Bootleg DS Carts making their way to eBay
Published June 14th, 2006 in Gaming, Internet, Noteworthy, Technology
It has been spotted by a number of people that piraters (is that even a word?) have been making bootleg copies of DS games. 4 color rebellion has some photos and pictures to illustrate how you can recognise these fakes and avoid paying a bunch for fake and malfunctioning carts. They make a few main points:
- Miss-aligned label placement - A lot of fake carts have labels that are not properly aligned with the sides of the cart and shoddy build quality. Some look like they’ve been printed by inkjet printers with no glossy finish.
- Incorrect labels - Some carts have labels which may look real but the images on them are not the ones they have on real carts.
- Back contacts - The contacts on the reverse of the cart should be gold (used for better connections) but on most fake carts there are black contacts showing rubbish build quality.
- Proper logo’s - Real carts should have the Nintendo logo slighly recessed and more ’subtle’. The logo should also be higher than the centre of the cart.
Use these tips to help you steer away from fake copies of DS games, and if possible report them to eBay or others so that a catalogue of some sort can be made of perpetrators. I would also be weary of buying things like these on eBay. A good general rule is; if it looks to cheap to be real, it probably isn’t. Also, if there are no real photos of the actual product, and just some press images and details copied from the original website, it probably isn’t legit.
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I’m not convinced about how legitimate these photos are, I have seen the same photos on about 20 websites but I just returned from a shopping tour of the usual places, Bangkok, Kuala Lumpur, Homg Kong and Guangzhou and I have yet to see a single DS copy that looks anything like these..they are ALL in GBA carts, though many have convincing boxes and packaging it’s the GBA style cart that gives it away. I spent ages looking for copies like the ones shown, they just dont exist.
Andy