Roll of the Dice

The monsoon season has finally arrived. Sweet, life-giving, road-flooding water at last! That ought to cool things down for a couple days at least. Hopefully we won't be seeing any more week and a half stretches of 103 degree weather, either. I find it harder to update this blog when I'm in a liquid state.

Anyway! I was bitten by the frivolous spending bug this week and picked up a Super NES Classic from ShopGoodwill for a reasonable price (along with ShopGoodwill's less reasonable shipping costs). I have so many of these miniature game systems that it just felt wrong to not add one of Nintendo's to the pile, but I wanted to wait until the price was right.

Unfortunately, I discovered shortly after my purchase that the Super NES Classic is a frequent target of counterfeiters, and that they've upped their forgery game considerably in the days since the system was first released. This is how a phony Super NES Classic used to look when the real machine hit stores:

image from Amazon

There are all kinds of tip-offs that this is a bootleg, from the lack of official Nintendo branding to the completely redesigned box to the 9-pin D-shell connectors on the front of the system. The "Super Mini" proudly declares that it has 821 games, but I'm convinced that at least forty-nine of those are slightly altered versions of Hudson's Adventure Island.

The manufacturers of these fake Super NES Classics have gotten a lot craftier, though. Newer systems use the Nintendo logo, the Wii compatible controller ports, and even have the same FCC warnings stamped on the underside. Only the most subtle of hints reveal the ruse... an oddly shaped HDMI cable here, an incorrect serial number there, a lack of bumps near the controller ports indicating which one is player one and which is player two. It becomes much more obvious that it's an imposter when you turn it on and try to play the games, but by then, it's already too late. Bye bye hard earned money, hello paperweight.

Careful examination of the device ShopGoodwill was selling could have revealed any chicanery, but not when the seller was coughing up pictures like these...

I may need to get a refund on this system, but whoever was taking these pictures definitely needs to get a refund on their camera. Yikes.

Anyway. There were a lot of vague and even contradictory information in the pictures shown in the listing. The bumps on the controller ports are impossible to see from the angles the pictures were taken. The connectors on the ends of the controllers seem to be a dark gray, a tip-off of the system's authenticity, but it's hard to tell when the snapshots were taken with a Fisher-Price camera with Vaseline smeared on the lens. The included HDMI cable doesn't look anything like the ones packaged with a real Super NES Classic, but it could have just been lifted from a DVD player or some other old doodad, since the system in the listing didn't come with the original box or any AC adapter at all. 

My best hope lies with the serial number label, which has the proper UPC code and uses the SU prefix followed by nine digits. That could be faked too, but even the good bootlegs tend to be way off base here, using an incorrect font and the CU prefix from the older NES Classic. 

There's a chance this system could be the real deal, but I guess I won't know that for sure until it arrives and I'm able to test it. Best case scenario? I've got an easy way to play Super NES games on a big screen, without having to dig out my long-neglected Raspberry Pi. Worst case scenario? I've got another useless device to add to my bulging junk drawer. Cross your fingers for me... I could use the luck.