10 Strange and Hilarious Bootleg Video Games

Through the wonders of legally-ambiguous ROMs and lots and lots of spare time, we have some of these baffling, bizarre, and sometimes downright impressive bootlegs. Check out Adventures in Poor Taste for the other five.

• 1. Sonic the Hedgehog 4 - SNES

  

  Sonic 4 proper actually came out in October 2010, following a sixteen year hiatus after 1994's Sonic 3. Apparently the man who patchworked together this amalgamated Frankenstein of a video game simply couldn't wait that long. Sonic 4 - well, this strange, alternate version of it anyway - is basically the game Speedy Gonzales: Los Gatos Banditos with Sonic sprites haphazardly pasted all over it. And instead of rescuing fellow rodent compatriots, as Speedy does in the actual game, Sonic for some reason rescues Mario from human-sized bird cages.

• 2. Super Mario World 64 - Sega Genesis

  

  Ever wish you could play Super Mario 64, but without any of the pesky deterrents, like the lush 3D environments, the freedom, the engaging story and fluid controls? Well, thanks to whatever sadist cobbled together this mess of a hack, you can! Super Mario World 64, despite being modeled after an SNES game and named after a Nintendo 64 game, puzzlingly calls the Sega Genesis its home. You can tell that much by the soundtrack comprised entirely of songs inexplicably jacked from the Genesis games Tale Spin and Jeopardy!. I'll take "Miserable Heaps of Garbage" for $200, Alex.

• 3. Puckman Pockimon - Arcade

  

  Puckman Pockimon is a Pacman clone. Its title comes from horrendously butchered versions of "Pac-Man" and "Pokemon" (although if Scott Pilgrim vs. the World taught me one thing, it's that Pac-Man's original name was Puckman. That and Aubrey Plaza is really, really hot). The selling point, and apparently the trump card developer Genie 2000 is hoping will entice you to play Puckman Pockimon instead of a fully functioning, non-pirated game is that in addition to a genericized Pac-Man, you can also play as an unnerving, floating, disembodied Pikachu head.

• 4. Street Figiter II Pro - Famicom (NES)

  

  Rounding up the "Best Examples of Engrish" category for these pirated games comes the venerated "Street Figiter II Pro", presumably an alternate universe in which the Street Fighter guys are overactive, ADD-addled figiters, fighting over the last bottle of Ritalin. Here you can play as "Zangiff", and represent the stars and stripes of the good ole' "USSA".

• 5. Final Fantasy VII - Famicom (NES)

  

  Developed and published in 2005 by the vaunted team ShenZhen Nanjing Technology, this game is actually supposed to be, well, pretty fucking awesome.
  Let's take a look at what some reviewers have said about it: Our friends at Kotaku described it as "...an achievement I have no hesitation in labeling Herculean", even going so far as to label the game "a triumph of the human spirit". Holy shit!
  Surely Kotaku editor Luke Plunkett has some strange fetishists' hard-on for Chinese bootlegs. There's no way this third-rate knockoff can be that good, can it? Let's get a second opinion. The late GamePro team had the following to say: "[Final Fantasy VII for NES is] the video game equivalent of the Human Genome Project." ...Umm, WHAT?!