If you fancy getting the gamer in your life something a little different to the SNES or PlayStation Classic consoles, it turns out Soulja Boy might have the product you’re after.
The only hitch is that the self branded “SouljaGame Console” (yes, it’s really called that) the hip hop artist is peddling appears to be loaded with pirated ROMS from a number of companies. Oh dear.
MadlittlepixelYouTuber Madlittlepixel decided to take the plunge and pick up a SouljaGame Console – which apparently comes loaded with a whopping 800 classic games. For $150 dollars (on sale) that’s a tidy little bargain, right?
Wrong. As Polygon pointed out, these consoles are little more than unbranded emulators that Soulja has whacked his name on and decided to re-sell.
Beneath the packaging, which brilliantly features a picture of Soulja Boy himself in the corner, the console itself looks a hell of a lot like an Xbox One S.
The whole thing also comes with a HDMI cable and two controllers that look suspiciously like the crap PS2 pads you’d make your mate use when they came round to play.
Of course, once the system is booted up you’re greeted with a whole bunch of copyrighted games from consoles like the SNES and Sega Genesis.
As a few people have pointed out, there’s no way a company like Nintendo is okay with Soulja Boy selling games like A Link to the Past and Yoshi’s Island, so I can’t imagine he’ll be allowed to keep this up for long. Nintendo have done a lot worse to people for a lot less when it comes to protecting their IPs.
If that wasn’t bad enough, it also turns out that the console doesn’t even run these classic games very well. Soulja Boy has heard these criticisms of course, and he’s less than happy about them. That hasn’t stopped him from planning his “next console” of course.
I love how some of the gaming media is trying to down play my dream of getting in the gaming industry just wait until the launch of my next console we will see who has the last laugh! 😊😜
— Soulja Boy (Drako) (@souljaboy) December 10, 2018
Whatever Soulja Boy’s next console ends up being, he better get it out quick before Nintendo, Sega, or any number of game publishers decide to sue him straight into the heart of the sun for his current model.
Ewan Moore is a journalist at UNILAD Gaming who still quite hasn’t gotten out of his mid 00’s emo phase. After graduating from the University of Portsmouth in 2015 with a BA in Journalism & Media Studies (thanks for asking), he went on to do some freelance words for various places, including Kotaku, Den of Geek, and TheSixthAxis, before landing a full time gig at UNILAD in 2016.