NES World Champ Boxing demo cart

I found this NES cart in a display case at a pawn shop. Something about the label told me it was worth picking up.

It's rather hefty for an NES cart, indicating that the board inside is much larger than your average NES cart, and it's most likely populated with EPROMs instead of the ROM chips inside normal NES carts. Because it's held together with those stupid star-head screws, I haven't cracked it open for a peek inside yet.

The scribbled-out bit used to say "0.7". It's not entirely clear in the scan, but there are two whited-out areas on the label, to the right of and below the word "VERSION." I haven't scraped off the white-out to see what's underneath. Guess this particular cart was used for more than one revision.

I don't have a normal-release version of this game, so I don't have a basis of comparison, but as you may guess from the word "Final," it looks pretty much complete. At least it didn't crash on me for the few hours I played it.

How is World Champ as a game? Pretty lousy, actually. It's probably only worth playing in two-player mode. The computer is a crappy opponent. All I had to do was turn on the rapid fire switch on the four-score adapter and hold the button down. The computer opponent would walk right into my punches, take a few on the chin, and fall down. I soon figured out that the only thing the game needed me for was to start the match; I'd just tape down the button on the controller and go do something else for a minute. By the time I'd get back, I'd have already won.

I paid five bucks for it, which is probably worth it for an individual cart with the likely provenance of this one, but I'd have felt severely cheated if I paid that for a regular-release version of it.

This cart is no longer in my possession.

Jay Tilton
12/02/96