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.

[Ed Oscuro]

Battle Mania 1

These pictures were taken as I'm selling the left one (incidentally, good luck finding an eBay seller who'd own up to having a copy like this; if you ignore the printing it's clearly "Very Good!" ). The inferior copy is on the left (it has a white stick-it type note on the back). Now, you can't really see it even in the big pictures, but the GREEN printing on the left copy along the spine is slightly lighter, but the red is actually deeper (you can see that even in the thumbnail). Dunno what the heck is going on there. It's not sunfading.

You need to open the big picture to see it, but if you look at the words BATTLE MANIA here you'll notice it's red with a black border. On the left copy, there is a very, very slight gap between the top of the red and the top black border (the camera could barely pick it out) which shows up as a razor-thin white line in person. In the right copy it seems perfectly aligned.


Back cover of the games, same as before (keeper copy on right).


Comparison of the games' manual fronts and the back of the cartridge - keeper copy of game and manual on bottom.


Flipped - you see what I mean about the back covers of the Japanese manuals showing wear strongly. The bottom one doesn't have any wear along it, but little bends still show up with a vengeance. The print collects fingerprints too.


Another condition comparison. Keeper on the bottom.

Battle Mania manual misprint madness!


Okay, this might interest a few people - look at that manual misprint! I flipped the order of the two copies here, but the bottom manual goes with the worse copy. Blurry.


You need to look at the larger pictures to see the difference, I think, but it's not amazing. Strangely, I think the blur effect doesn't hurt the face of the blue girl. It doesn't do wonders for the rest of the image though.

[Ed Oscuro]

A raft of crappy pirates
...and then we're outta here!


Super Monaco GP might have had the flyer put in backwards, because the cartridge is held along the FRONT cover, instead of the back as usual in Mega Drive and Genesis cases. Probably just a simple foul-up. Nothing great to look at though, and Super Hang-On's printing is worse than the Samsung and Battle Mania 1 misprints combined.


Arnold Palmer's golf is incredible; the cartridge inside is a Japanese-style Mega Drive one but look at the case - looks like a US Genesis cover except with the words Sega Genesis covered over. I'm not sure if SuperReal Basketbarf is sunfaded or if that's the fault of the pirates - I guess it doesn't make much difference though; even though the artwork is technically competent this would've been an ugly cover even in its original form.


High Quality! Incidentally, the cases themselves show a lot of variation; one has ridges along the center of the clasp area for easier opening, and all of them seem to have different patterned plastic.

I didn't picture it here, but the cartridges are obviously fakes and the giveaways are the labels. One of them has a square label stuck carelessly into a slot with rounded edges (so the very corners stick over the edge). Many have a poorly printed back. They all kind of obviously suck.


Back covers #1.


That's all.

[Policenaut]

Amazing stuff, I've been looking for some Korean SMS stuff and a Gam*boy.

[Ed Oscuro]

I should have mentioned that some years ago I was looking at buying a Samsung game from Omar Cornut - I have no idea what genre it was, but it certainly didn't look as bad (cover-wise) as this. I ultimately couldn't justify it because I didn't know if it'd be any good and I had other things to buy instead. I should chat him up about this.

[blue lander]

I picked up a Korean Samsung version of Sonic and Knuckles yesterday. The label's really blurry too. When you power it up, it appears to be the Americans version...

[Ed Oscuro]

Hmm, I'll have to check out what BM2 loads up as (yeah...haven't loaded it up yet, rolf)!

And for the sake of keeping both threads current, here's a comment from the Shmups Forum version:

[...] Trying to think of what other Samsung/korean versions I've seen knocking around. There's definitely a Samsung Eliminate Down...but I definitely saw one recently I hadn't seen before. Gleylancer, maybe? Was definitely a shooter...