Slashdot Mirror
Nintendo Blocking Counterfeit Game Machines
An anonymous reader writes "Nintendo won a court case Monday which "prohibits retailers from selling products that look like Nintendo's game controllers from its older Nintendo 64 game console, which can be plugged directly into televisions to play games."" These were apparently being sold nation-wide in mall kiosks. Shady.
They had them at my mall. That booth was pretty popular until it dissappeared without a trace... (they mostly hired immigrants who boasted to me about how it had "Nintendo, Sega, Atari..." It ranked a 105 on the Shade-o-meter.)
Wouldn't these be legal to buy, if I owned the NES version? Carrying around a controller size machine is much easier than 50+ NES carts
Plus, you don't have to blow in the damn cartridge to get the games to work.
It's worse than just one or two Nintendo first-party games. From the ones of these I've seen they appear to be running an emulator (the menu system looks nearly identical to NesterDC) with a nearly full library of NES titles. The ones in my local mall were nearly constantly hooked into a TV with Contra loaded into them, but sometimes Castlevania or other third-party titles.
How's my typing? Call 1-800-eta-shut
Supposedly the controller came with 65000 games but there were only about 25 or so actual games. They were merely repeated over and over like the old 100-in-1 bootleg Nintendo cartridge that had serveral versions of the same games.
You mean Action 52??
Nintendo is not likely to do this...
First, this would eat away at the sales of their other more profitable products. Second, they only own the rights to their own games, and could not include ones from Namco, Konami, and all of the others without getting a legion of lawyers involved.
Too bad, though, Getting the old nintendo classics legally for around $40 or so would be awesome.
"-1 Troll" is the apparently the same as "-1 I disagree with you."
She thought it looked like a nice gift, they were charging "only" 59.99 for it. She brought it home, I said we were taking it back since they were illegal. Talk about a huge hassle to get them to take it back.
I told them that the games weren't licensed. They said sure they are. I asked why Nintendo's logo wasn't on the box. They said I don't know. I kept insisting that I wanted my money back NOW.
Eventually the guy calls his manager and talks to him on the phone for a couple of minutes. Then he wants me to talk to him. I gave the manager the same spiel, threatened to go to the police. The retail monkey got back on the phone again.
Then he loads up Super Mario Brothers, which says Copyright Nintendo on the title screen. He tries to use this as proof that they are legal. I almost came unglued. The second retail monkey comes over and I explain to him that it's even unopened/unused, and it's illegal.
Then this guy calls the manager, but it was to ask how to do a refund on the credit card machine.
Stay away...stay far away.
In the Mall Of America at first they had one, then they had 2 of the stands selling the shady consoles.
Very shady - I could tell instantly they were a not authorize game machines.
The booths at the mall usually sold these multi game machines and also a video table tennis game.
On the machine themselves - no where on them had a mail address, UPC, or any copyright notices. The imaging on the packaging looked like some 80's rip off. I could swear half the images were directly stolen from toy ads from the 80's.
They sold multiple models of the Nintendo system including a deluxe model with gun and two controllers. Base models had just one controller or two. They all had random amount of games usually hovering in the 16,000 listed on the box.
AS someone else commented those are 16,000 in 1 type machines so about 60 games were usable. Games vary from Super Mario Brothers to contra to other games that never made it to us. But most of the games are hack or variations that does nothing to game play or skip you a few levels or instantly crash the game.
Price - no where written or shown on the booth is the price. So you know you can price them down.
I've heard some people get it for 65.00 if you say the right words 40.00.
One other thing that makes it interesting is that the machine had the ability to handle Nintendo 8 bit cartridges. Mind you Asian / Japanese cartridges, not us, but if you had a converter it would still work.
Also the controller had the analog Nintendo 64 stick on it but it was glued into place. So you can't actually use the joystick in the games.
But happy they are closed down.... Though it would be nice if Nintendo made a 20 in 1 like that unlike the $20.00 game boy advance carts....
A relative bought me one of those systems. An N64-looking controller, along with a Sega Genesis-looking controller and a small pistol lightgun.
The name of the system? I don't know. It had one name on the box, another on its side, and the system itself had a different name completely.
The N64 controller had a slot which allowed you to play expansions...turns out that the slot was for Famicom games, which meant that it wasn't meant for American audiences really.
Also the thousands of games weren't really thousands of games. They were maybe 60 games, listed thousands of times by different variations on their names.
But that was not what irked me the most. What irked me the post was the game they called Pacman. It was actually a Mappy Land clone, which was weird because Mappy Land was one of the games listed! I want my Pac-man!!!
I have 3656.9 Bogomips. How many Bogomips do you have?
But, the units play a beautiful version of Galaga. Who can resist Galaga? ;)
DecafJedi
my weblog: apropos of something
These things are often referred to as Famiclones (Famicom clones) and dodgy peoples have been spitting these things out not long after the original Famicom itself appeared. Google for "Famiclone" and read all about it, the top site has over 240 variants. If you must have one then don't pay big $$$ for these, there is no telling how much bootleg 8bit Nintendo stuff has been spewed forth in the last 2 decades...
Nice try but did you stop to think about who would actually buy the thing if it cost $1000? Raising prices on a crappy product only goes so far.
I know this is tough to believe, but $1,000 was a hot deal on a pre-hacked illegal VideoCipher II board and receiver at the time. And that was $1,000 in 1980's $$$.
I don't know what the limit is before people rub their brain cells together and realize it's cheaper to be legal instead of pirating, but it's really high.
There's a wired article all about hacked VideoCipher boards somewhere... hmm... here it is.
If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think - BoC
When I say some for sale in a mall kiosk in the USA I went up to the young man that was selling them. I asked how they were able to import what was clearly a pirate device. He said, "If I'm selling it then it must be legal!" I told him that he clearly didn't know what he was talking about and he got angry with me. He was even madder when I told him in earshot of potential customers that what he was selling for $59.99 was available in Taiwan for $8.00.
Lasers Controlled Games!
They loaded up Contra. I, like all of you, I assume, remember the Konami code. I went to enter it....
The guy says, "No, watch this!" HE HOLDS B AND START and I get 30 lives.
I walked away scared.
Obviously, these methods didn't always work; later versions of the frontloading console rendered most of these methods totally useless. The toploading NES can run them fine, though, since Nintendo decided to get rid of the NES lockout chip in the end (since that's what caused dirty carts to blink the screen).
* Q
P.S. If you don't get this note, let me know and I'll write you another.