Mega Drive: Korean Samsung, misprints, pirates, oh my! (56K warning)

[Ed Oscuro]

I created a thread in Collector Guides about my recent acquisition of a crazy Korean Mega Drive version of Battle Mania 2 (BM2). About a week ago (sheesh, has it been that long already?) I had reason to take some pictures of the first games in the Battle Mania series, so I pulled out BM2 to take some pictures. I also pulled out some PIRATES, OMG that I was sent years ago as freebies (I hope) for another purchase.

The original pictures are HUGE and top out around 7MB in size, and will be many times the size of your monitor when zoomed-in. Didn't feel like spending tons of time editing them down. I used ImageShack for convenience; unfortunately, they're far too small to be usable. Here is the link to the Imageshack gallery. So, if you want to follow along properly you will have to also download this ~147MB file: LINK OF DOOM

Battle Mania 2: Korean vs. Japanese


Korean on the left. Now you can see the whole car. Great, right? WRONG! The cover image is so fuzzy it's embarrassing.


Game box spines (Korean on the left). The nicest-looking part of the Samsung box.


Back covers. The Korean box has photographs of the Japanese box's screenshots, but they're cropped badly and parts of the same screenshots may be out of focus...this is probably the worst screenshot job on a game box I've seen yet.


Tops of the game boxes. Samsung on top w/ yellow sticker. You can tell from the small ImageShack version about as well as the bigger one that the texture isn't as nicely done (look at the top left, immediately left of the sticker). It's more obvious in person.


Korean manual front and cartridge back.


Original Japanese manual front and cartridge back.


Korean again.


Japanese again. The solid purple back on the JPN covers (both games in the series) show wear too easily. It's still a cut above the chintzy Samsung version though. Incidentally, the Samsung version's paper feels slightly rougher - it's not as glossy and slick.


This wasn't really staged! That side of the card was like that. I'm not sure I want to know how it got stained like that (there's no problem in the manual) but it fits the character too well.

Here's the front side of the warranty card:

Tengen! I was surprised by this. Tengen released V-Five, Gauntlet IV (which was developed by Sega) and some other stuff, but I thought it tended to be Sega programmed. Vic Tokai did the programming themselves. A bit surprising to think that Tengen would've had an extensive distribution and service network in Japan.

Post continued below: Ten image limit.