joe randel's art dump

So the other day I talked about those fake artsy Famicom cartridges. Well today I’m talking about real, fake Famicom carts. Wait… what?

What I’m talking about are those Chinese hacked NES games. I found a site that had a huge list of them and some of them look pretty good. Although I’m sure most, if not all, play like crap. Scanning though all these though takes me back to my early NES days, just like looking at those art carts. So of my favorite game memories come from games just like these… well. Not really like these, but from this era of games.

Even though these aren’t “real”, approved games it does look like a decent amount of work was put in to making them. So it makes you wonder, was it better to just whip out a hack or put effort in to making a decent title. Although, there are a lot of just hacking the game and swaping some tiles and sprites to call it a new game.

Anyway, have a look though the list. There are some “fun” NES versions of some titles you wouldn’t really expect. Like Golden Axe, Zelda: Minish Cap, Titanic, Resident Evil… the list goes on and on.

There is crown jewel though. It’s a demake of Final Fantasy VIII.Yup, pretty much the whole story line of that PS classic is in there. How awesome is that? It’s a whole freaking bucket of awesome is what it is. You can find more screens of it here. It looks great too. If this was release as a real NES game back in the day… it would have blown our minds… heck, it blows my mind now.

It makes me want to give my NES a hug ^_^