NES Cartridge Chaos: The Official Nintendo Region Converter and More!

This post is a combination of looks at several oddities among my pile of NES and Famicom cartridges. Why, for example, do I have a copy of Gyromite when I don’t have a R.O.B.? Did I miss something interesting in my MMC blog post? And while it is the Japanese release of Kid Niki: Radical Ninja, is my Kaiketsu Yanchamaru being a little too radical? Who put the ram in the rama-lama-ding-dong? Some of these questions will be answered!

Gyromite, or if it’s on the ceiling, Gyrotite

Gyromite, or in Japan, Robot Gyro, is the best game that supports the R.O.B. toy robot sold with certain models of the Nintendo Entertainment System. This isn’t really that impressive, though, considering there were only two, and the other, Stack-Up, is barely even a game.

Here’s the title screen of Gyromite. Notice something?

Yep, even though on paper Nintendo renamed the game from Robot Gyro (or possibly just Gyro, judging from the cartridge art), they didn’t actually make any changes in the ROM from the Japanese release. Why bother? The game doesn’t actually contain any Japanese-language text.

Now, you can play Gyromite without R.O.B. pretty easily, by just having someone press buttons on controller