I’ve never been very interested in collecting pirated games for any of my retro consoles. I have always preferred original games, however lately I’ve accidentally come by a few pirated Famciom games. Like the Super Mario IV Armadillo hack, which is basically just the Armadillo game changed to have Mario as the main character, and Caveman Games, which is a NES release ported on a cart for the Famicom.
I know there’s a lot of people that prefer pursuing those rare pirated games, and lately I’ve begun to understand why that is. It’s quite charming, it’s a game just like all the other games I’m collecting, and somebody made it, made an effort to re-code an existing game to their liking, and it’s always intriguing since you never know what to expect form a pirate game. The pirated games are more rare as well, and usually unique, since they weren’t mass produced like many other original releases.
The Last Ninja was a game I saw on Ebay and it intrigued me since I wasn’t completely sure which game it was and also, my best friend NinjaBrite loves Ninjas! So I bought it hoping that she would enjoy trying it ^_^
So I cleaned the game up a bit and tried it briefly to make sure it worked and it worked perfectly on the first try ^_^ I looked it up as well and found out that The Last Ninja was actually released for the NES by Jaleco however the game was also firstly released on the Commodore 64 but it was called The Last Ninja 2.
I compared some screenshots from this version and the version on C64. It is lacking a lot of the details from the C64 version. Here’s the comparison of sceneries: (click to enlarge)
If only the C64 didn’t have such darn long loading sequences then I would probably be playing that more often than the 8bit systems! >_<
Retro Video Gaming 
Ninjas! <3 Jag vill testa nästa gång vi ses! ^^
jaaaa! :D synd att du inte kan nästa helg :( :(
Oh my god, this was game of the year!
haha yes it was! At least the label says so, and the original NES box said so too, but it doesn’t say who delivered the award… o_O
There are some really good pirates out there, but also a ton of terrible ones.
I liked the NES port of Super Mario World, and the folks that did FF7 and FF4 ported to the Famicom, while certainly far from perfect, at least made an effort at porting some great RPGs back to the Famicom. So, stuff like that, and the Zelda A Link to the Past port, all make for great conversation pieces and collector’s items. :)
I really would like to have the Super Mario World one ^_^ I don’t really care for RPG’s though ;D but I will definitely continue to explore the pirate world :D
The Zelda one that was a port of the SNES game was actually pretty good, except for the very bad music, LOL. :P
The Mario World one you can probably get on TaoBao (that’s where I get most of my unlicensed games), but it’d take you a long while to sort through all the stuff on there.
I got Mario World for the Genesis there some time back. :)
too bad that the music is the only thing I enjoy with the Zelda games ;D
I’m not sure I found the right webpage for TaoBao but I searched for “Games” and for “Famicom” but it didn’t find anything at all.. =(
TaoBao is a Chinese auction site – what I do is I translate search terms like Famicom or NES or whatever into chinese and run it through there to see what comes up. Usually there will be tens of thousands of results!
Jag är som du att jag inte gillar att samla piratgrejer egentligen….men man har ju börjat tänka…Har jag förstått det rätt om jag säger att du är mer en SEGA-spelare än Nintendo?? Men att du hellre samlar på Nintendo? Får jag fråga om din bakgrund som spelare? :)