Pirate Games

[gossi the dog]

Don't use the term import or modded.

If your selling a japanese DC game simply state that it's Japanese and will require a Dreamcast system capable of playing Japanese games. It does the trick.

[Salsa Party Animal]

I just stick with European and America/Canada for trading, as it usually work and avoid DVDs and GBAs games on ebay.

I bought a R1 DVD from Malaysia and I asked them if it is a genuine or pirated disc. They say it is genuine. It is not.

[pptradio]

I've bought a few JAP GBA games from Ebay, but only from 'known' HK/JAP sellers with lots of positive feedback, and lots of listed games (not only GBA). They were all genuine copies. But, if you expect a recently published game which has a BIN price of $9.99 to be genuine, it should not be a surprise that it turns out to be a fake or bootleg.

[buster_broon]

But, if you expect a recently published game which has a BIN price of $9.99 to be genuine, it should not be a surprise that it turns out to be a fake or bootleg.

think thats the point

if it had a bin a $9.99 then i wouldnt have bid but all the fake stuff i've ended up getting from ebay has cost ?1-?2 less than the high street price - so you can see why i am annoyed

i will only buy GBA games ebay if it has a picture of the item for sale

anthing with a generic picture desont even get as second look

[ascender]

eBay is very annoying - if you put the wrong word in your auction listing it can get pulled. And because its very hard to get in touch with a real person at eBay to ask why it was pulled, you have to use your common sense. Which, if you get it wrong again, can mean you get your account suspended.

I had a number of auctions suspended on eBay because I declared the region of my Xbox games I was selling and said they would play on a UK machine or an NTSC one which had been made region free. I was therefore advocating chipping your box = piracy.

Very annoying when you consider how many openly fraudulent auctions are going on all the time.

[Lyris]

Yeah ascender, that annoyed the **** out of me. Hong Kong pirates are selling copies of Super Game USA Advance 500 in 1 and meanwhile I'm getting auctions shut down for containing the phrase "This games is PAL, but will work on any machine with a boot disc".

Needless to say, the ones I'd already sold had their buyers emailing me immediately, worried that they'd bought pirates because of eBay's automatic "Violation" message.

[Magnakai]

Bah, I thought this thread was going to be about games featuring pirates. *sulks*

[Halo]

Listing DC games - don't call them imports, call them NTSC games. They don't seem to get pulled then.

[tokyochojin]

I remember back when pokemon yellow had just been released in the U.S, bought a copy from project K ( i think it was called) when it arrived, i thought the box looked kind of old and pale.
Mind you this was about 6 years ago, i was young and didn't realise as it had an instruction booklet and the game looked ok(apart from the "nintendo seal of quality missing, and no nintendo print in the 'finger, groove?').
But yeah later i realised i had been done, although the cart worked perfectly

p.s i remember when getting an SP from Gamestation, they tried to sell me a "preowned, german" version of Wario Ware but as it was only 6 quid more i went for the UK released.
The wario ware was just like the pokemon box i described above.

[superstarbeejay]

I remember back when pokemon yellow had just been released in the U.S, bought a copy from project K ( i think it was called) when it arrived, i thought the box looked kind of old and pale.
Mind you this was about 6 years ago, i was young and didn't realise as it had an instruction booklet and the game looked ok(apart from the "nintendo seal of quality missing, and no nintendo print in the 'finger, groove?').
But yeah later i realised i had been done, although the cart worked perfectly

p.s i remember when getting an SP from Gamestation, they tried to sell me a "preowned, german" version of Wario Ware but as it was only 6 quid more i went for the UK released.
The wario ware was just like the pokemon box i described above.

This follows on perfectly to what I was going to say. I am now dubious of ANY pre-owned GBA game. Even some of those sold in places like GS, cash generator and even GAME are fakes.

The sad thing is that there are genuine sellers out there who are getting swamped by the fakes. I bought a genuine mint PAL copy of superstar saga about 2 months after release for ?11 on ebay. If the pirates weren't around that game would have fetched ?20

[djjimbob]

Bloody hell - just had a look on ebay for the word minsh - and Duddy's right - it is full of fakes.

That's really quite saddening and also frustrating for those people who want to buy legit copies from eBay.

[Bobontheway]

Try fidning a legit game in HK, it's virtually impossible. The differences are in the quality of the copies. At the midnight market they're all the 50 in 1 carts.

Erm that's not actually correct. At the midnight market it's kind of a no-brainer that you'll find pirated games considering almost 75% of the items there are pirated (All of those CK and Armani stuff they sell isn't actually real you know).
Yes, piracy is ridiculously high over here in HK but that doesn't mean it's virtually impossible to find legit games. They are everywhere; there are 3 stores near my flat that stock nothing but official games and of course there is Sham Shui Po. Sham Shui Po has literally hundreds of stores selling official games / peripherals. The problem is that there is such a large amount of piracy in hong kong that it's hard to not find a pirated game stall when exploring the local markets. Oh yeah and you can also go into Toys'r'us if you want.

At the posh shopping malls they're the badly printed card box variety, which from a distance look like the real thing. Piracy is everywhere in HK.

Now this is just plain wrong. By "Posh Shopping Malls" you must be referring to the individually owned game stores that just so happen to be in large buildings. These places aren't "posh" and these kind of shops aren't that common. It is normally an empty store area that has been occupied by the pirated game sellers. They place copies of the cover art all over the walls and keep all the games near by. All you do is go up and ask them for a game then they tell you to come back in 30 or so minutes to pick it up. The whole process feels very dodgy and usually the games do not work/have parts missing/skip/are not what they say they are. One of my chinese friends has a ridiculous amount of pirated games in his flat but the majority of them aren't even worth touching.

Anywa to sum it all up.
Piracy is a big problem in HK but it's still unbelievably easy to find any official game you want from almost any region.
*hugs his Taiko no Tetsujin and drum*