I remember reading about pirate copies and hacks that were getting made back then. The gaming mags here would occasionally cover them in heavily slanted towards "don't support this stuff" articles that only made me want to support that stuff. 😂

Like, you are telling me there is a Street Fighter II game for the NES and we are not getting it in North America? There is a version of X game I love on Y console I just bought but licenses won't let anyone release it here in North America?

I was so mad at some of those hacks and pirate games not getting released here because they looked absolutely freaking awesome in the mags. I learned later after getting on the Internet that a great many of them were absolutely horrible. Still though, that was with hindsight of over a decade of curated games being released here - who knows what my opinion of SFII on NES might have been if I was able to play it back then before I was exposed to PlayStation, N64, better PC games, etc.