You might've noticed that the ultra-rare PC Engine arcade card game Ginga Fukei Densetsu Sapphire has been turning up on ebay at reasonable prices recently. The real deal quite often fetches upwards of $400, so these fakes can be rather enticing. Here's an example of one.

Luckily, the fellow who runs superpcenginegrafx.com has put together a rather extensive guide to determining what's real and what's false. Apparently these (rather high quality!) bootlegs were made through the Swiss company care4data, and are easiest to tell from the real deal by the fact that the tear strip goes across the middle of the logo, rather than much lower, where it'd usually be. This is a seriously detailed report. There are six pages of info here (navigate at the bottom), from manual scans to disc images.

So now you know - one wonders if this will reduce the value of the original as well? Thanks to SignOfZeta for finding this, and Justin Cheer of superpcenginefx.com for putting the whole thing together. [Cross-posted from Brandon's IC, which also has a follow-up post with more PC Engine-related obscure neatness from the same site.]