It’s a Fake!
Have you ever bought an item on auction thinking you where getting the genuine item only to find out that it was counterfeit? I have. I remember looking for Mega Man Zero 1, 2 and 3 for GameBoy Advance back in the early 2000’s. I found an auction for the games on Ebay and so I bid… and won. I was so happy to finally get them, but I did find them to be a bit strange. The colour of the cartridges to be a darker grey and they fit slightly more snug then a normal cart. A few weeks later I was mentioning this to my wife and she noticed the it said “Nintondo” on the back of it. I was floored. I couldn’t believe I had been taken so easily. Mind you the games worked fine… mostly. Years later I discovered I couldn’t save a game past the second slot. I learned my lesson on buying games of Ebay with that purchase. Although I do wonder why they didn’t just put Nintendo on the back of the game. They where all ready ripping them off so they might as well go the extra distance to make it a “perfect” fake.
We’ve discovered other fake things off Ebay in the past few years. We’ve recently bought bootleg Disney pins and movies too without realizing it until it’s too late. Although now we notify Ebay and get our money back when we can. Although now we buy artisan crafts and things you can’t really counterfeit. That or we just stay away from on-line auctions in general.
Does it bother you to have a fake version of something or are you just as happy with it as long as it works properly?
Play Asia
September 15th, 2012 at 11:59 pm
Yeah, I’ve had a similar experience with Ebay…I’ll admit the “Nintondo” label is pretty funny, though.
September 16th, 2012 at 12:34 am
well, if i were to say, get an awesome deal for an NES or something, but it wasnt a real NES, but still worked and played actual games from the NES, i would still be happy with it. especially if it was cheaper than an actual one. for instance, i just bought an Atari Flashback 3. it isnt actually an atari, but it sort of looks like one, and has 60 games installed on it. and it was only 32 bucks at walmart.
September 16th, 2012 at 3:47 am
The only knockoffs that I’ve really come across has been some anime dvd’s that had Japanese audio and Chinese/Engrish subtitles. Well, perhaps Engrish is a bit too generous, as it was even worse than the usual mangle you’d get out of google translate.
September 16th, 2012 at 5:50 am
my pedegg, I tried buying one off ebay as I can’t seem to find it here 🙁 (forgot mine when I moved) But it turned out to be a fake. now I wonder if all the bad reviewers who say the pedegg doesn’t work got a fake. ah well, I’m working on getting a real one.
September 16th, 2012 at 1:52 pm
I principally don´t buy stuff on ebay. If I buy something online, I buy it “new”, mostly on Amazon. So far, I never had any complaints about the stuff I bought; here´s hoping it stays like this.
September 21st, 2012 at 6:02 pm
I once bought a DS game from eBay that worked fine in all respects except when I tried to put it into sleep mode, the system would rapidly go in and out of sleep mode endlessly, which is actually quite noisy because of the distinctive “clicking” sound effect the system makes when the system goes to sleep.
I guess I don’t regret the purchase, it was impossible to find anywhere else, but it annoys me that the money went to pirates instead of the people who made the game. It’s why I don’t feel bad about pirating older games if I can’t find a place to buy them anymore; at that point it makes no actual difference to anyone except to the pirates who are marketing their copies as originals.
And I always buy new copies once a game has my interest; I don’t intentionally wait until the game goes out of print so I can justify pirating it.