Puckman Pockimon Genie 2000

Yes.

"Puckman Pockimon Genie 2000", thirteen-year-old unlicensed arcade tat from the far east, here to make your day that extra bit less pleasant. You got your Pokémon in my Pac-Man etc., and a worldwide culling of brain cells commenced.

Credit goes to Techokami for tracking this one down.

Super Mario World 64

Remember when I used to talk about unlicensed games? Good times... or not.

Anyway it's time to relive the horrors, with the demented holy grail of Sega Mega Drive tat, Super Mario World 64. First spotted back in 2008, this abysmal piece of garbage has finally succumbed to preservation efforts after almost five years of struggles. It's a good day for the world, and by extension, that means it's a bad day too.

Pokemon Gold Silver

An elusive unlicensed Super Nintendo game, supposedly titled "Pokemon Gold Silver" has been recently dumped. Joy of joys.

The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past

So I'm sure the fans were crying out for a NES port of The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past. I mean who wouldn't be - clearly the superior graphical and sound capabilities of the Super Nintendo pale in comparison to those of the prior generation.

Well check it out, your wish has been granted in the form of this unlicensed "port" from China. It's aLttP, but with 100% more screeching home-made NES audio to ruin your day. And worse scrolling. And worse graphics. But tossing these points aside for a moment, this is a fairly accurate port of the third Zelda outing. It just needs to be played on mute.

If I were a younger man I'd dissect this game in detail but for now, this is Blog Squirrel's pathetic attempt at raising awareness of this game. Inspiration for my handful of daily visitors.

Tiny Toon Adventures 3

Another soul saved.

Look, it's Tiny Toon Adventures 3, an unlicensed Mega Drive platformer from the far east which has been recently dumped and tailored to the needs of emulators by the folks of Sonic/Sega Retro. It's mediocre!

Top Fighter 2000 MK VIII

Fighting games generally aren't my style, but they soon become my style when one allows Muhammed Ali to punch Michael Jordan in the face.

It's Top Fighter 2000 MK VIII, unlicensed tripe for the Sega Mega Drive. What happened to the seven earlier versions? Who knows, who cares. Apparently it's a pretty awful game but they said that about the other two as well. Will this one break the trend?

Bible Adventures

Are you ready for the potentially fourth best religious-themed video game ever?! It's Bible Adventures for the Sega Mega Drive. Unlicensed 1995 tripe by Wisdom Tree, Bible Adventures was aimed at crazy people in American society and failed to take note of important industry standards. Sounds like a blast!

Adventurous Boy

That was one long radio show.

"Unlicensed drivel!? I thought you'd grown out of that, Squirrel!". Not quite. Top time travelling duck fan BanjoSonic likes to feed me forgotten pirate games once in a while. This is one such game, Adventurous Boy for the Sega Mega Drive. It's a broken Fantasy Zone clone... how could I resist?

Wario Land 3 (Mega Drive)

NMMX of Sonic Retro has done the world a favour by dumping this slightly infamous hack of the Mega Drive platformer, Puggsy. There were a couple of videos floating around YouTube, with all sorts of uneducated simpletons claiming this was some sort of amazing pirate original.

Is it worth caring about? Well if it gets more people to play Puggsy I suppose so. It's a very bare bones hack which essentially just replaces the title screen, credits, and Puggsy sprite (as well as removing the Sega logo), but Puggsy is a very good game, sporting great graphics and sound for the time as well as PHYSICS. There's also a version for the Mega CD.

Oh and a fun fact for you - supposedly Puggy's anti-piracy tactics are still in-tact here so make sure SRAM is disabled on your emulator.

Elfland

ELFLAND. Oh how the title makes your mind go wild. What could possibly lie beyond this line of text? A fun Christmas-themed game in the style of Super Mario Land? A on old DOS platformer from my childhood whose existence I forgot about until writing this sentence and will probably blog about it in the near future? Of course not... it's an unlicensed NES game from "Tip Top" in 1992.

And wouldn't you know it, it has absolutely nothing to do with elves. It's actually a strange Bubble Bobble clone, without the bubbles or bobbles. The catch this time is to eliminate your enemies by changing colour in a de Blob style manner, and if it had been presented a little better... it might have been quite nice.

ASDER 20-in-1

An update to The Obscure Research Project? Madness.

I'm not all that sure what posessed me to play through this pirate NES compilation, but I did, and and here's the page to prove it. Unlike most compilations it's not just a bunch of stolen games tied to a menu, but is, in fact, 20 completely original titles... well okay some are hacks... but still, not many people will have played these games before.

I don't know Nintendo's history as well as Sega's so chances are there might be a few more hacks included in this compilation. I spotted Crush Roller (or Make Trax) but there might be others so you might have to take this with a pinch of salt and I'll update it at a later date.

Shui Hu Feng Yun Zhuan

what how when why

China, my greatest foe. And my greatest ally. Actually to be honest I don't really know China and it doesn't really know me, but I do know of the products it produces. This is one of them, a Mega Drive beat 'em up under the awkward name of Shui Hu Feng Yun Zhuan. Catchy isn't it?

When I saw this game I couldn't really care less for it, though it was made for an entirely different audience so that might be why. But don't ignore this post. My statistics say you like this weird crap so this might be right up your street, and after playing it, it gets to a few houses on my road too.

Super the Lion King 2

Donkey Kong Country (on the NES) Returns... though I almost wish it hadn't.

This was dumped... today! Another Donkey Kong Country pirate for the NES, this time featuring... Simba from the Lion King! And three levels!

Essentially it's another clone called "The Panda Prince" in new clothes. There's not much to say about it, aside from that fact it's short, difficult tat that looks and sounds terrible, but it's not difficult to describe. The game feels the need to start off with one of those poorly designed minecart levels that need save states to beat, and after completing that stage there's two very simple on-foot levels and a fight with DKC's Necky. It's clearly based on a more complete version of the game, as is the Panda Prince, but that's yet to show up.

Pyramid

Time to hurt ourselves again with another unlicensed game from days gone by. Despite spewing their fare share of garbage back in the day, I haven't mentioned the pirate group "Sachen" much... probably because most of their games are centred around gambling. It doesn't even feel right to associate them with the word "pirate", because like companies such as Wisdom Tree they don't appear to be a bunch of crooks, just a group that's trying to appeal to a market Nintendo neglected... and that almost seems fair game.

So time to look at one of their better works. "Pyramid", an original title that took the formula found in Tetris and thought "it's not hip to be square", adding... TRIANGLES into gameplay. Well, it is a video game developer's favourite shape.

More garbage on its way

I suspect many people travel to this blog for the latest and greatest news on my one-man-mission to somehow document every notable obscure pirate video game on the planet. I've been in the process of swapping computers, and the new one isn't a fan of my old internet setup. It does, however, have a 23-inch 1080p monitor, so it's difficult to complain.

Of course this means I've had to ignore new dumps such as this. PANDA WORLD. Yes that's right, the way to protect an endangered species isn't to force them to mate in captivity, you just need to construct a giant robot that will hurl up a few babies every now and then.

You got your Mario in my Street Fighter II

Again

More fun for me when I inevitably update tORP. A while back I attempted to create some sort of timeline with Street Fighter II pirates but it was horrific to sort out. Lots of similar dumps splattered all over the net in various locations, undocumented and in many cases, unemulated outside of the likes of FCEU or Nestopia. As far as I'm aware nobody has made a decent stab at trying to make sense of these pieces of garbage, but this will certainly help bridge a gap.

Essentially it's Master Fighter III with Mario (and a Little Nemo background) added. It's nothing spectacular, but these sprites were all carried through to Mari Street Fighter III Turbo so there was clearly some sort of underlying relationship going on here.

Along with this dump, yet another Mortal Kombat pirate popped up, this time going under the name of "Mortal Kombat V Pro". The second outing for our good friend Zoo.

I suspect it pre-dates "Mortal Kombat V Turbo 1996" which I've already written about, though strangely this seems to run at 60 frames per second unlike its sibling, making it the better choice.

Isn't piracy just grand?

Super Aladdin

I'm having to resort to broken builds of FCEU due to a lack of updates on the Nestopia project. A shame I suppose... Nestopia is probably the best NES emulator out there... but anyway look what popped up recently

It's Aladdin on the NES... again. Back in 1992 the Mega Drive title was a phenomenal success as it was one of the first examples of pairing smooth Disney-like animations with a video game. Though DOS and Amiga ports were understandable, for some crazy reason it was ported to the NES... badly, and released only in Europe. In between then and now, two other NES ports have popped up; the hideous "Aladdin 2" which I've talked about briefly in the past, and "Super Aladdin", which has been around a while apparently but only got my attention recently.

VELBT

Char sent me his recently dumped "100-in-1" Game Boy Advance pirate. As I'm not usually the first or second person to have a go at a game, I thought I'd post about it.

I mean it's nothing amazingly special, just PocketNES with a bunch of ROMs. But there's a few hacks, a couple of homebrew games and the odd pirate original included (bonus points if you can guess which ones). Gives me an excuse to review a lot of quick sprite edits on one go, so expect a tORP page soonish. One day I'll also get around to finishing that page on Hummer Team's Tiny Toon Adventures pirate (there's a lot to talk about there).

In other news, the Taxman, known for his Retro Sonic engine (Retro Sonic XG, Sonic Nexus) is developing a Sonic CD port to the iphone. It's been pitched to Sega after a "what iphone games do you want" blog post, who have promised to bring it up in one of their board meetings. A Sonic fangame adopted by Sega? Might be more likely than you think.

A blast from the past

So, Super Mario & Sonic 2; we meet at last.

You see, back in the days when I first discovered pirates there weren't too many known Sonic ones about. There was Somari, and Sonic 6 and Sonic Adventure 7 and... well quite a few I guess. But during my travels on the now defunct Sonicology I came across this masterpiece, then undumped. It was obvious it was a hack (a Chip & Dale: Rescue Rangers 2 hack in fact) but what remained inside was unknown. Just a mystery screenshot like the one above.

That was, until about 12 days ago when the ROM got dumped.

Needless to say it's not a very good hack. In fact, with more playable characters than levels... it's pretty broken. Not to mention the Sonic sprites are laughably poor. Mario ones are from Super Mario Bros. 3. It's just squirming with originality!

Though I had forgotten it existed, it's always good to see new dumps. Speaking of which, there's a prototype "Mike Tyson's Intergalactic Power Punch" hanging about now too. It's not one of 1992's big hits, lets put it that way, and it certainly wasn't when it wound up as "Power Punch II" later on.

Bubblin and Bobblin

Another one? Has hell frozen over once again? Just got the Super Bubble Bobble article on tORP. Some may find it interesting. Some may find the fact that Kega Fusion 3.6 and up will run it more interesting. Some may not find it interesting at all.