Video Game Review - Somari for the NES

Somari is an 8-bit version of Sonic The Hedgehog starring Mario.

What in the hell?

My initial reaction was that there was no way in hell that this game wouldn't be laughably terrible. After playing it for about ten minutes, my reaction was that this game is one of the most impressive bootlegs I've ever seen.

Apparently, nobody knows who made this game, where it was made or even exactly when it was made. It's more than likely from Asia, my guess would be China or Taiwan because of their active bootlegging industry at the time, but it's most likely from Taiwan. Apparently, somebody took out a trademark there in early 1994 for the name Somari. That's more than likely this game.

It's a shame that nobody really knows who they are, because these bootleggers could have been hired by Sega or Nintendo to make real games

I'm not going to lie - this game isn't as good as either of the games it ripped off. But it's very good on it's own merits.

Mario runs fast in this game. Maybe not as fast as Sonic did, but considering that this is an 8-bit game, it moves fast, and it feels fast for what it was. It also looks damn good. The colors are a bit dull, making it look more like a Master System game, but they look good for a Master System game. Here's a comparison between the graphics in Somari and Sonic The Hedgehog on the Sega Master System.

  

Sonic's colors pop out more, obviously, but consider that Sonic on the Master System had an actual budget and a team of professional, top of the line programmers and artists working on it. Somari was amateur hour, and I think they did a very impressive job.

The only problems with the game are that it has a very high difficulty, some control issues, a few glitches (it is a bootleg after all) and the music is bad enough to make your ears bleed.

If it sounds like I'm making excuses for the game, I am. It's a bootleg. The issues that Somari has kind of come with the territory. But bootlegs are rarely good games. There are exceptions - the Famicom versions of Chrono Trigger (an excellent backwards port, even if it did have Pokemon sprites in it) and Final Fantasy VII (which Kotaku editor Luke Plunkett called a "triumph of the human spirit," and Gamepro called "The video game equivalent of the human genome project") are the two big ones, and I think Somari is on the same level as those two. Consider what it is: a bootleg made by amateur Chinese, Taiwanese or Russian programmers who more than likely funded the project out of their own pockets. Don't expect gold from them. Expect silver, and you'll more than likely get that.

The easiest way to get it is on an emulator since it's rare to find it on eBay, but if you do, expect to pay anywhere from $20 to $60 for it. It might not be worth that price, and I really can't see how someone would have a problem pirating a game that was made and distributed illegally in the first place, but the collector in me definitely wants a copy, just because it would make a good conversation piece.

So emulate it. You might not like it - in fact, the consensus seems to be mixed on whether the game is good or not, but you have to give the anonymous programmers credit, because what this is a very impressive achievement for what it was.