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I recently rediscovered my tiny collection of five GBA games, and got to thinking it would be grand to have more. So I hit up Gumtree, Australia's Craigslist (owned by eBay), and found this ad. Not really knowing anything about the second hand market, I entered negotiations with the buyer. His games were selling quickly: he somehow managed to sell Minish Cap after he agreed to sell it to me, while we were discussing a replacement for another game that he sold. From watching every episode of Hustle many times, in retrospect I realise that my fear was no longer on being scammed, but on missing out, a classic component of the con. Otherwise I assume I would have caught this: Yeah, the only blurry image of the GBA games were inside frosted cases. But I didn't so I paid up, buying WarioWare, the two GBA Fire Emblems and Sonic Advance 3 for the then-seemingly-reasonable sum of AU$45 (US$32) and a week later, to my immense disappointment, there turned out to be a reason for those cases:  There's a wide spectrum of skill on display here, but WarioWare here was so bad it immediately made me spot the flaws in everything else:  As opposed to what the label should look like:  A bafflingly awful Nintendo logo gives away the Fire Emblems as well, and on closer inspection they're also missing model numbers, but for Sonic Advance you have to flip it over (assuming you don't notice the overly dark printing):  They all had this exact back, so it seems likely these were a job lot. The scariest though was the DS game, which at first glance looks great:  The cart, too, although the sticker wasn't cut perfectly, would be easy to mask and difficult to recognise:  It was only when I put it besides my other DS games did the printing seem way too dark and the transparent cover plastic seem bluer than actual boxes. What's crazy is they went to all the trouble of printing the entire manual, a very thick book:  It is clearly the wrong size, however, and the vertical logo is way too close to the spine. It is also printed very badly though, the ink in some areas so thin that the text begins to vanish:  There's a different problem with the back cover, the colour registration is badly misaligned, which results in this blurring on thin areas like text:  Incredibly, they also printed an entire, thick, health and safety manual, but the fonts are immediately wrong (and is multilingual despite purporting to be the US release):  Finally, just the like GBA games, the Nintendo logo is wrong on the back of the carts. It's a better attempt, at least they went for a bold face this time, so I missed it on first glance, but on the second it's pretty obvious:  The story ends with me getting a full refund. He capitulated immediately. After all, he would have made thousands of dollars from that ad alone. And if he's done it enough to have a return address sticker made up with his company name, I have a feeling it was not the first, nor sadly will it probably be the last time he does it. But it's been a fascinating, if bitterly disappointing, ride for me. I can't help but think it's more work to invent your own Nintendo logo or cart sticker than just slap the pre-existing one on. That they went to all the trouble of printing a 60 page manual but didn't bother getting the registration right is pretty crazy. It's also disturbing how accurate some of the products were: I think that no matter how good the photo would be of the front of Sonic or Mario & Luigi I don't think I would spot it as a fake. And all it would take is for them to use the actual logo on the back mould and I would be poo poo out of luck. I would love to hear your tales of perfidy, and insight as to how you're supposed to buy from the secondary market when it is such a minefield.
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Dec 8, 2015 06:48
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| # ? Apr 20, 2024 00:50 |
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are your games haunted???????????????
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Dec 8, 2015 07:00
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chaosbreather posted:Gumtree, Australia's Craigslist daww, australia 
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Dec 8, 2015 07:04
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I bought a bootleg playstation game off ebay once
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Dec 8, 2015 07:04
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I once rented out Sonic on the Megadrive and when it came time to return it I put the guts of my Altered Beast in the cartridge and the kept sonic guts. Looking back, that was a dick move
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Dec 8, 2015 07:07
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I remember back in the day my parents got me a 101 Games In One!~!! cart for my gameboy. It was, of course, like twelve games in one--Tennis, something with a penguin or another, Mario Land, Tetris, and a few others--just with goofy rear end renames as filler, like BlockFall, Pingpong, and that sort. I never once realized it was pirated, I thought they were different difficulty settings or something. I was a dumb kid 
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Dec 8, 2015 07:13
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the fire emblem logo is also hilarious if you know the series. It's showing the logo for FE7, but the characters in the background are from FE6. it'd be like a bootleg FF7 with Locke and Terra chilling on the cover.
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Dec 8, 2015 07:23
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How much did you pay?
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Dec 8, 2015 07:24
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Hollenhammer posted:How much did you pay? AU$45 (US$32) Endorph posted:the fire emblem logo is also hilarious if you know the series. It's showing the logo for FE7, but the characters in the background are from FE6. it'd be like a bootleg FF7 with Locke and Terra chilling on the cover. Didn't know this, that's even more crazy!
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Dec 8, 2015 07:26
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did the games work though cause if they did who cares
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Dec 8, 2015 07:28
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Justin Tyme posted:did the games work though Bootleg games work for a while then gently caress up when you're saving and the like, and only work in some hardware. But beyond that, if I wanted to just get a copy of the software I could just download a ROM. I want the genuine physical artefact, which is what I paid him for. So, me, I guess, I care.
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Dec 8, 2015 07:57
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chaosbreather posted:AU$45 (US$32) Well that's a huge red flag right there. Theres no way you're going to find games that cheap here in Australia, especially nintendo
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Dec 8, 2015 08:01
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Hollenhammer posted:Well that's a huge red flag right there. Theres no way you're going to find games that cheap here in Australia, especially nintendo Yeah, I get that now. Interestingly though there is that exact same fake fire emblem on eBay now for $100 so I guess price is no guarantee.
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Dec 8, 2015 08:21
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My first copy of Doom (shareware) came in one of those 99 games bundles that my dad received with the purchase of a PC from a shady mid-90s computer store. For some reason, all of the creature sounds and whatnot were all replaced with .wavs of quotes from the movies The Untouchables and Reservoir Dogs. Nothing beats having a cyberdemon telling you that "He'll have your rear end hangin' from a flagpole in the mornin'!" or an imp that says, "Talk to me like that in front of my son? gently caress you and your family!"
Nickelodeon Household fucked around with this message at 00:21 on Dec 9, 2015 |
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Dec 9, 2015 00:14
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| # ? Apr 20, 2024 00:50 |
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Ciaphas posted:I remember back in the day my parents got me a 101 Games In One!~!! cart for my gameboy. It was, of course, like twelve games in one--Tennis, something with a penguin or another, Mario Land, Tetris, and a few others--just with goofy rear end renames as filler, like BlockFall, Pingpong, and that sort. I got one of these via my uncle. I remember thinking it was an SNES game that used an adapter to let you play it on an NES!!!! (yeah it was a loving Famicom cartridge with an adapter) which was A Big Deal because we only had an NES. My brother and, I being the ignorant little kids we were, called it Chinese Nintendo™. As wonky and weird as those games were, we played the gently caress outta that cartridge and I'm sad it passed to another similarly confused child at a garage sale. 
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Dec 9, 2015 00:46
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