Power Player Super Joy 3, the Super Joystick!

Throughout the years I passed up so many Super Joy consoles, because I didn't know exactly what they were. Later on, when my interest in handheld Famiclones started to grow, I found a powder blue Super Joy 3 and I decided to take a chance on it. I had only done a little research on Power Joys, but I was told the Super Joy 3 was essentially the same type of Famiclone, meaning this thing played classic NES/Famicom games, and supposedly played Famicom cartridges. Those two facts alone were well worth the couple of dollars I paid for it.

My very first Famiclone is the one on the far left side.

When I got home I scrambled to find all the needed cables and batteries to give the thing a complete test. After powering the system on I was greeted by a little bit of music and a screen boasting 12000 games, which I now know is just a marketing ploy to move these things off the shelves. After a little bit of playing around, I started to wonder how these things could play Famicom cartridges, because mine didn't have any visible cartridge slot. Instead mine had some weird cover protruded from under the console, which caused my hands to cramp if I used it for too long, with absolutely no possible way to externally connect a Famicom game.

After carefully removing the the plastic cover, so that I could reattach it later, I found the 60 pin connector with a small board stuck inside. I grabbed a Famicom game I had bought a few months prior and tried to get it to fit, but there was no hope. I decided I should take the Super Joy 3 apart and see if this thing really would play Famicom games through that slot.

The answer was a resounding yes; yes these things really do play Famicom cartridges. But if I had to take the whole thing apart, rendering in useless, how was I suppose to actually utilize this fact? In frustration, I just put the Super Joy 3 in my closet and used it on occasion the way it was, until I happened to find another Super Joy 3, this time with an actual slot to put a cartridge in.

As you can see above, the Super Joy 3 comes in 2 external variations. The first, and most common, has an actual Famicom sized slot on the bottom, allowing for cartridge insertion, opening the library to any Famicom (or pirate) cart you own. The second design still has the cartridge slot, but it's molded so that the unit only allows for the inserted rom board, leaving no room for any actual cartridge to be plugged in.

My collection has grown quite a bit, and hopefully will continue to grow, so I've found that although the Super Joy 3 is your typical handheld Famiclone, stuffed into an N64 style controller, there are at least two different programs inside that I've found. The first being the one I previously mentioned that boots up with a little bit of music and boasts 12000 games. The second one boots up with no music, a black background and Fun Time written in green, before going to a screen of 78000 options.

The overall quality varies from unit to unit as well. Some of my Super Joys have very nice video output, while others have lines in the background, and others have fuzzy, snowy screens that are almost unplayable! While the inner workings vary from unit to unit, the outer construction tends to stay the same with cheap plastics throughout. I have noticed a slight button variation, but it really isn't a plus or minus as they are all buttons and do their required jobs, no matter what plastic they used.

The Super Joy 3 has a player 2/light gun port on the very front of the unit, outside of where the battery pack goes. I've never owned a brand new Super Joy 3, so I can't comment on the quality of the zapper, but I do happen to own three of the second player controllers. Player 2 controllers are modeled heavily off a Sega Genesis controller, with slight modifications. These controllers are ok, for what they do, and work well with almost any other Famiclone you have as controllers for either player.

After collecting my first one, it seemed that I found them all over the place. If one of them happened to cross my path that I felt the price was worth paying, I couldn't pass it up. So, needless to say, my Super Joy collection has expanded to a total of six. I can't really say the Super Joy is a great unit, because it varies from unit to unit, but I can say that if you get your hands on one that works correctly, it's a great little handheld Famiclone.

This is a Famiclone?

I've acquired quite a few Famiclones of all different shapes, sizes and designs in my years of video game collecting. Famiclones range from the bizarre and ugly to an exact replica of the Nintendo Famicom, visually speaking. What I happened to find today sits somewhere between those two, yet I'm still not sure exactly where.

At first glance this thing is a bottom of the barrel scraping third party Xbox 360 controller, but if you look a little closer the telltale signs of a Famiclone are present. There is no brand name to be seen, simply a strange logo where another analog stick should be. But whoever made this was so dedicated to trying to incorporated the Xbox 360 feel that the power button is a large circle in the center of the controller, with a border that lights up, just like the controller this is trying to resemble.

There is a second player port nestled at the bottom, between the handles, but the main player controls offer the standard Famiclone fair in a confusing array. There is a standard D-pad and a pseudo analog stick, which works as a standard D-pad and is there merely for looks, and six action buttons to choose from. What are listed as A and B are backwards, X and Y are the turbo versions of the aforementioned buttons, while LB seems to work as both A and B simultaneously and RB does absolutely nothing at all.

On the very top of the controller are a pair of plastic humps, I assume to simulate shoulder buttons, that are pretty much pointless and useless. Between those are a standard set of AV output jacks as well as a power input. Unlike almost all my other handheld style Famiclones this one offers no battery power option at all, but luckily works off the same DC 9volt 300mA power supply all my other Famiclones use.

When I found this at a local Goodwill I originally didn't want to buy it, but once I saw that it was 50% off this week I quickly changed my mind. I honestly didn't know what to expect from this unit; was it a bunch of 8-bit homebrews or would it be just another 9999999999999999 in 1 pirate fest? With the uneasy feeling of whether the system would work and what I could expect from it once I got it home set aside, I plunked down the whole $1 for it and waited to get home to find out.

After plugging in the AV cables and wearily plugging in the AC adapter, hoping it wouldn't blow up, I pushed in the power button and watched as it lit up green and Fun Time flash quickly on the screen. Immediately after that a list of 76000 games appeared, which equated to approximately 50 games listed over and over again. Almost all of them were Famicom/NES pirates, but there were a few games I've never heard of.

As per normal this Famiclone is packed with games such as: Contra, 1942, Arkanoid, Super Mario Bros., Circus Charlie, Mappy, and many more. But there are also games I've never heard of such as: Nature Clan Island, Knight Hero and Ice Oceans, the gameplay of all these games isn't anything I'm familiar with, so I know its not a simple retitle. Some of them even have extremely well done title screens, leading me to believe someone took pride in making these games.

Again, as normal this system is made of extremely cheap plastic, the lower D-pad is almost completely unresponsive, the reset button takes a good hard press to work (which is better than resetting a game on accident) and overall its just another standard Famiclone from China. Its small and packs in a lot of games, but without the option to power it with batteries this system is not portable, which would have been extremely easy if they had tried to clone a wireless Xbox 360 controller. Other than being a different shape and lacking a 60 pin connector (perhaps a detail I should have pointed out earlier) this thing isn't much different than any of my Super Joy systems.

To simplify, knowing what I know now if this system wasn't $1 I wouldn't have picked it up!