Here is 1998 SUPER HIK 4 in 1 12M, a typically atypical pirate multicart from the ever-strange Famicom land of Hong Kong. The Chinese characters look a little strange in the scan because they're reflective gold in color! This differs from the other multis shown on this page in a few ways. For one, it's really well made; the cart is surprisingly light and the board doesn't rattle in the cart case (like some of my non-pirate Fami games do). Excusing the weird English spelling in the games, it's not so bad. Now, let's take a look inside the cart... 1. Draggon Ballz 2 This is actually an Asian original port of the Super Famicom fighting game Dragon Ball Z Super Butoden, featuring characters from the anime that lived up to its name by dragging on forever. The movements of the characters are a little jagged, but the graphics are impressive (featuring parallax scrolling) and it's all in all a decent port of a game that wasn't all that good on the SFC anyway.

2. Stereet Fighter III Turbo 56 Peoples Although this is more or less the same SF2 original pirate production that's been shown on other people's web pages, there are a couple of very strange quirks to this one - this is probably the first case of a pirate company pirating another pirate company's games... The game itself is surprisingly good; if released here, it probaly would have done pretty well. It's definitely better than anything Tengen or Color Dreams made for the NES. All the backgrounds and characters from the original SF2 are here, as far as I can tell. Flicker is almost nonexistant (except when a character dies and his body spreads out horizontally) and the game moves along at a pretty fast clip. The graphics are about as good as they'll get for a NES port of SF2, but the music is pretty clunky - the only low point in an otherwise solid production.

Here are your "56" characters. Notice that there're about six Vegas, six Chun Lis, five Blankas... and two Marios.	Guile takes on Vega. The cheering pilots are missing; they probably used all of the video ram for that airplane.
Ken vs. Chun Li	Chun Li loses against M.Bison

Now we come to the strangest addition to the game, and the one that makes me think that this game was pirated by this HK company from another HK company. You can play as Mario in this game! I swear upon my mom and my Famicom that I did not make these pictures up. These HK guys borrowed the Mario sprite from SMB3, stretched it, and made it into a (really, really badly animated) street fighter! When you beat someone as Mario, you even jump up and down a couple of times! It's totally amazing, and it led me to thinking: If I made a version of SF2 that was fun to play and reasonably well-made, why would I possibly want to throw in a shoehorned Mario sprite to the game?

Chun Li somehow finds it within herself to beat on Mario

Mario's amazing "stick arms out" attack downs Chun Li

3. Morio & Sonik 2 Bet you were excited when you saw this title, right? Well, I'm sorry to disappoint you, but this's actually nothing but Chip to Dale no Daisakusen 2 (the Famicom version of Rescue Rangers 2) with the sprites changed. The above shot is the menu you get when you start the game, allowing you to pick what characters you want. Mario is again lifted from SMB3, but a badly-drawn Sonic has also been put in. I don't know about you but I'd much rather play as Sonic in SF2 than freakin' Mario! Below is the title screen proper. Check it out, we're actually playing Disney's Hi 'n Al Rescue Rangers Daisakusen 2. Yippee, eh? 4. Revolution Heroes The only name they spelled right, but it's nothing but a pirate of the Japanese version of Guerrilla War, so I didn't bother with screenshots. An interesting side note - the game in Japan is called Guevara! The plot is very specific about you, as Che (and a second player as Fidel Castro, if you can find one) overthrowing the Batista rule of 1956. I suppose I can see why SNK decided to make the plot a little more generic for American release. Now you know why that portrait at the beginning of the game looked so familiar..

Pix: |tsr Back to the odd page.