Segaiden

Well, here we go. I've already covered Sega's first console, the SG-1000, in comprehensive (if retrospectively inaccurate at times) details. Now, here we have the sequel: The American adaptation of the Mark III upgrade to SG-1000, the Master System. Or the Sega System, if we're being strictly accurate. Beginning with this episode, which covers the Master System hardware and its three pack-in games (or rather, two pack-in games and one built-in game), I will be focusing on the U.S. lineup until we get to the end of 1988 and Phantasy Star, bringing Sega 8-bit coverage even with NES coverage. And from there, we'll be moving in tandem into the future, juggling Nintendo and Sega retrospectives in 1989 and beyond. Please enjoy.

Sega leads off its non-pack-in Master System lineup with a solid conversion of an arcade masterpiece and a respectable original title: Fantasy Zone and Ghost House. While the former suffers some compromises in the move from System 16A arcade hardware to the less powerful home console, it retails its key features, and its charming personality still shines through. As for the latter, Ghost House falls short of greatness due to its lack of content and clumsy control mechanics, but it nevertheless features a lot of fun ideas and secrets to unravel... and, like Fantasy Zone, it packs in plenty of personality, which makes it a winner. Maybe not, like, "gold medalist" winner. But at least a solid bronze.

Three episodes into the Master System run and already we have some familiar sights—but understandably so, since each of these games comes to Master System from arcades. So, while we may have seen Choplifter during our SG-1000 survey, we certainly didn't see this version of it; Sega based the older, Japan-only release on the Apple II game, while this U.S.- and European-exclusive upgrade draws its content and aesthetics from the company's arcade interpretation. Barely a year between the two home releases, but this one feels far more of-the-moment than the SG-1000 port did. Teddy Boy, of course, launched alongside Hang On with the Japanese Mark III hardware. The Western release is almost exactly the same as the Japanese MyCard, with one crucial (but ultimately immaterial) difference. As for My Hero, unfortunately it does no favors for the optics of the Master System and its Sega Card format. While it looks almost as good as the arcade game (except that sickly green sky), it lacks a hug

I thought the main feature this week would be TransBot, a pretty OK shooter based on a pretty good arcade game that rectifies the failings of Orguss for SG-1000 while basically swiping the concept wholesale, but no. TransBot is fine. The main feature, however, turned out to be F-16 Fighting Falcon, a game no one would reasonably ever want to play, which does some absolutely ridiculous things with the Master System's more esoteric capabilities. Yuji Naka supposedly programmed this port, and all I can say is: What a mad man. There's also World Grand Prix, the sequel to GP World. It's a game about racing the same track over and over again because the requirements for qualifying for later tracks are human impossible to achieve.

A pair of games based on popular media works? Well, almost. Action Fighter clearly draws its inspiration from 1970s James Bond and his transforming Lotus Esprit, but unlike James Bond 007 for Multivision, it doesn't wear the actual Bond license. It's a much better game, though. Drawing heavy inspiration from the likes of Spy Hunter and (gulp) Xevious, it turns out to be an unexpected highlight of the Master System's launch period. On the other hand, Black Belt did sport a media license... in Japan. Here in the U.S., however, Sega scrubbed all of those details clean. And I do mean "scrubbed"—rather than simply redrawing the main character's sprites, the developers gave every single component of this game a visual overhaul. It's really quite an impressive effort—and yet, the underlying work still shines through. And, because it plays as a convincing Kung Fu clone, you can understand why they went to the trouble rather than just skipping over localization and publishing some other game

An unlikely star emerges in this week's Master System episode: The Sega Sports Pad. Required for (but not bundled with!) Great Ice Hockey, this analog-ish trackball controller ultimately didn't have much purpose in terms of deliberate tie-ins, but thanks to its alternate mode it proves surprisingly effective with a number of other titles, especially shooters. Such as... Astro Warrior, this episode's B-side, which goes from being OK-ish to OK (if a bit easy) when played with the Sports Pad.

It's an all-shooting episode of Segaiden with the Master System's second light gun game. (Or third, if you take a doggedly literal view on the names on cartridge labels and count Marksman Shooting / Trap Shooting as two separate games. I bet you probably still put an apostrophe in Ys, too, don't you?) That's followed by the first of December 1986's Commando / Front Line clones, Rambo: First Blood Part II. OK, that's not fair to Rambo. It doesn't want to be Front Line (who does?) but rather Ikari Warriors, and it has the cooperative play to prove it. Although it certainly is fussier about its secret continue codes.

When did the lie that girls don't play video games gain credence in America? I remember seeing little nerds of all genders in arcades in the early 1980s, so that fallacy must have taken hold around the time that the Master System arrived. Certainly that would explain why these two games, both of which featured playable female casts in their original incarnations as Sega Ninja/Ninja Princess and Gokuaku Doumei Dump Matsumoto, saw their sprites replaced by men here on Master System. A weird coincidence! However, it doesn't affect how either game plays, which is to say "pretty damn good." The Ninja delivers on the potential of Ninja Princess, presenting the same fundamental experience but with vastly smoother gameplay and all the arcade version's bonus stages restored. And Pro Wrestling may not be as good as the NES game by the same title that would ship a few months later, but it absolutely puts every other wrestling game on U.S. the console market in 1986 into a sleeper hold before pi

Before we start, I realize that I mixed up some details when I mentioned a non-existent submarine. No need for corrections—it's already been addressed for the book. For our two final American Master System releases of 1986, we have a game that looks remarkably derivative of an early Nintendo NES title (and rightly so) and a game that often gets compared to a major NES hit (but really is something much stranger and more ambitious). Yes, there's no denying that Super Tennis—no, not the Super NES one—looks almost exactly like Black Box Tennis for NES, all the way down the character sprites. But, you know, steal from the best, right? That philosophy seemingly looms over Alex Kidd in Miracle World as well: A game that Sega clearly designed as the answer to Super Mario Bros., what with it being a character platformer where you break blocks and all. Except the similarities really end there, and Miracle World ultimately embraces an entirely different design philosophy. If it weren't for t

Sega didn't publish a lot of Mark III titles in Japan but not America—just about everything the company released for its home territory always made its way to the U.S. Segaiden/Master System Works will be examining the handful of exceptions, which adds up to roughly a dozen games over the course of the Mark III's lifetime. Not all of these Japan-exclusive titles are worth playing, but you'll find enough interesting oddities here to merit some cursory exploration. Case in point, this episode. Although Great Soccer (not to be mistaken for the completely different game that shipped in America as Great Soccer) doesn't have much to offer the world, Great Golf (again, not our Great Golf) is a very different and quite enjoyable take on the sport, while Fushigi no Oshiro Pit Pot (not strictly a Japan-exclusive since it did show up on a European combo cart) scratches a primal action-RPG puzzle-dungeon exploration itch that The Legend of Zelda would properly treat with a metaphorical calamine p

A fairly short episode this week, and for good reason: These games are not terribly good! Only two of 1986's Mark III releases failed to make their way to the U.S., and you don't need to spend a lot of time with either of them to see why. Comical MachineGun Joe could have been a fun shooting gallery action game, but its sluggish controls and wonky aiming turn it into a real chore to play. And High School! Kimengumi offers very little in the way of gameplay and relies heavily not only on guesswork and memorization but also upon the player's familiarity with a manga and anime which, to my knowledge, have never made their way to the U.S. You can understand why they didn't bother to Black Belt this one.

Exploring Sega Master System's chronology in direct comparison to the NES lineup has proven education. I didn't own either system as of March 1987, when these two games premiered, yet I distinctly remember being as impressed by the Master System demos I saw at shops as I was by my friends' NES games. Releases like Great Baseball and Space Harrier assure me of my younger self's sanity: They really did blow anything Nintendo had on offer right out of the water. Great Baseball looks (and more or less plays) like Bases Loaded, a game that wouldn't appear on NES until mid-1988. In the meantime, all the NES had to offer on the baseball front in 1987 was Nintendo's own elderly Baseball, a first-generation release hailing from 1983. As for Space Harrier, no one cared about its strange graphical clipping effect at the time, because no one had ever seen a console game crank out so much high-speed action with such huge sprites. Master System obviously couldn't match the Super Scaler arcade orig

Sega draws once again upon its arcade work for this episode's set of releases, though they delve much further back into the past for one than the other. Shooting Gallery uses an electromechanical target gallery cabinet from the 1960s as its jumping-off point. Between that primal legacy and the addition of lots of other stuff to the mix, no one could ever accuse it of being a mere ripoff of a certain iconic Nintendo light gun shooter. As for Quartet, it looks to much more recent coin-op history—a 1986 game by the same name. Unfortunately, the Master System's limitations forced the company's designers to pare down the design to a mere pair of players, falsifying the title. To make up for the compromise, they also removed more than 90% of the original arcade game's stages as well. Sounds terrible, right? Well, Quartet on Master System isn't actually as bad as all that, undergoing a similar arcade-to-home reinvention as Capcom's Section Z. It's just too bad about the reversed button setup

It's fun to goof on the "Sega Does What Nintendon't" marketing line, but sometimes that claim was more than just sales hype. For example, this week's episode, in which we have a pair of games that would show up on NES about a year and a half later in lesser forms. Ghostbusters on NES lives in infamy as a flamin' hot hunk of garbage, but this version hews closer to the Commodore 64 original, adds some new material, and looks great, making it arguably the definitive console release. As for Wonder Boy, well, if you've been following this channel for any amount of time, you know the story there. And certainly its NES version—Hudson's Adventure Island—was by no means a disaster. I'd even say it turned out superior, music-wise. But, Sega's release did a much better job of recreating the coin-op game... and it hit the U.S. way ahead of Hudson's rendition. That makes this perhaps the last moment in time when American kids could look at the two consoles and say, "The Master System is the on

This week we have what may be the single most inexplicable set of releases for Master System: Great Football and Sports Pad Football. I mean, football games make sense for the U.S. market. Americans love football! (Not the soccer kind.) And it makes sense for a console to have more than one football game over its lifetime. But when they're only a month apart? From the same publisher? And are actually just the same game released under two unique titles with distinct box art and no real indication that they're almost entirely identical? Incredibly weird! Almost disastrously so! I mean, the core football sim underneath it all is decent. But still. It's just so baffling. Also up: Rocky, the first Two-Mega (256K) cart for Master System. Sega clearly poured that extra memory into visuals, because damn does this game look good. As for how it plays, well... it probably could have used another couple of megabits of data to shore up that aspect of the game, if we're being honest.

Master System has been a pretty wild ride so far, huh? Unfortunately, the software and tech highs that Sega brought to the table failed to make the headway you might expect (and that they deserved to) against Nintendo's head start with the NES, and this episode opens with a comparative look at the two consoles in summer 1987. And it's all tied to a less-than-wild ride: A very underwhelming reinvention of Super Scaler dirtbike coin-op Enduro Racer for console, which became even less whelming in its transition from Mark III to Master System. Of course, this one mediocre racer didn't cause Master System to slip so far behind NES's American market share. It's just one of those things.

The Light Phaser finally proves itself an invaluable companion to the Master System instead of simply a tool for maintaining parity with Nintendo's lineup thanks to Gangster Town, the most inventive light gun shooter we've seen so far on an 8-bit system. With a fun theme, imaginative scenarios, and tons of bonus details and mechanics, it sets a new standard for the genre. It's also unreasonably difficult unless you play in two-player mode, but, hey. That's Sega for you. There's also a volleyball game this week. I guess.

This episode's run time spans nearly five times as long as it does to complete a single playthrough of the game under discussion here. As a Light Phaser shooter, Missile Defense 3-D doesn't take terribly long to complete; Sega's designers understood that light gun gameplay can cause fatigue and always did their best to keep their shooting games brief. In this case, you have a shooter that adapts Missile Command into a quick, multi-scenario diversion, with some stages that only take a few seconds to complete. So, there's not too much to say about the game itself... but the setup and tech around it? Ah, now there's a tale to tell. I realize I refer to the Sega 3-D Glasses as "Sega 3-D System" throughout. There was a little NES Works Gaiden bleedthrough in my brain, I'm afraid.

We have peak Sega here: A technically and creatively groundbreaking arcade game that turned the world into instant fans, and which in turn became an excellent home conversion. Considering the gulf in power between the Super Scaler-derived Out Run arcade board and the Master System, this home adaptation is nothing less than a small miracle. Of course, Sega did juice the system a little, at least in Japan. Out Run is the first U.S. release to contain secret code to support the Japan-exclusive FM Sound Unit peripheral for the Mark III console. Before the Tower of Power, Sega fans had the Mark III sprawl, and the FM Sound Unit played a big part in that. And although we never received the add-on in the states, Out Run is one of many U.S. games that can be made to run with FM audio enhancements if you don't mind gimmicking things with modern methods, such as console mods or region-busting FPGA devices....

Kung Fu Kid brings us a genuine rarity: A direct sequel to an SG-1000 exclusive game. Sure, we've had spiritual successors (all those "Great" sports games) and direct remakes (a la Wonder Boy and The Ninja), but Kung Fu Kid continues the story of Dragon Wang. Such as any story could be said to exist in a game where you walk and kick infinite guys in an attempt to steal some of Spartan-X's valor. The real question is, why Dragon Wang and not, say, Girl's Garden or Gulkave? Ah well. Equally rare is Great Golf, a rare Master System sports title that deserves the "Great" appellation. A huge improvement over... well, everything that came before it on consoles, really. Great Golf offers an immersive, dynamic viewpoint and offers crisp, intuitive mechanics, advancing the golf game genre over the best available thing on any console market in 1987—which is to say, basically, Nintendo's aging Golf for NES.

This week brings us to our 50th (!) episode of Segaiden, which suggests that the "gaiden" part of the name has become a lie. And what more fitting subject with which to violate this semantic sanctity than with Zillion, the game whose title and license implies it should make use of the Light Phaser—but which doesn't? Yes, there is no truth in advertising when it comes to video games. Pretty good game, though, if unusually derivative of someone else's work. Sega usually works more discreetly with their clean room reverse-engineering. Speaking of advertising, this episode also bring us to parity with NES Works as we begin to take into consideration Sega's promotional efforts with its own in-house promotional newsletter (Sega Challenge/Team Sega) that would eventually evolve into a proper magazine (Sega Visions).

Fantasy Zone II arrives as the delicious filling in this week's terrible, terrible sandwich as Sega closes out its 1987 lineup with that ultimate game review cliché: A mixed bag. With the likes of Great Soccer and Great Basketball on hand, this is not so much closing the book on the year as it is driving a nail into its coffin. Once again, it's up to Opa Opa to save the day... with a little help from Team Sega, as it happens. On to 1988! You know, eventually.

A slightly spicy episode this week due to some racy historical background behind one of the featured games. In defiance of stereotypes, it's not the game with a bunch of schoolgirls on cover. This episode also contains a lie: It claims to be the final entry for 1987. This turns out not to be true! During production I realized I'd overlooked a few titles along the way, so next week ties a bow on 1987. Apologies for leading you astray. Anyway, I wouldn't recommend either of these games to friends, but in the tradition of classic Video Game History, both of these games are actually pretty interesting despite not necessarily being something you'd want to play in 2023. Sukeban Deka II combines an obvious knockoff (it really wants to be the Kunio games) with a surprising knockoff (it also wants to be Portopia). And the mahjong game, well, it's mahjong. But it looks really nice! And it's also the one presentable member of a family of smut-mongers.

OK, with THIS episode, we bring 1987 to a close. And 1985! It turns out my survey of Mark III games that never reached America overlooked two titles: The underwhelming co-op shooter Satellite 7, and Great Baseball. Yes, I know. I've already covered Great Baseball. But this was a different Great Baseball, because Sega never met a game historian they didn't want to confuse. Of greater interest this time around, we have 1987's two paddle-enhanced titles: Woody Pop and BMX Trial. Naturally, I also explain what the whole Paddle Controller thing is about (since that also didn't reach the U.S.) in service of discussing these tie-in titles, both of which shipped with the Japan-only analogue joypad as a pack-in. As for the games? Well, Woody Pop amounts to a clone of Arkanoid so similar to Taito's game that you could practically call it a reskin. And BMX Trial... well, it's much more unique. A top-down bike racer with branching paths, non-linear stage progression, and the ability to paddle y

Sega jets into 1988 with a new distributor and a pair of games that do what Sega did best on Master System: Namely, convert arcade games and create strong follow-ups to SG-1000 releases. After Burner doesn't pull off the Super Scaler-to-Master System adaptation trick quite as effectively as OutRun did, which is largely down to the more powerful arcade hardware behind After Burner's coin-op edition, but it still looks and plays a lot more impressively than any other console flight combat game at the time. Not that there were a lot. But still. As for Penguin Land, it's a top-flight puzzler... well, I guess "flight" isn't quite the word to use for a game about penguins. But it's quite good and has an interesting trick up its sleeve. As a treat.

Another arcade conversion? On Master System? Yes, it's more likely than you think. This time, however, Sega appears to have run out of eligible Super Scaler creations, so we have something that feels much better-suited to the hardware than After Burner did: Alien Syndrome. And yet for some weird reason, Sega's own home port of their own arcade hit plays less like the original coin-op than any other home version of the game, dropping the cooperative play, the free-scrolling stage layouts, and some of the moment-to-moment play mechanics. It's not bad, but it is a little underwhelming and really quite bizarre. Also this episode, we have an original Master System creation in Aztec Adventure, a game with some interesting ideas hampered by some hostile game mechanics.

Even as Konami was getting cheekily political on NES and in arcades with their audaciously titled "Contra," Sega cautiously dodges controversy by meekly retitling S.D.I.: Strategic Defense Initiative as "Global Defense" for Master System. Nice try, guys, but we all know the truth. Meanwhile, Zaxxon 3-D probably SHOULD have been given a different name, since it plays more like Zoom 909 with a few Zaxxon-esque embellishments.