It is pretty hard not to have pretty low expectations going into this game. After all, this is a "port" of the classic game Diablo for the Nintendo Entertainment System by Chinese bootleggers. While they can occasionally produce some absolutely stunning results in the field of "demaking", quality is not exactly something that Chinese bootleg games are most well known for. Fortunately, Chinese Diablo manages not to disappoint. Unfortunately, it is in its low level of quality that it meets expectations. This game is not just bad, but outright painful. That said, it is a somewhat hilarious kind of bad. I can honestly recommend that this game should be played at least once by anyone, just to see for themselves how fantastically terrible a port it is.

Let us begin with the graphics. As you would expect from just about any Chinese knock-off game, you will not be finding many, if indeed any, original sprites here. Castlevania seems to have been a primary source to "borrow" from in the graphics department, at least where enemy graphics are concerned. From the looks of it, newer Castlevania games at that, with the colour pallet simplified to work with the limitations of the Nintendo Famicom and its eight-bit graphics. Two of the "Final Guard" style enemies flank the title screen, and a Witch enemy was my most common random encounter - because, yes, it has random encounters. I will have more to say about that aspect later on. There was also a Bluer enemy...at least, I think that was what it was. It can be a little hard to tell with the simplified graphics, which lack detail. Other aspects, such as the character, look very obviously like they came from a different and again, newer, game entirely, given a monochrome pallet to work on an eight-bit colour system. The main character's walking sprite is downright spastic, and everything else looks like it might have come straight out of Dragon Quest/Warrior, or some other early role playing game for the Famicom. The gameplay most certainly did.

So, yes, that at last brings us to the meat of this game - its gameplay. The first thing that is obvious is that it in no way resembles Diablo. At all. Period. Perhaps this is due to laziness on the part of the bootleggers, or maybe they just knew their audience had a love for the role-playing genre, maybe the style of the classic Diablo was simply too hard for them to reproduce. Whatever the case, the fact remains that this Diablo is no hack-and-slash, but rather a turn-based RPG. Do not let the style of this game fool you, though. Just because it plays like a role playing game does not mean that you will be getting such luxuries as a party of diverse characters, a wealth of weapons and armour with shops to spend your hard-earned gold at, or a diverse array of spells. From what I played, the party consists of just you, completely without equipment if you forgot to put it on, because of course you start the game with nothing equipped. The town you start in has no shop, and you only get one spell, a healing ability that will use almost all your mana, but leaves just enough behind to mock you with.

As for the fights, it might be kind to call them brutal. You do more damage than the enemies (at least, if you remembered to wear your equipment), but that is not much help, given that they can all take an insane amount of punishment, and often use "special abilities" (noted only by a different attack animation- err...wobble) that do almost as much damage as you. Even given the best possible results, you'll be in need of healing after pretty much every fight. At the beginning of the game, if you should find yourself facing more than a single opponent in one battle, prepare to face defeat, and the return of the title screen, where you can start over from the very beginning. There's a rest function that you can, seemingly, use anywhere - provided, of course, that you read Chinese or can figure out which option on the menu it is. It doesn't recover all your health, or any of your mana...and, no, there isn't an inn back in town either, nor can you sleep in your home other than the aforementioned rest command. Resting does reveal, however, that the game surprisingly enough includes a day and night system, the effect of which on gameplay, if it actually has one at all beyond a simple pallet swap, I was unable to determine.

Also, on the subject of the player character, I would be remiss if I did not bring up his movement on the over-world. I mentioned that the sprite itself was prone to erratic movements, but the character moves in a manner that is pretty well its equal in how erratic it is. Movement appears to be quicker going from side to side than it is going up or down, and even then the exact speed seemed to vary from one moment to the next for me, with the main character occasionally being at a crawl, and at other times accelerating to some kind of super-speed. This actually could probably be considered to make the game-makers' (bootleggers') decision to not use a proper real-time battle system a good thing. I can only imagine how poorly a faithful reproduction of Diablo's core gameplay might have functioned under those conditions.

Finally, there is the story and audio quality to be considered, and, to be quite honest, I have been trying - almost desperately - to put them off. This is where Chinese Bootleg Not-Diablo really fails to shine. From others, I have gained the impression that the music is taken from another game, possibly Golden Sun. All that I could really tell you about it are two things. First of all, it is painfully high-pitched, at least to my ears. This game outright hurt me to listen to. Not that the music is necessarily bad, though I certainly did not enjoy it in the slightest, but rather simply because all the sounds were in a range that, quite literally, and I cannot stress this enough, physically hurt my ears. I assure you, that is not an exaggeration in any way. If you are going to play this game, then I suggest that for your own sake, you do it with the sound turned way down, or better still, turned off. Trust me, you will not be missing much of anything at all. The second thing that I was going to mention about the music is simply that it is a short loop that repeats endlessly, and was the same in all the areas I visited. You will get tired of hearing it pretty quickly, even if the high-pitched sound doesn't get to you first. The rest of the game sounds are actually tolerable, but mainly because they are also not much of anything to begin with. They are unmemorable, and for the most part more or less drowned out by that awful piercing shrill that passes for music.

As for the story, I do not speak Chinese, or any of its dialects. I can only tell you that, apart from the title, the game bears no resemblance to Diablo in any way. If not for the obvious way in which it combines elements from other games, in the style of pretty much every single Chinese-made bootleg of a popular game for an outdated console ever, I would have my doubts as to whether or not that was indeed what they were trying to copy. As it is, though, I really don't doubt it one bit. Still, the placement of buildings and non-player characters bears no resemblance to the layout of the town of Tristram and its inhabitants. There is a castle with a king and his rows of statue-like unmoving soldiers, complete with a token chancellor and no sign of a queen, as seen in every early role playing game in the history of ever. Most characters have only a single line of dialogue (and, indeed, the game can only display a single line of dialogue at a time), making the rare person who has more to say almost leave you with the worry that the game has suffered a fatal glitch-out and become stuck in an infinite dialogue loop...but then it ends, and you can go back to playing the game, as if it were really worth it. In any case, the point is that the story is not at all true to Diablo, because the elements in the game just don't match up at all. If you've seen the Final Fantasy 7 clone for the NES, or even the NES Chrono Trigger bootleg, this is actually pretty disappointing. I would judge how whatever story they do have works on its own, but as I said to begin with, I am unable to read it. I can only go by what I can see, which seems to be that they took an innovative game of its time, that was very popular and has a legacy that survives to this day, and made a poorly designed and utterly generic RPG to slap its name onto. As I said to begin this whole thing, it is worth a look, just to marvel at how bad it is, but little else.

If you're looking for a serious, clever hack of "A Link to the Past" with a brilliant story, great humour, and innovative and challenging changes to gameplay then this is...not for you. Then again, you more than likely worked that out for yourself already. However, if it is not any of those things, then I suppose that leaves the question of what exactly this hack is. Well, for a start, "Not very good", would be something that it is. "Mostly unchanged" would be something else. The maps, enemies, and pretty much everything are still exactly as they are in the unaltered game. Still, that's not really answering what the hack is either. The truth is, there isn't all that much that one can really say about this particular alteration. The only thing that's actually been done is that the in-game text is edited, and poorly edited at that. Lines of dialogue too big for text boxes are crammed in tight like sardines, with words overlapping and making some lines totally unreadable. Not that what's there is worth reading. If this game can be considered "mature", it is only in its use of inappropriate language. Explicit it may be, but mature it is not. No, rather the whole thing comes off as more than just a little bit juvenile. The "joke", if one can call it that, is that lines have been changed to be more "adult". Generally this means that everyone and everything is talking about pornographic activities, the places where such things take place, and/or the associated paraphernalia for the same. Also, there is cursing. There is an awful lot of cursing, which entirely lacks any and all impact due to both the lack of consideration for situational appropriateness, and the utter ubiquity of its usage. While it may at first be amusing to see such crude and vulgar language superimposed over a beloved classic (or a hated scourge of one's childhood, as the case may very well be for some players), the novelty of such a change quickly wears thin. Essentially, it all boils down to one thing. There is only one joke here. It is not executed well, and it is repeated for far too long, to the point that one may just find that they can no longer remember a time when they ever found it funny in the first place. The bottom line is that the hack just is not interesting enough to hold anybody's attention for long. If you have ever played the original "A Link to the Past", then you will not be missing out on anything by giving this one a miss, and if you have not played "A Link to the Past", then the odds are really quite high that you will have a much more enjoyable experience from playing the original. The only thing that this hack manages to bring to the table, the use of crude humour to replace dialogue, is something that you could easily do in your own head. In fact, it would likely be a better experience in the long run, since lines you came up with yourself would never come out garbled and smashed together, and would likely sound funnier to you.

First of all, I'll confess, I didn't make it all the way through Super Mario Unlimited. However, what I did play felt very much like something Nintendo themselves could have produced. The levels were all quite smartly designed, and the flow never felt too forced, while still providing a satisfying level of challenge. For instance, making it to the first castle, the difficulty ramped up in a way that put the pressure on just enough to feel tense, without giving a stressful experience. The following worlds, for as long as I played, continued this trend of a gradual but steady progression of difficulty that was just what a Mario fan would expect.

There are definitely some new mechanics at play, as well. While the classic elements are most certainly still there, and you'll definitely be off to a fine start using just the platform jumping and fireball throwing skills taught in the classic N.E.S. original, I only had the chance on my first play-through to just start scratching the surface of what Super Mario Unlimited is really all about. There are a few spots that give you the option to get through an area multiple ways, usually requiring some up-front test of skill to avoid a challenging obstacle further on. It definitely made a nice break in the linearity of the stages. Also, there was some kind of collection system involving gathering rare coins scattered about with Mario's face on them. I may not have ever found out exactly what these were, or what they were for, but the game tracks how many you have managed to collect, and I found myself taking the extra risks and setbacks I needed to in order to collect as many as I could. This definitely makes things a little bit more interesting.

The music was, from what I heard, taken from official Mario sources, but this may not necessarily hold true in the later levels of the game. Graphics for the game look pretty good, though, especially for the limitations of the Nintendo Entertainment System. I gave a relatively low score to the game for story, but in truth that has to do with how little story the old style of Super Mario Brothers games have to begin with, and it may be undeserved. You appear to be hunting for Yoshi, rather than Princess Peach/Toadstool/Daisy/whichever-one-we-happen-to-be-going-with-today. That may or may not hold true for the entire game, of course, and I am willing to admit that if I played more of this game (which I most likely will do in the future), I might just end up having to amend that opinion. Ultimately, though, this is one aspect of the game where it simply falls victim to being exactly what it is supposed to be...that being a simple, retro-style platform game. It is most certainly not the sort of thing that I would hold against the game, and the lack of more story doesn't actually take away from the gameplay, nor does it really detract from any other aspect of the game. I certainly never found myself wondering what the Toads were up to while I was off stomping Goombas. This was only my first impressions, but the game is plenty of fun without that, and certainly worth giving a try, in my opinion.