Club Retro 2019: Master System March

Well so far in Dragon Crystal SMS version, I've made it to floor 23. This game's getting brutal at this point. Main issue are enemies that can permanently lower your attack value, as well as other enemies that can destroy your armor in one hit. Trust me, that shit will make you rage. All pretense of fairness has started to evaporate. Thankfully this game allows continues, as long as you have the in-game currency to pay for it. Unfortunately when you do continue, you just get to keep your currently equipped sword and armor, and that's it.

Edit: "Paradin"

I kind of liked Fatal Labyrinth (which is actually this game's prequel, and not the other way around), but Dragon Crystal always seemed harsher, even in the beginning.

Another thing I've read about the Master System's success in Europe is that it owed a lot to the fact that distribution was taken over by Virgin, which was absolutely massive in those countries (we say Europe, but it's mostly France, the UK and Germany), and marketed it much more adeptly than Tonka did in the US. Of course the fact that the NES hadn't caught on helped; the gaming market up to that point, especially in the UK, was all Commodore 64, Spectrum and the arcades, and most of those arcade-to-micro ports were abysmal.

Reminds me of how some store sold my mother a Saturn with a copy of Dragon's Lair on Sega CD back in the '90s. The good news is it also had the Christmas '96 trio (Virtua Fighter 2, Virtua Cop, Daytona USA).

I literally had no idea the Master System even existed for a few years as a kid. Everyone had a NES, then everyone switched to a Genesis or SNES, and I thought the Genesis was Sega's first system. The first I heard of the Master System was when a friend of mine mentioned that his grandmother had one in her cottage (which had probably belonged to one of her sons or some other relative) at some point, probably around 1994, but it wasn't working. Then my brother went to France on a school trip and came back with game magazines that featured a few reviews for SMS games, confirming it was real. Similarly, I only knew of one kid who owned a Turbografx-16, and I never got to try it. By the time I started reading US game mags, neither system was getting any coverage.

This will obviously date me, but I knew it existed from the Sears toy catalogs we'd get for Christmas. I even remember there being a listing for Black Tiger for NES in there, but that's one that never materialized. Too bad, too, because I really like the arcade game!

I had a similar experience when I bought my Saturn off of eBay back in the early 2000s. Got the package, and a couple of the games (and controllers) were 3DO games. Furthermore, I noticed that the sellers had found a couple more games and listed them after I won my auction, and they just happened to be Shining the Holy Ark and Legend of Oasis. Yeah, I had them fix it by taking back the wrong games and giving me those instead. It worked out, but I remember wording my email a little more strongly than I normally would have, which kinda makes me feel bad. But the screwup was theirs, not mine! I'm just weird like that.

@tsumuri: Brazil also has ridiculously punitive import taxes.  If a system wasn't manufactured there (which is what Sega did with their TecToy agreement), it cost a crapton of money.  It still happens to this day, with the PS4 being just shy of $2000 to start.  Not sure if they ever set up any manufacturing there for it after launch.