One Christmas, I was surprised to discover that one of my gifts (from my parents) was this device. It's a 15-in-1 game system, built into a controller that hooks right into the TV or VCR. It's a cheap-looking, translucent blue thing, kind of resembling the Dreamcast's controller, with an analog stick, crosspad, and 5 buttons (A, B, turbo A, turbo B and reset).
What makes this thing special is that all of these games are NES games from Color Dreams and Bunch Games, running on what is apparently NES hardware! Anybody who remembers the Color Dreams games, knows they weren't exactly the highest quality. Actually, they were pretty shitty. But some of them had a certain charm to them, much like B-movies. At least one of these chintzy games is bound to bring some "Oh, God, I remember that!" nostalgia from any NES gamer.
I was ecstatic. For one thing, I had trouble for a minute believing it was real! It was so ludicrous and cheesy, it was great! This was something I could show off and play with my friends, and we could laugh at its sheer existance.
There's an instruction manual for setting it up (which refers to it as the NS-800 Rumble Station All in One Computer System, for some reason), but no game instructions. Instead, on the back of the manual is a listing of the games, along with one-line descriptions in some pretty amusing Engrish:
What really mars the experience, however, is the "rumble pack". That's right, it has a rumble pack, built into the top of the controller, where all the cables go in. Waitaminute, I thought. These games were all written long before rumble packs. How did they implement that? Well, how the pack works is it simply goes off every single time you press a button. No, there isn't any way to turn it off, either! If you think this sounds cool, it's not. Playing with the controller jiggling every time your character jumps or shoots or does anything gets old QUICK.
And it is for that reason alone that I would recommend NOT buying one. However, if you're a collector of NES paraphernalia, and want to own what is probably the only legitimate clone hardware, you can probably pick one up for around $20 at your local Wal-Mart or other discount department store, and any number of funky little electronics websites.