Bootleg DS Carts Hit the Market

It was bound to happen sooner or later: bootleg DS carts hitting the market. While it was previously safe to buy a DS game online or used in a store without checking to see if it’s official or not (as none were spotted until this point), you may want to take certain precautions when adding future games to your DS collection (and will probably want to skip buying games from a source that does not look totally reputable all together).

These cheap, Hong Kong-produced knock-offs have been plaguing the GBA market on auction sites such as eBay and Amazon.com for a long time now, and while the first wave of DS bootlegs look shoddily made (thus being easy to avoid), if past history is an indicator then these illegal fakes should get better to the point where you might not even know if you’re buying an official cart or not until the poorly made cart starts malfunctioning.

Which brings me to another point: while bootlegs may be cheaper to buy in the short-run, once they start losing their save data (official carts hold save data for what seems like forever while counterfeit carts use cheap batteries to hold saves) or stop working all together, you’ll probably end up having to buy a sturdy made, quality official cart anyway, so in the long run its worth looking out for whether your getting a bootleg or an official cart.

So while its going to be hard to dupe any reputable gamer into buying one of these awful looking carts, a clueless parent looking to buy a game for their kids probably wont even notice the difference at the time of purchase. Still, keep a close eye out for these counterfeit carts, because as time goes on the bootleggers will keep improving the looks of these games to eventually look nearly the same as official carts.

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