Segaiden

We're back to Master System for a while, and folks, this was a rough reentry. I learned a lot about Master System hardware while trying to acquire literally ANY usable Rescue Mission footage at all—turns out this game is bizarrely hard to get working since it requires use of the Light Phaser but struggles to read the peripheral via my television on both real hardware and MiSTer. Special thanks to Mr. Porkchop of misteraddons.com for going to extra mile with me to figure out how to get the thing working (it gave his setup fits, too). Was it worth the trouble? Well, not really. Rescue Mission is charming and has some good ideas, but it is possibly the most frantic and unfairly-stacked-against-the-player light gun game this side of Revolution X. Eventually, Sega would discover the concept of a "continue feature," but that day is not today. Happily, Maze Hunter 3-D holds up a lot better! It's a different sort of 3D game, one that goes for the diorama effect rather than an immersive first

I know what you're thinking. "Jeremy, it would have made a lot more thematic sense for you to combine Maze Hunter 3-D and Fantasy Zone: The Maze into a single episode." Sure, but then I'd have ended up with an episode consisting of Rescue Mission and Parlour Games, and I'd lose thousands of subscribers overnight from sheer collective disgust. No, better to pair the good games with the bad and balance things out. Eh, that's not fair. Parlour Games isn't bad at all—it's a Compile game, how could it be? But it does feel a lot more uneven than Fantasy Zone: The Maze, a great home port of a great arcade game that combines two Sega legacy franchises into one thoughtfully crafted and thoroughly contemporary take on the maze-chase dot-gobbling format, which was feeling pretty creaky by 1988. I don't know that I've ever seen anyone sing the praises of Fantasy Zone: The Maze, and that's a damn shame—it's the kind of game that deserves to be immortalized through song and legend. Or at least th

Warning to sensitive viewers: This episode contains rapidly strobing 3D footage. I normally drop alternating frames on 3D games to minimize the effect, but in this case, the 3D imaging is central to the game's technical issues (which I did my best to explain despite being a layman). By mid-1988, the Master System had just about reached its second birthday... and, well, you know what they say about the "terrible twos." Here we have a string of second games in existing Master System franchises to prove the point. I wouldn't call either Space Harrier 3-D or Alex Kidd: The Lost Stars bad, but neither quite capture the excellence of Space Harrier or Alex Kidd: In Miracle World. In both cases, I feel that these failings result from the desire to chase an arcade-style experience, though each game falls short for entirely different reasons. Space Harrier 3-D makes questionable use of the Sega 3-D Glasses, while Alex Kidd abandons the rich design of its console-based predecessor in pursuit o

Another Master System sequel arrives, and once again it doesn't really live up to the standard of its predecessor. The original Zillion gave the Master System one of its most involving action games, a platform adventure inspired by Epyx's Impossible Mission but which improved on the existing gameplay template in impressive ways. Zillion II does not do that. A much simpler game, it abandons the adventure and exploration elements in favor of straightforward auto-scrolling combat and vehicular action. That said, it is one of the best-looking games ever produced for the system, so that surely counts for something.

Sega's other mascot gets his own sequel, too. No, not Alex Kidd. What? I don't mean Opa-Opa. I'm talking about Wonder Boy, baby. Fresh from his tropic island paradise, Wonder Boy has abandoned the grass skirt and stone axes of his first adventure in favor of... full body armor? A succession of castle-forged steel blades? Magic spells?! Honestly, if this game weren't called "Wonder Boy" right there in the title, you'd assume it was a different game altogether. But I guess Westone and Sega wanted to tap into a growing game design trend and said, "Hey, we have an existing brand to tap into." It worked for Zelda, I guess. Or rather, Link. The Zelda series. You know what I mean. Wonder Boy in Monster Land builds on a minor arcade and console design trend in a pretty solid way. It's not just respectable, it breaks the depressing streak of crappy Sega Master System sequels that decided to impose itself on the console in the middle of 1988. Well done, Wonder Boy. You truly are a... wonder.

We are halfway through the Master System library. Well, more or less. About halfway. It's close? Look, Segaiden is an art, not a science. The point is, this presents us with a golden opportunity to pause, look back at the journey so far, and remember the best times. Also, the worst times. Because light means nothing without dark, good cannot exist without evil, and best games have no weight if not balanced against worst games. So please join me for this momentary breather of video game history and celebrate the finest creations for Master System so far. And the bad ones, too. And be sure to look forward to the back half of SMS Works, because the best (and worst!!) is yet to come.

Sega delivers a convincing Master System conversion of one of its most striking arcade hits, tweaking the coin-op game's design in small ways that made for a more console-friendly experience. We've seen similar revisions made to previous Master System games, too, but the difference is that those games weren't Shinobi. A fast-paced platform shooter, Shinobi saw Sega offering its own take on a burgeoning format of the time. It arrived a little later than most of the big breakout titles in the genre, but that just meant that Sega had time to learn from everyone else's missteps and deliver a nearly flawless take on the genre. It also underscores the company's most direct rivalry... no, not Nintendo.

Here's a sight: Not one but TWO games for Master System that have already appeared in other video works productions. Both Spy Vs. Spy and Shanghai either had appeared or would eventually appear on a Nintendo platform at the time of their launch for Master System, but in a wild and unexpected twist of events, these were the versions to play. Spy Vs. Spy actually appeared simultaneously on Master System and NES, but this version includes quite a bit more content (read: twice as many levels) and a much richer screen interface that works more like the microcomputer original than the mediocre port that Kemco offered up. Not a bad farewell to the Sega Card format. As for Shanghai, the game never made it to NES, so Nintendo fans received it instead via HAL Laboratory. There's no such thing as a bad HAL game (probably), but that version of Shanghai had to overcome the logistics of working on a small, monochromatic screen, which is why most people just play it with the alphanumeric tile set i

This episode brings us two brave attempts by the Master System development cadre to create visually spectacular gaming experiences despite the fact that the console just didn't have enough juice under the hood to realize those aspirations. Sega promised arcade-quality experiences at home, but the gulf between their arcade tech and the Master System's aging architecture has really begun to make itself felt at this point. To their credit, the unnamed and uncredited programmers and designers laboring to create the Master System library give it their best shot here! They change up some fundamental elements of Thunder Blade to better fit the console space, adding new patterns and behaviors for enemies while redefining the basic scroll behavior of the action. I don't know that those revisions work, but you can at least respect the effort. And Blade Eagle 3-D... well, it's a 3-D game. But did it NEED to be 3-D? Out of all the 3-D "SuperScope" games, this one probably could have used a hidde

Whether you're conquering them with spin kicks or rent increases, this week's Master System pairing is all about taking charge of the streets. This is not a strictly chronological pairing, mind you, but I've kinda skipped over Monopoly for a few episodes because I've developed a real distaste for the source property (in reality, about two months separated the arrival of these two games). My dislike of Monopoly is not a knock on the Master System release, because it does a bad thing well. There's merit to that. But if you've got 10 friends who want to sit around the TV and take turns playing video games, why not skip Monopoly and do five consecutive sessions of Double Dragon? Unlike the better-known NES release, this version of Double Dragon sticks close to the arcade original... that means cooperative multiplayer! And also super-cheap enemies who get attack priority and make the whole thing feel deeply unfair. Well. So it goes, I guess. You take the good with the bad... as the fact t

Well, well, well, what have we here? It looks like Sega has taken a step back for a moment and gotten a read on the changing shape of the video games industry as a whole, which leads us to Kenseiden: Perhaps the first game for Master System clearly designed as a conscious effort to do the Nintendo/NES thing rather than trying to fit a Sega arcade-sized experience into a tiny console-shaped box. No, Kenseiden dials down the pace of the action from the usual coin-op-style mania we've come to expect from Sega and conspicuously imitates Konami's methodical Castlevania games. The NES (or maybe MSX?) Castlevanias, mind you, not Haunted Castle. Make no mistake; Kenseiden still includes some of the testicle-punching difficulty that is Sega's stock-in-trade, no question about it. But, miracle of miracles, those difficult parts are—wait for it—optional. This feels like a real turning point for the Master System, the system's clean break from "arcade experiences at home, more or less" to "on-tr

Take a peep into an alternate reality where Sega's 8-bit home console developers were given the time and resources to explore a project to its conclusion and buff it up to a spit shine. Phantasy Star towers head and shoulders above everything released on the console to this point—and, frankly, it handily crushes about 95% of competing console releases from the era, too. A fully realized work that brings a new level of narrative sophistication and audio-visual fidelity to the role-playing genre, Phantasy Star sees the creative luminaries of the Master System development world collaborate on a great-looking take on the RPG with no actual flaws to speak of. About the only criticism you can level at Phantasy Star is that the balancing makes it a bit of a slog... but that's true of every RPG from the late ’80s, and has been tidily remedied with modern patches and remasters. It's one of the few 8-bit creations that truly holds up today.