1993 on a budget (this is a master system thread)

King of Posters
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everybody probably knows that by 1993, the master system was a budget console in the uk. i’m not sure such a concept even still exists! but the console itself was about £40, the price of a mega drive game, and master system games themselves were even cheaper.

i was just looking on smspower, and found this land of illusion poster from 1993. on the back of the poster, there’s a big ad for various games, priced at £9.99 and £14.99, and to be honest, though you’d definitely be jealous of 16-bit owners, you’d be eating well as a master system owner at this time!

first, the £9.99 games
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okay, so this isn’t a deep line up, but the highlights are pretty high. the ninja is a game i like a lot, a genetic forebear to gain ground. i haven’t played the master system version of mercs, but i’m going to assume that it is at least decent? same goes for alien storm. the multicart and rescue mission are weird choices for a budget line, since they’re only of use to people with a light gun, who probably already have at least one of them already. the real highlight, though, and the game that inspired me to make this thread: sagaia! that’s also known as darius ii! now, the master system version isn’t quite as good as the mega drive one, but it’s closer than you might think, and back in the small window of time before anyone got a good mega drive emulator working on the gp32, sms sagaia was a title that got a lot of playtime from me.

and the £14.99 range, which is a lot bigger
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while i’m a big proponent of mega drive altered beast, the master system port is absolute garbage. a lot of the characters aren’t even drawn to the same scale! it’s very obviously knocked out as cheaply and quickly as possible.
assault city is another light gun game, but it’s at least a lot more exciting and advanced than the ones mentioned above.
chase hq is fine, and the cyber shinobi isn’t too bad either, despite the hate it got in magazines at the time.
ghostbusters is a great version (maybe the best version?) of the game that was released on a bunch of 8-bit systems at the time.
psychic world is kind of generic, but there’s something about it that really catches my interest. the msx version is probably better though. running battle is a decent master system exclusive beat em up! the r-type port was, at the time, probably the best home version of the game you could get in the west. spellcaster is a cool platform/adventure hybrid. shinobi’s a port that’s fine, and a lot easier than the arcade original.

so uhh, i don’t really know the point of this thread. just that you could get some surprisingly good games for very little money 31 years ago. i might have to get a master system at some point, since for some reason (i guess it’s just not seen as cool enough?), most of the games are still dirt cheap in the uk, while every other old console’s prices have shot through the roof.

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Sometime I think about making homebrew (sometimes for the SMS), which in turn makes me think about how the economics of production then vs now mean that we will never see new cartridges for these systems sold at prices even close to this low.

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Wow, 1993 was a full decade into the hardware’s lifespan, seeing as how it is based on pretty much the same architecture as the ColecoVision (according to Jeremy Parish’s video series) and the games kind of feel similar, though Coleco devs were much less confident with the ability to do scaling convincingly.

I’m not sure if there was ever any sort of adapter for Game Gear games, but if there was that would be really neat.

Also, Mercs and R-Type are both great on master system

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Pedantic note: The Master System/Mark III (1985) is a half-generation improvement over the SG-1000 (1983). The main improvement is that instead of using a generic video chip from 1979, the Master System’s video chip was developed in-house by Sega themselves. (For reference, the Famicom’s video chip was developed in-house by Nintendo, which gave them a significant edge over their competition in 1983.)

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It’s funny, the Master System is utterly alien to me. I can’t picture the games in my mind’s eye. I don’t even know what the system or its peripherals look like.

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there’s adaptors to play master system games on the game gear, but an adaptor to do the reverse would need some extra hardware inside it or something, since the game gear can display more colours than the master system.

the console looks kind of like a building from blade runner!
when i think of “japanese videogames in the 80s”, the master system is where my mind goes. which doesn’t really make sense, since it was only ever popular outside japan. i guess it does have iconic 80s properties like hokuto no ken and sukeban deka on it, though.

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It didn’t achieve wide penetration in America. Very regional. I’m pretty sure I’ve never seen a real Master System in my life.

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I bought a master system for $30 at Toys R Us with Alex Kidd in Miracle World and Joe Montana Football. They just had a big pallet on clearance. Never saw one anywhere else in the wild before or since. Would have been around '93.

Later I’d get Golden Axe and Strider. No version of Golden Axe is actually good, but the MS version is particularly diminished. I enjoyed Strider well enough, not knowing any better.

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Games look kind of like NES with thick, black outlines on sprites.

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What I will always remember about the Master System, more so than the handful of times I got to play one, is that after the Genesis came out and was a hit in the States Sega decided to rerelease it again as the Master System II and… I remember there being a big pile of boxes of them at a Toys 'r Us around here that eventually got dusty, I’m not sure they ever sold a single one.

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the master system ii was a much more cheap model. iirc, it only had rf output, while the original model had composite? also it was a lot smaller, and was so light it felt hollow.

it might not have sold in the us, but it was massively popular in europe, since it’s the model that was the same price as a new mega drive game i mentioned in the first post. it usually came with either alex kidd or sonic built into it, too.

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ohh, Alex Kidd is “the default master system game” to me but I’ve never seen one with Sonic!

the cartridge port cover looks cool imo

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