So for a good while now, I’ve heavily stuck my nose into some really oddball bootleg games from companies such as “Shenzhen Nanjing Technology” or “Fuzhou Waixing Computer Science”, and I got to say, if you really and I mean genuinely take the time to understand these games from start to finish, no matter how obnoxious they may be, you might come to find that some of them are quite enjoyable in the long run, especially if you can translate them, know the source material they’ve stolen from, or have a genuine interest in these sorts of things to begin with.
Take for example a bootleg game for the NES called “Bio Hazard”, this is a “demake” of Resident Evil (for the PS1) with combat mechanics from Resident Evil Gaiden (for the Gameboy Color), and a generalized layout and stylization of the game to look like a top-down view of RE1. Keep in mind, EVEN IF you don’t know Chinese, you can play MOST of the game purely on muscle memory and trial and error (at some points). Of course, and SPOILER WARNING, if you’ve played the original game, you’ll be quite familiar with the painting room that shows the different stages of life. Of course, if you can translate the text, even with an AI like Google or Yandex (text on image translator), oddly enough, you can get through that game with a fair amount if ease, purely based on your own knowledge of the source material.
Why I bring this up, is because I feel, despite these games being based on and even containing STOLEN assets, there is still a lot of value to most if them, and given enough understanding, perhaps a bit of prior experience with the source material, or some other knowledge that helps, a good portion of these games are rather enjoyable.
There are of course, some genuinely god awful steaming piles of crap, but even then, with a few basic fixes (or cheating), it is possible to enjoy even some of the WORST bootlegs out there.
Some other noteworthy bootlegs, despite their absurd difficulty (which is impossible to beat without cheating) are as followed:
—Diablo (for the NES, but is based on Diablo II)
—World of Warcraft (for the NES, tells a fairly accurate slimmed down version of the first few games/campaigns through the eyes of a person’s in-game character, which is why the characters in the game bicker about who’s gonna get the gold, and you get to play as Illydan).
—Final Fantasy VII (for the NES, unlatched, it looks nothing like the source material, as it uses FF1 assets, but with a patch, it’s clearly 1000x better).
So what about the rest of you, have you or do you want to dip your toes into the world of bootlegs? And if you have before, any games you personally enjoyed and why?
