About six months ago, a new and exciting kiosk opened up at our local Lloyd Center mall. Instead of selling, say, semi-depressing painted hermit crabs, questionable mafia hair straighteners, or buckwheat-filled pillows, it was selling the "Power Player" — a totally classic Chinese 76,000 NINTENDO GAMES-IN-ONE import special.

If you've never seen these things, the idea is that it's a plug-and-play videogame device, and that they're terrible and funny:

(Don't miss the surprising amount of comedy packed into that flyer — I'm a fan of the blockbuster games "Milk & Nut", "Combat Guy", "Donkey Calculator" and, most especially, "Burger Moment".)

Besides the hilarious rip-off industrial design (N64 and Genesis together at last!), and the weird Star Wars packaging photo, and the way-too-realistic gun (which once caused a bit of a problem for me at airport security on a trip back from Los Angeles after once having bought an "AdvanceBoy"), the biggest joke about these products is that they advertise "over 76,000 games!"

Basically, it's the same 30 crusty old games, with different names. For the first few pages, they actually try to put some effort into it — "Donkey Kong" becomes "Kong Don" becomes "Angry Man Donkey" becomes "Donkey Ding Bell Climb", etc. Or something like that. But by the time you get to about page 20, the programmers totally chucked it in and the "original titles" become completely computer-generated: "Donkey Kong 18543" followed by its sequel "Donkey Kong 31950", etc.

Of those 30 games, they're all brazenly pirated Nintendo originals, with minor modifications. Dave once straight-up asked the mysterious lady working our local kiosk: "Aren't these games illegal?" "Oh, no, no, totally legal", she replied. (She had no idea.)

Anyway, one day, the kiosks went away. And this month, the following ad appeared in Electronic Gaming Monthly:

According to the plea agreement Nintendo posted, Yonatan was making out like a bandit: buying the units for $8.50. At Lloyd Center, they were selling them for $60. Now, it seems, the jig is up.

Insert prison/Pooyan joke here.