
But as soon as I switched to playing Sapphire, the screen lit back up. I thought that was pretty weird, considering the lower setting of my SP’s screen was brighter than the “high” setting on all my friends’ SPs, as I took good care of it, and it was unlikely that the backlight would be going anytime soon. When I started the game up, oddly enough, the backlit screen of my SP went out, like I was playing on an old Game Boy Advance or a Color. I popped it into my GBC and started playing.Ī couple of weeks ago, I lost my GBC for a while, so I had to play it on my SP. I’d poured plenty of money into the franchise and one bootlegged game wasn’t going to kill me. When I started it up, it only had one option – New Game, and unlike the well-loved cartridge I’d been using, it didn’t have any wear marks from being inserted into the GBC or anything indicating it’d been used. You can see in the picture how the sticker doesn’t fit the front of the cartridge, and the red plastic is cheap and almost see-through (if you look close, you can see the internal battery on the second, while the first can’t be seen through at all).

As soon as I compared it to my old one, I knew it was either a bootleg or produced somewhere else.

About a month ago, I bought a second Pokémon Red cartridge off eBay so I could start a new game and screw around without messing up my save file.
