Today, I got in the mood to play a Sega Master System game. I made a mistake and chose Sonic the Hedgehog. This has to one of the worst ones. I prefer Spinball and 3D Blast over this. I will say the backgrounds are nice and I like how they make Robotnik look. What’s wrong with it? Instead of an explosion of rings when I get hit, there’s only a single blinking one. I can’t pick it up either. The game slows down all of the time, the platform detection is so off, and I’m never allowed to carry rings into boss fights. Walking on or in water is so slow and unbearable.
Would you believe that this game has it’s own Labyrinth Zone? Sicko trash right there. Underwater most of the time, multiple pathways that meet dead ends, springs that launch me into spikes. The Scrap Brain Zone that follows it up is just as bad. I immediately fell into a pit because I was used to how slow Labyrinth Zone was. It’s another maze zone with a bunch of switches and one-way doors. I spent a good five minutes stuck at two doors before I realized I had to go all the way around the level to actually make it through the second one. The bonus stages aren’t even interesting! I found out that chaos emeralds are just hidden in a stage. I watched a video of what happens if you collect them all and it just makes some clouds go away. I’m so mad at Sonic right now!
i really like master system sonic 1! but i’ve only played as far as jungle zone and have never experienced the horrors of the labyrinth zone
today i went to an actual arcade! obviously, i played a bunch of stuff, but i want to talk about two videogame/piinball hybrids.
baby pac man is the one that’s probably best known. it’s a stand up cabinet with a small monitor up top, and a small pinball table in the middle. on the monitor, you play a version of pac-man with no power pills and a different maze for each stage. the stages also have exits at the bottom, and going through the exits lets you play on the pinbal table for like 10 seconds before the flippers locks and you’re sent back to the maze. it’s weird, and i’d love to be able to figure out a strategy for it, but there’s no home ports, and it’s not really something you can emulate.
the other is video pinball, from 1978. this is a very strange and unique cabinet. there’s black liight-looking disco-themed art, like you might expect from a late 70s pinball table, and there’s a bunch of lactualy little lights and target and things in there, too. but the ball, flippers, and score display are pixels projected onto the “table” using a mirror. it sounds like a stupid and pointless gimmick, but it’s amazingly effective, with the use of sounds and vibration, it kind of successfully tricks you brain into thinking that the whibe blob moving around in there is a real ball! very impressive!
and i guess the point of it would have been to offer a low-cost pinball table that only takes up the space of a regular standup cabinet to bar owners etc.
Jungle Zone is where it starts getting nasty. The second act is a platforming challenge where jumping makes the screen scroll up. It does not scroll back down. If I missed a ledge or landed on a ledge I didn’t think I was going to, I would just die. It’s the stage where I let go of all decorum and started rewinding every time I died.
Immediately after playing Sonic the Hedgehog, I decided I should play something good or else I might start resenting the Master System. I chose Power Strike II and it appears I chose well. It’s a late game for the console, released in 1992. It’s Compile, so there’s lots of weapons and confetti.
When I first started it, I thought I had switched it onto Easy mode, “Level 1 - Crush.” I thought, “that means the game is gonna have a crush on me.” It actually meant that the game was going to be incredibly difficult. All enemies spewed bullets out on death, on top of the extra shots they took. I could not make it far and thought I might have been picking up too many power-ups, that the game had AI difficulty and I should be getting hit more often. It took me about a half hour to fix that mistake and then I beat it on Normal. It’s fantastic!
Try Wonder Boy in Monster Land. It’s the secret best game on the master system IMO and there’s nothing else like it (especially not the Wonder Boy sequels/remakes, which have a totally different and more well-trodden philosophy). As a kid I was always eager to visit my Sega Master System friend to play it. Posted about what it’s like here.
fyi, GG Aleste 1 and 2, despite also being localized with the Power Strike moniker, are completely different games than their SMS counterparts. (by my money, GG Aleste 2 has the most sublime music to come from the SMS’s ruddy sound chip)
why do i keep playing far cry 5 is the question i keep asking myself while playing a lot of far cry 5. it’s kind of wild how the most Designed parts of this feel the worst? all the on rails story stuff is a slog full of multiple restarts due to weird bugs killing me while just driving around clearing out camps and doing side quests is also buggy as hell but frequently hilarious. they should’ve leaned into that more!
amazed they wanted full price for this at launch lmao
to this day i wanna know whoever greenlit “the entire plot is communicated to you through forced capture cutscenes” and why because seriously what the fuck
fuck i know, i’m like the target market for a forced capture cutscene and i’m so bored by them! at least send some terrifying super soldier to throw me around instead of this stun dart nonsense
@Rudie told me he was playing Marvel Land because I had implanted the idea to play Marvel Land in his head at some point in the timestream so now I’ve played through Marvel Land twice in as many days and being astounded by how actually fucked up parts of it are
OK one more tough area after this I finally expanded my party size to 3! Onwards to Hell and probably some kind of second world of ruin/spirits past that
As a Retro Gamer and a Disneyland-Nerd I appreciated a lot of the level design. Will play it more later.
Also played Dahma also for the Megadrive. That is a god damn Megadrive video game. It has a level select code which is the hook to let me the dad play the game more. Excited to play more of it. Maybe I’ll even try to get good at it.
It was a Big Gaming Week as I also got to go to Mikado. As I said last year, Outrunners is incredible. After Burner Climax remains one of my favorite games ever.
Playing Arkanoid as intended is a treat. Dangerous Seed might be my favorite early Namco shooter and the one that is much less well known than the others.
I tried Milk-chan on an EXE-Arcadia machine (lol) and you got one guess what it is. If you somehow guessed Getting Up-like you won.
Even in a blown out dying CRT, arcade games remain perfect. Made sure to play things I didn’t know this time. Dark Mist is a scrolling action RPG by Taito that is broken but I loved it and got very far on one credit.
Gholly Ghost is incredible. It is ghosts projected on too a real diorama that opens doors and toilets and the bed shakes. Stuff like this letting me know “emulation just can’t do it.”
Now to stop myself from buying the 500 dollar modern lightgun to be happy, for once.
Tried playing Need For Speed The Run and I had to set up a custom firewall rule for it to prevent it connecting to EA’s defunct Autolog service, otherwise the game softlocks. Hell it softlocks after I quit and I can’t launch anything else from EA’s launcher. I would describe Need For Speed The Run as literally it’s a Gritty Reboot of Cruzin’ USA. You go from West to East across America. The mob’s after you. There’s quicktime events. This was around the time EA insisted every game be made in the Frostbyte engine so you have BlackBox doing their very best at turning an FPS engine into a Racing Game.
Also did a bit more of The Saboteur and by that I mean enough to get past the first mission so I could save and skip the introduction. The game is not playing nice with my Xbone controller, I may have to dig out an Xbox 360 controller (again, sigh) because compatibility might be better. I think if this game didn’t try to go for graphical fidelity in the year 2009 and went for something more stylized it would aged a little better. This game also crashes if you set the video resolution to the highest it goes. Also on PC you have to set the video options via a separate application, but you can switch nudity on and off in the in-game menu. You can punch nazis in this game, that’s good!
