Those of you who know me may be aware of the fact that my brother is something of a connoisseur of vintage video game consoles. At any given time, he has no less than nine systems hooked into his television (the Magnavox Odyssey, the Atari 5200 with 2600 adapter, the Colecovision, the Nintendo Entertainment System, the Super Nintendo Entertainment System, the Sega Genesis/CD/32X, the Nintendo 64, the Dreamcast, the PlayStation 2). In the past two weeks, he’s added several new devices to the mix. First was the Atari Jaguar (with CD attachment), purchased from eBay. Yesterday, he and I trekked out to the nearest CD/game exchange, armed with a variety of duplicate games he’d picked up as part of lot auctions (fun fact: did you know that it’s scientifically impossible to get any Atari 2600 games on eBay without also getting another copy of Yar’s Revenge?) and a couple of truly horrendous anime DVDs I should have sold years ago (Battle Athletes, I’m looking at you…). By the time we left, he was accompanied by a Xbox 360 and an “FC Game Console.”
It seems that the market for hardware clones of old Nintendo consoles produced by Chinese manufacturers with questionable quality control practices has been blown wide open by recent legal developments. Nintendo Entertainment System hardware clones, once restricted to shady international websites, flea markets, and the backs of particularly unsavory trucks, have apparently been found legal to sell in the United States, and moved into the big-time, high stakes world of used media exchanges. This particular exchange was selling two such knockoffs, both produced by a company called Yobo Gameware. The first was a pretty straightforward NES knockoff called the FC Game Console, a top loading, card-slot reader system that uses standard NES controllers. The second was a more ambitious effort called the FC Twin, which boasts support for both NES and Super NES cartridges. My brother and I opted for the vanilla FC Game Console because the FC Twin only featured SNES controller ports, and we couldn’t accept buying a system that didn’t support such must-have accessories like the Zapper, the NES Advantage, or the Power Pad.
My first observation about this thing is that the cartridge slot is really rather poorly designed. It’s simple enough to insert a cartridge, but getting the damned thing out again is exhausting. My second observation is that the controllers packaged with the system are actually quite nice. The overall form factor is roughly the same as a SNES pad, and the standard Dpad/start/select/A/B buttons have been augmented by a slow motion feature and two turbo buttons. It’s not quite as fancy as a NES Max, but for a $30 knockoff, it’s not bad at all. The system connects to the TV with mono RCA cables, and the picture quality is superb. The sound is a bit off in places, though: my brother specifically noticed some of the samples from Mike Tyson’s Punch Out!! sounded wrong. Even so, it’s not like it sounds awful.
To be sure, we already had a working NES. My brother even has the redesigned, top-loading NES that Nintendo released in 1994 or so to deal with the fact that the original front-loading, “toaster”-style units were badly designed pieces of crap. It’s a nice system, but it has problems. The biggest of these is poor picture quality: there’s no composite video output, so the only way to hook the thing up is through coaxial RF output. Which is bad enough, except that I swear there’s some kind of magnetic/electrical shielding problem that increases the amount of signal noise. Or whatever. I’m no A/V expert, I just know that the system produces poor quality video. It has other problems, as well, which are of particular interest to a piss-poor gamer like myself: it doesn’t support the Game Genie. Yes, there are adapters floating out there which allow you to use the device, since the problem is purely mechanical (the thing physically won’t fit into the deck), but the draw of a system that would address both the graphical quality issues and the Game Genie issue for only $30 was too much to pass up.
As it happens, the FC Game Console addresses both of the above issues admirably. It supports the Game Genie, and it looks damned good doing it. Unfortunately, it introduces some other flaws. Compatibility, while certainly not awful, is less than 100%, and some of the holes are significant: it won’t play Castlevania III at all. It will play The Legend of Zelda, but apparently exhibits some significant graphical glitches while doing so. It appears, despite horror stories to the contrary, to have no problems with Super Mario Bros. 2, but that’s apparently dumb luck, as I’ve seen numerous forum postings saying that it does not.
So the console currently sits alongside my brother’s official NES, rather than replacing it as originally intended. For the vast majority of games, it works flawlessly and really is preferable to the officially released system. But the shortcomings are unfortunate. My brother has already started talking about getting a refurbished toaster-style NES from Nintendo Repair Shop, Inc. Does anyone have any experience with these? Do they effectively deal with the gray screen/blinking light problems faced by the system?
That’s all for now. I’ll be back in a bit with comments on the Xbox 360, once I’ve actually gotten the thing up and running properly….
