5 Really Weird Clone Video Game Consoles
5 Really Weird Clone Video Game Consoles
The world of bootlegs and knockoffs is a wild one.
The world of bootlegs and knockoffs is a wild one.
The Phantom is a glorious piece of madness in plastic form. This Brazilian console was seemingly designed after a group of engineers got drunk and flipped through the Toys R' Us holiday gift catalog.
This clone console was a famicom stuffed into the shell of an Atari 7800, uses Sega Genesis controllers, a Master System light phaser, and played games from NES carts. It's incredibly weird, but the all black everything aesthetic is pretty pleasing to the eye.
The Gradiente Phantom System was so popular in Brazil it even got a pretty impressive television commercial that was far cooler that the legit commercials we got in the United States
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The Milmar Top System 2 is an NES clone that saw life in Brazil, a huge market for clone systems thanks to strict import laws. This console wasn't as popular as the Phantom and information is scarce, but what we do have is pretty interesting.
The console featured a dual-slot design that allowed both Famicom and NES games to be played without the need for any fancy adapters. But what made this one strange wasn't the console but the company behind it.
Milmar is best known in Brazil as being makers of jet skis and various types of watercraft. Not sure what their reasoning was for getting into the NES clone market but the 90s weird pretty wild time.
So, it's the early 90's and you really want a new video game console for Christmas. All your grandparents have to got with is an Argos catalog and their own wits to figure out their way through the gaming section.
Chances are most kids got exactly what they wanted, but there must have been a small percentage that ended up the the TV Boy handheld console. And by handheld we mean it all fit in your hand, but you still needed a screen to play.
The TV Boy itself was simply an unlicensed Atari 2600 crammed into an oblong piece of plastic. It featured 128 games with their copyright notices removed, because that's totally how copyright laws work.
We've focus on vintage clone consoles from places where the traditional consoles didn't make a huge dent for one reason or another. But that isn't to say that clone consoles are a thing of the past. Case in point: the WiWi.
The Nintendo Wii was a monster of a console and with that came a plethora of clone system trying to take advantage of the motion waggle technology. Problem was that the motion controls they used weren't actually motion controls.
The WiWi simply took really bad 2D games and added a bit of waggle to the affair. There wasn't much control and shaking the flimsy WiiMote-like controller simply simulated the press of a button on a regular controller. Also, the WiWi sounds like pee pee.
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Probably the strangest console on this list is the Treamcast. This Dream cast clone came from China but isn't a clone in the traditional sense. Rather, this one is a heavily modified Dreamcast console sold as it's own thing.
The Treamcast gained notoriety for its custom shell and portable nature thanks to the built-in fold-down display. This thing ran its own pirated firmware that allowed it to play all international games.
It could play CD-Rs discs and play both MP3 handle Video CDs, a very popular and low-cost video format in Asia that only recently halted production. Because the Treamcast was so close to the Dreamcast, Sega sued the company and managed to get sales halted online.