What if i told you that there was a Super Mario Bros. game for the Sega Genesis, and a Sonic The Hedgehog game for the Super Nintendo. What if I said you could play Mario in Sonic's world, and Sonic in Mario's world. Would you stare in disbelief and shock? Or would you laugh uncontrollably, thinking that something like this wouldn't exist in a million years? Well believe it or not, these games DO exist. They are called "Pirated Games", which in short are pretty much the hacked games of the 1990's but unlike the rom hacks of today, these games were actually sold in stores. That's right... companies that no one ever heard of made games like these just to make a quick buck off of them. For this review, I will discuss 4 Pirated games. Two Mario and two Sonic games.

Game #1: Somari
Everyone knows that old saying "SEGA does what Ninten-dont". Well a company in Hong-Kong tried to counter that by making an 8bit Sonic game called Somari, which is nothing more than Mario in Sonic's world. Now you'd think that converting an 16bit game to 8bit would be difficult, but apparently these guys did a decent job at it, speciallly at the time of it's release... 1994. This was around the same time where Super Mario 3, and Sonic 2 were already released and guess what... Somari uses the Super Mario 3 Mario sprite and can use the Spin Dash attack not invented till Sonic 2. However, that doesn't mean this game is without any flaws. First of all, right off the bat, you'll notice that the music for Green Hill Zone is out of whack. With the exception of the beginning part, the melody lags behind the bass by like 1 beat... AND IT LOOPS FOREVER!!! Don't get me wrong, i love Green Hill Zone's theme music but this sounds like the song got cut up during the conversion process so the Hong Kong company tried to duct-tape the pieces back together. As for the graphics, their pretty much what you would expect for an 8bit game. However the level design looks absolutely like any of the stages from any of the sonic games (oh and no Srap Brain Zone either... wtf?) You know what I find odd though? The Sega Masters System was also an 8bit video game consol but the visuals and sometimes the audio was far superior from the NES. In fact, that's what Somari is... a Nintendo version of the Sega Masters System game Sonic The Hedgehog. Obviously SEGA had the better technology, which is one of the reasons why at the time i loved SEGA, but unfortunately since the Sega Masters System didnt have any popular games aside from the Sonic games, it died out. So yea, how does it play? Eeeeehhhhhhh.... not so good. For one thing, the guys that made this game decided to fill in each act with TWICE as many enemies as the original sonic games, so no matter what, you are always going to get hit by something, so attempting to collect every ring you can find is just a waste of time. And how could you even accomplish that? The controls for this game are crap. It feels "stuck"... like it takes a while before you reach full fast speed (not like in the sonic games where you gradually increase speed, in this game, you stay one slow speed, then SUDDENLY go really fast), and when you do, you can barely see anything comin from the right side of the screen, unless it's too late. So yea, 3 strikes from Hong-Kong. SEGA 1, Nintendo 0.

Game #2: Sonic Jam 6
So if Mario can be in Sonic's world, then why not Sonic in Mario's world? Thats exactly what Sonic Jam 6 is all about. A company in China decided to rip the graphics from the Super Mario Bros. game from Super Mario All Stars on Super Nintendo to port it onto the Sega Genesis, replacing Mario with Sonic. Graphic wise, its not a bad job. Sound wise, it sounds horrible. Let's just say when they did a copy & paste job, they LITERALLY copy and pasted everything, including the MIDI instruments from the Super Nintendo, which actually made the level songs sound worse on the Genesis than on the Super Nintendo. The controls are at times slippery, specially when jumping, you can loose control while changing directions very easily if your not careful. As for Sonic himself, instead of being small and then growing big once he gets a mushroom, these guys decided to make him red and then turn blue when he gets a mushroom. C is to jump, B is to run faster, and A is to shoot fireballs if you got the fire flower. His jumping in this game is 2x as higher than Mario's jump, making high platforms easily reachable at times. So yea if you can overlook the minor flaws, its an ok game.

Game #3: Super Mario World
No I'm not saying that the original Super Mario World for the SNES is an actual pirated game. Believe it or not, there is actually a version of this game for the SEGA Genesis, which is VASTLY different from it's SNES counterpart (aside from being a pirated game). For one thing, you can't jump on enemies, instead you have to pick up boxed to throw at them. Second, the blocks can not be smashed, in fact they act more like solid platforms than anything. Third, instead of coins, your collecting gems. Fourth, you cant go down pipes. And finally, there are no mushrooms, stars, or flowers as power ups. Instead, there are acorns, health boxes, and power fists that lets you shoot a fireball at enemies. Wait a minute though... throwing boxes at enemies, using acorns as power ups... oh snap, its a rip of Capcom's Chip & Dale rescue rangers from Nintendo! Well, not quite. See, the same Taiwan company that made this Mario game made another game before it called "Squirrel King" which is basically an unlicensed genesis version of the Chip & Dale games on Nintendo... and guess what... they decided to RIP THEIR OWN GAME BY TURNING IT INTO A MARIO GAME!! Wow... just... wow. My guess is that they were REALLY bored and had alot of free time on their hands, or they were fuckin retarded and couldn't come up with anything original. Anywho, does it play decent? Acutally, yea. Graphics are almost spot on from the SNES version, the music is MUCH better than Sonic Jam 6, using the Genesis' synthesizer rather then that crappy MIDI copy/paste job from the SNES, and the controls are easy to work with. The Mario levels are a mix between Super Mario Bros. 1 and Super Mario Bros. The Lost Levels. However, the same level 1 music plays for all the super mario levels, even the underground and castle levels. But this only lasts for 3 stages, as we then get to the Squirrel King stages with different music. IRONICALLY both Squirrel King and Super Mario World have the same Donkey Kong song in one of the stages. Weird but cool, lol. Give it a shot for yourself, its another Pirated game i recommend playing.

Game #4: Sonic The Hedgehog 4
Oh fuck, now we are in for some REAL shit. its unkown where this game came from, but it should have been left in the scrap heap. STH4 (A.K.A. Sonic The Hedgehog SNES) is a pirate hack of Speedy Gonzalez: Los Gatos Bandidos, a game released for the same console. But if anything, the game looks more like an unfinished hack job. If you've played the Speedy Gonzalez game, you would know that right off the bat that the first stage of STH4 is broken beyond belief.. well the background anyways. It's mostly red with a shadow of what looks like to be some trees in the distance. Anywho, the object of this game is to run around, rescuing marios as they are trapped in their cages. Each mario rescued counts as a check point. However, just like Super Mario World, touching enemies damage you, so instead you have to KICK them, which half the time the kicks dont make their mark, leaving you open for damage. Sonic's sprite is a mix of Sonic 2 and Sonic 3 from the sega Genesis. His power-ups in this game are... well just speed shoes. His normal running animation is his standard walking animation. And... thats it. Its hard to review more about this game when it locks up once you reach the middle of the 4th level. Incidentally Speedy Gonzalez has that same problem on my emulator in the Space level. Whether or not thats just a bad rom dump is a different story. But yea, Somari is bad, but it doesn't come anywhere close to this game. Stay away from it at all costs.

Hope you've enjoyed this little trip into the world of Pirated games. :-P