You can't say you've never been curious. Whether window shopping or browsing AliExpress: "All-in-one console, plug and play, 100 ORIGINAL games included. Only $9.99!" And of course, it piques your curiosity! You could be missing out on an entire phenomenal catalog of games, just for the price of a couple of coffees. But you've been fooled before and you know these Chinese pirates are selling pure smoke (except when they don't). So the doubt remains. With a hundred original games, if only 10% were good, we'd have a good deal, right? How bad can the pirate games on Chinese consoles be? Bad enough to regret spending a few bucks on them? Well, yes and no, and that's what the YouTube channel "plug & play @ supermulti" is about, which we recommend here (and whose videos accompany this article).
Because it's clear that the Chinese pirates at least try. Most of the games are terrible to be honest, but there's always one that can catch our curiosity. Take for example "Desert Storm", a hack of Contra that appears on many of the all-in-one 8-bit consoles on the market (video below). It's just a clone of "Contra", but with different levels and sprites. And it's not bad at all! At least I wouldn't mind if it fell into my lap. Now, if all games are like the prehistoric elevator one in the video above, well...
"plug & play @ supermulti" is one of the few YouTube channels dedicated to this theme and is well on its way to becoming a showcase of what we can expect if we buy one of these little consoles. With a slow update frequency, on this channel you'll find all kinds of clones and hacks of well-known games. Some so well disguised that they're unrecognizable at first glance, with completely new levels and dense graphical retouching (as in the case of "Desert Storm"). Games that seem to come from a sort of parallel dimension, where the history of video games appears distorted and illogical.
Many of these games are crap, pure laziness (and badly written, to make it worse). But among all that crap, there's always some pink excrement that doesn't smell so bad. "Jurassic Park", for the console "25 in One Super Gun King", is another of those unicorns of manure. It's a light gun game (included with the machine) where you must traverse, in the style of "Operation Wolf", the Jurassic Park of Spielberg's movie. All in a delicious and flickering 8-bit style! I'm not saying it's a masterpiece, but I would have preferred this little gem to the original NES version, which is forgettable. Just look at that T-Rex boss at the end of the first level! A 100% bootleg beast!
And so on with everything. Pure ambivalence. For every one good, twenty bad. That's why the compilation videos from the channel are so good, taking the visitor through each game of the different all-in-one consoles on the market. So you don't get scammed and make an informed purchasing decision. Because not everything is terrible, although it can very well be. The video that follows is one of those compilations (from the "Gamer 36 in 1" console), and an excellent example of "games from the parallel dimension".
"Arkanoid" is called "Diamond" and is a fairly decent remake of the classic. Instead of "Tetris", there's "Coin Tetris", which is like a "Columns" with Japanese currency. "Risker" is "Excitebike" but with a car and without so much dependence on engine temperature. "Sparing" is "Urban Champion" but with animals, in the forest. "Battle City" is now a spaceship game. And so on! Reality completely transformed. Borrowed memories from a child of the parallel dimension. An eerie valley that makes our own memories stand on end.
In short, if, like me, you're interested in the world of pirate video games, "plug & play @ supermulti" is a channel to follow closely, even though it has a lethargic update rate. There you'll find many indescribable treasures, witnesses that the Chinese video game piracy industry is still alive and kicking and still breeding all kinds of amusing aberrations.
