Pirated Famicom carts – Super Mario IV 4 Armadillo & Caveman Games

I’ve never been into Pirated games, but the other day I found these quite cheap and I was in a Famicom-cartridge-shop-a-holic state of mind and they just happened to slip into my possession thanks to my itchy auction-bidding-index-finger ^^

The name of the first game intrigued me, so I googled it. Super Mario IV (4) Armadillo is actually the Armadillo (アルマジロ) game for Famicom that has just been hacked to contain Super Mario as the main character instead. It’s basically the same game, I suggest getting Armadillo instead, the cartridge is prettier ^_^

The original Armadillo cartridge looks like this:

And this is what the pirated fusion of Armadillo with Super Mario Bros 3 looks like compared to the original (the original is on the left):


Mario cannot kill enemies by jumping on them, he has to transform into a ball like in the Armadillo game.

When you turn into a ball to kill enemies it’s basically exactly the same game.


They haven’t even bothered to change the life icon from Armadillo’s head to Mario’s..


Caveman games was released for NES with the same name. It’s a fun sports mini games type of game set in the stone age with cavemen. You can choose different characters and different game types.

They have some really funny competitions like Mate Tossing:

Or Clubbing:

Dino Race:

And various other sports:

Caveman Games is a fun game IF you have a friend to play and laugh with.