Club Retro 2019: Master System March

Even if you could name 100 good to great NES games, that's still less than 10%. It still makes good NES games the exception. I'm also pretty sure you'd have to pad the list with a lot of dubious games to reach 100, but that, as you pointed out, is strictly subjective. Personally, I constantly see bad NES games given a pass for things that would never be forgiven on another system, mostly because they're long-standing "classics" and have an established reputation that pushes people to minimize their issues, or people have been playing them since they were kids and either don't notice or minimize the flaws and problems. I see people on message boards dismiss lesser-known games entirely for having "moon jumps" or any other unpopular variation of jumps, but Castlevania gets a pass for its godawful stiff weirdo arc jump? Or the ridiculous knockback everytime you get hit, causing the character to literally jump backwards to his death all the time in the most unjustified trolling fashion? 

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When I say the got serious around '87, I'm referring to the software specifically. The quality and ambition of the Master System games they made during those last two years of its Japanese run is markedly higher, and there are things that suggest that developers were allocated more time to work on them than before, including various comments in interviews. Developers were also starting to get a better grip on what worked and didn't, so naturally they made better games. 

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I played Golden Axe Warrior years ago, and remember souring on it as well once I got deeper into it. There were things I liked about it initially, like the fact it had towns, and the way some items were hidden about, but it was probably also the combat that ended up pissing me off. I had a similar experience with the two Neutopia games. Then again, I'm not a fan of pre-Link's Awakening Zelda, so of course I'm gonna like the clones even less.

Let's face it, the quality-to-crap ratio was not good in the 8-bit era. I'd say nearly every system had its share of garbage, although the overwhelming success of the NES led to a situation similar to the Wii. Lots of folks trying to cash in with what amounted to shovelware.

And 100 games, just on the US side, is an easy target to hit.

As an example of the dearth of great games on Master System, I think it's worth looking at the list that Retro Sanctuary put together.  They actually did a top 100, and just looking at the aggregate quality, there are very, very few titles on that list that hit the quality level of their NES list, choices I wouldn't make aside.  And while one might be tempted to chalk it up to nostalgia (especially given my reputation around here!), many of the NES games in question I didn't have access to until I was well into my adult years.

Anyway, I actually played through another SMS game, and it's Sonic Chaos.  I left some impressions before, but I'll add a few more.  While the levels are short, there are lots of opportunities to stock up on rings and get to those bonus stages.  I'm not sure it makes any difference getting the emeralds, though?  The ending was pretty bare-bones.  The game also got more fun when I wasn't ring-hunting, although again, the stages were ridiculously short.  You can hit the goal without even trying hard in around a minute.

Adding to my frustration is how small the ring hit-boxes are!  I mean, the Genesis version has easy-to-collect rings, but this one?  You've got to be lined up just right.  I honestly don't understand why you'd make the primary collectible so difficult to collect.

One other gripe is the amount of slowdown.  There's a lot of it.  A lot of it.  Just jumping causes slowdown, and it's not even very consistent slowdown, either.  It's very annoying, and makes the somewhat finicky platforming even more finicky.  The SMS can do better than this!  Perhaps the issue is because of Aspect handling development, not Sega.  The SMS Sonic has slowdown as well, but feels much smoother overall.  Maybe another part is that the game wasn't properly optimized for the larger display area of the SMS vs. the Game Gear version, although Wikipedia says that the Game Gear version was released a month after the SMS one.  They'd have to be developed side-by-side, I'd think; it's not like there are major architectural hurdles to clear there.

I know that's a lot of negative, but I also don't think Sonic Chaos counts as a bad game.  I just think it really suffers in comparison to its 16-bit brothers.  It also doesn't help that I'm not a massive fan, with my opinion of the Genesis games topping out at around an 8/10.  While this is a cut below, it's still an admirable effort to squeeze the experience on an 8-bit system, and it was probably even more impressive if you were playing it portably.  I'd say this one clocks in at a 6/10, maybe a 6.5.  Definitely worth your time if you like Sonic, though!

I think a big part of it is that a lot of genres were just beginning to define themselves. Once a genre is firmly established, it's much easier to produce an example of it that is at least decent, because developers at large have a good idea of the big dos and don'ts. For example, look at the very first wave of fighting game post-SF2, where even major developers like Namco put out mediocrities games like Knuckleheadz, then compare it to how even the most run-of-mill devs knew how to make a serviceable fighter by 1994. I think that phenomenon happened more frequently in the 8-bit days, and resulted in a lot of failed attempts at doing something good, rather than just plain shovelware (of which there was also a lot, and still is). 

bonesnapdeez My favorite SMS game is Zillion 2. I haven't found anything on the NES that fast and intense and arcade-like. I like Kenseiden a lot, too. Again, pretty unique game. It gets compared to Castlevania, but it's really nothing like it; if anything, it's closer to Genpei Toma Den, if that game wasn't borderline unplayable. I also like most games Kotaro Hayashida was involved with. He was probably the closest thing to a star developer on the Master System, having created Alex Kidd and acted as lead designer of Phantasy Star and Zillion.

Akira Nishitani's thinking with Street Fighter 2 was mostly "Street Fighter is not fun. How can we make it fun?" He was also handed the project as an outsider, not having worked on the first game, so it's great that it turned out as well as it did. If you've never read his interview on shmuplations, I really recommend it. He's outspoken and interesting.

Parallel to that, the people that had actually made the first Street Fighter had also thought long and hard about how to fix it, and the result was Fatal Fury. So without the failure of the original Street Fighter, it's unlikely either games could have existed. But I was really talking about how most of the developers who tried making their own SF2-clone immediately after it came out failed to varying degrees (the exception being SNK, but that's also because they weren't actually trying to copy SF2 - they were trying to correct SF1). I kind of like Konami's Martial Champions, but I'm in the minority; no one likes Namco's Knuckleheadz or Sega's Burning Rivals, and most people will admit that the first Mortal Kombat was not really a good game, to name a few.