is epic i have no idea what moses is doing so dramatically here but it looks awesome the game is hoo boy i don't know what category of game this falls into but trust me it sucks finally there's spiritual warfare which oddly enough was a reason i wanted to make this video in the first place i was working on a video about zelda clones and as goofy as this game is it is a surprisingly fun rip-off of the nintendo bread winner i actually had so much fun giggling my way through this that i decided to make a full review of it so stay tuned for more pantsless action coming up soon and that's it there are way more unlicensed nes titles out there but like i said i'm not really intentionally looking for them if they happen to cross my path in the future and the planets perfectly align i may pick up more and make a follow-up video but my summary is this if you've never played an unofficial game before you're not missing anything there is no joy to be mined here but as objects yeah they're fascinating just bizarre confusing jaw-dropping oddities that are the ultimate thing to show off when people come over like yeah i've got contra but what about robo demons no i'm just kidding we're not actually gonna play that contra it is anyway until next time thanks for watching [Music]

Channel: Big Ole Words

Views: 36,369

Keywords: nes, nintendo, retro gaming, retro games, gaming, video games, nes games, 8-bit, old school, nintendo entertainment system, famicom, family computer, 8-bit games, nintendo games, Nintendo gamer, 8-bit gaming, 8 bit, 8-bit gamer, 8-bit music chiptune, chiptunes, retro gamer, 80s, 90s, 80s video games, 90s video games, game collecting, game collection, retro game collecting, retro game collection, game room tour, gaming tour, unlicensed NES, tengen, color dreams, wisdom tree

Id: 3KqQZYvmZJ4

Length: 13min 31sec (811 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 14 2022