How do I tell if they're original cartridges or just knock off reproductions?
Obviously the sellers offering 5 different games for £20 are bullshit but what about ones that cost a more realistic amount?
What should I look out for?
Pic related is around £10 and I'm kinda suspicious considering it would cost more than double in a shop.
Without physical access to the product you can never know for sure. Virtually anything you can demand of the seller can be bullshitted with enough background research.
On my copy, there's a little, barely visible NINTENDO imprint on the cover and I don't see it on this one.
I can see it just fine, unless you mean the cart label rather than clamshell?
I just checked it, and I misremembered. There's no imprint.
>can't tell if there's a number stamp
>the ® under pokemon just looks like an asterisk unless the image compression just made it look weird
>can't tell for sure because the picture isn't clear enough but the letters on GAMEBOY seem kind of fricky
for 10 yurops I wouldn't trust it
Looks real. All the fonts are correct, label is placed on the cart correctly, I doubt fakers will go to the effort of rubbing marker on it.
Heres the back
The only way to tell for certain is to get a security bit screwdriver and open it up to look at the board.
I'm sure others will say otherwise, but I can't remember ever seeing bootlegs of the original Gameboy Pokemon games use Euro labels.
>How do I tell
You don't
get the right tools to open and compare the board with pictures of the original online. works 99% of the times, but boards can differ among regions/versions, so keep this into account
You buy it, open it, find out its fake and then use Ebay protection to get your money back because Ebay always sides with the buyer to the point sellers get scammed through illegitimate claims all the time.
Just buy the torx screwdrivers. You'll need them if you want to start buying carts
Oh boy, this shit drove me up the fricking WALL years ago when I decided on a whim to get back into the Pokemon games (I had only played the 1st gen up to that point). I didn't want to emulate because I think at the time they hadn't yet figured out how to move Pokemon from the GBA to the DS, plus muh authenticity. But frick me, OF COURSE the Pokemons are the most pirated games of all time. You need a fricking PhD in cartridge studies to know exactly the tell-tale signs of a legit and pirate cartridge. Some of them are really minute, too, and the pirates got better and better at copying them. It was especially bad with the GBA games. I even caught GameStop stocking them. And fuuuuuuuuck buying them online. Never knew what you were going to get, so I had to hunt locally.
I eventually succeeded, thank frick, but goddamn.
How many times did you buy a fake?
Once, I think. Well, I'm not entirely sure if it was actually a fake or if the cartridge was just broken, but I bought a copy of either Emerald or Leaf Green, and it would give me an error message about the clock or some shit, can't remember. Anyway, I took it back to the dude I bought it from, and he was real bro about it. He got another one, tested it on his GBA SP in front of me, and off I went.
My best tip is to look at the label, if it shows serious traces of wear and tear it's legit, the more fricked up it is the more guranateed to be real.
Obviously if you only have a budget of £10 you're looking for a copy to play it, not something to display on a shelf and post on reddit, so unless there's literal traces of shit on it shouldn't matter.