We pity the poor grandchild or boyfriend who gets one of these knockoffs for Christmas.
By K. Thor Jensen August 8, 2016 10:55AM EST August 8, 2016 PCMag rev iews produc t s independent ly , but we may earn af f iliat e c ommis s ions f rom buy ing link s on t his page. Terms of us e.
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It's kind of intense to think that the same three companies have had a stranglehold on the video game console market for over a decade. Ever since the Dreamcast died and Sega got out of the hardware business, you're pretty much stuck with Nintendo, Sony, or Microsoft if you want to play games on your TV. Well, that is, unless you want to think a little outside the plastic box. Numerous fly-by-night companies in China and elsewhere have released curiously familiar-looking game consoles for a fraction of the price (and with an even smaller fraction of the performance). These bootleg consoles show up at flea markets and ramshackle stores for absurdly low prices—some of them as low as $11—and exist only to sucker the ignorant or the curious. Inside the fancy boxes is typically the hardware of a system from several generations ago, often coupled with a handful of truly awful games. We pity the poor grandchild or boyfriend who gets one of these babies for Christmas. Here are our picks for some of the nuttiest console bootlegs on the market. View As: One Page
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Probably the most-cloned system of all time is the original NES, which has seen its guts repurposed into dozens of other machines from multiple manufacturers. For our money, the most absurd is the "Super Megason," released in Europe and Africa in the late 1990s. On the outside, it looks a bit like a Super Nintendo, but the guts are 8-bit all the way (you can tell by the fact that the controllers don't have shoulder buttons). You can't even plug a cartridge into this puppy. Instead it comes pre-loaded with a classic "multicart" with bootleg versions of first-generation Nintendo classics like Balloon Fight.
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Bootleg console developers are obviously looking to exploit as many familiarlooking products as they can, but sometimes they do it in super weird ways. Case in point: the Power Player Super Joy III, which has the functionality of a Nintendo Entertainment System but is housed inside a rip-off N64 controller. The colorful and somewhat bizarre box promises a staggering 76,000 games— more than have been released for every Nintendo system combined since the dawn of time—but it's really just the same 76 NES titles repeated over 1,000 pages of menus. That dishonesty extends to the software, too. Most of the games are Nintendo classics and also-rans, but several of them have been renamed after more popular games. The atrocious NES M.U.S.C.L.E. wrestling game is now "WWF." Karateka is now "Tekken." And, most puzzlingly, obscure puzzle platformer Nuts & Milk is called "Milk & Nuts." Why even bother swapping that one around? The system also comes with a terrifyingly realistic light gun.
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Portable consoles get the bootleg treatment too. Typically, these cheapo devices tried to fake buyers into thinking they're something a lot more expensive than they are. The "PCP Station" is an obvious Sony PSP in appearance, but the "Game Advance" is a reference to Nintendo's Game Boy Advance. The back of the box shows five games, which include Super Mary, Street Overlord, and Chanticleer Hegemony, which is probably an insane mangling of Sonic The Hedgehog. Each of the games is actually a self-contained LCD screen that plugs into the PCP Station's housing. If you've played the junky games made by Tiger, you know the drill. Each one is a dumpy attempt at a classic genre—shooter, driving game, one-on-one fighter—and all of the control buttons on the right side do the same thing.
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Known on the street as the "Terminator 2," this bootleg console was widely sold in Eastern European countries like Bulgaria and Croatia, but it ranged as far as Iran and Pakistan. In Bosnia, it was one of the most common video game devices on the market, and you can still buy them for remarkably cheap. This was yet another Nintendo Entertainment System clone, but it was housed in a casing that looked like a Sega Genesis (the hot system in Europe at the time). It would also often play games at a slower speed than normal. Even though the console took standard NES cartridges, they were insanely expensive abroad, so there were numerous bootleg multi-game carts released as well. They retailed for under a dollar each, but you certainly got what you paid for. The distinctive yellow color of the carts will elicit a powerful emotional reaction in people who grew up with one of these.
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The massive success of the Wii was a boon for bootleggers. Since Nintendo's console wasn't particularly beefy from a technical standpoint, cheap knock-offs didn't have far to go to catch up. Chinese bootleg manufacturer JungleTac rushed the hilariously ratty "Vii" to market in 2007 to capitalize on buyer confusion. Boasting a massively outdated 16-bit processor, the Vii came packed with a "Power Rod" that let you play such smash hits as Alacrity Golf and Fry Egg. They're all exactly as deep as they sound, mostly involving just single button presses to play. The console could also take one of three cartridges that featured even more knock-off games.
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The guts of these bootleg consoles are all pretty much the same—80s hardware that you can make for pennies, cheaply soldered together by child labor somewhere in Asia. It's the outside casings where the scam artists really shine. No bootleg box has the insane form factor of the PX-3600, made by Hong Kong's "Cheertech." This bad boy ripped inspiration from just about everybody, from the glowing green Xbox "X" to the round PS1 disc holder. Inside it was yet another NES clone, but this one featuring a staggering 57,000 games in one. Needless to say, most of those "games" are glitchy, hardly working garbage. A few of them are classics like Contra.
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The Sony PlayStation series has come to be synonymous with high-end hardware. The Japanese company employs some of the best industrial designers in the world to create striking, powerful game machines. And then Chinese rip-off artists take their hard work, throw a bunch of trash chips in it, and call it a day. The PolyStation series of bootleg consoles are some of the most hilarious on the market, clumsily aping the form factor while delivering truly inept gameplay. Probably the funniest in the line is the Mini PolyStation 3, which takes the PS3's chassis, shrinks it down about 66 percent, and turns it into a portable gaming platform. Needless to say, the shape doesn't work out very well for that, and the removable screen (where the DVD tray should be) is barely a step up from the Game & Watch.
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There are so many great things about this NES clone that I'm not sure I'll be able to squeeze them into two paragraphs. First off, the box art is from Batman & Robin, widely regarded to be the absolute dirt worst of all the Batman movies. Second, there isn't a single Batman video game to be found inside—it's just another multi-game cartridge with all the usual NES titles that we've seen a dozen times before. It's the hardware design that really puts this baby over the top. The main box duplicates the original Xbox, but with an insane red, green, and black color scheme that looks like one of those Africa pendants rappers wore in the 90s. The controllers are rip-offs of the original PlayStation gray versions, and the zapper light gun (remember, Batman hates guns) is a solid black pistol.
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