NES vs Sega Master System: My Personal Opinion

No matter where you may stand on the whole Nintendo vs Sega debate, there are two indisputable facts when it comes to their 8-bit systems: Nintendo’s NES was far more successful, but Sega’s Master System was more powerful. With Nintendo’s NES coming out approximately 9 months before Sega’s Master System, Nintendo was headlong into building up popularity for their NES, but in that time Sega made the Master System more powerful. Even so, with Nintendo’s tight grasp on licensing games for the NES, marketing manners and many other factors, the Master System, sadly, never stood a chance.

I must admit that the Master System wasn’t as high on my list of wanted consoles as say.. the NES top loader, but it was always there. As research for the system, I spent countless hours studying video game comparison for the few games that were released for both the NES and the Master System, with the Master System version almost always looking the best. I had always hoped to acquire a Sega Master System (or Power Base converter for my Genesis 1) on a vintage gaming hunt, but sadly I had only found one at Disc Replay and one at an indoor flea market, both of which were priced too high for the thrift hunter within.

Being fed up with waiting I decided to just go ahead and pay a little more than I normally would, just to own the system and see what it was all about. After spending some time with both the actual system and some emulation, just to get a feel for what the games I don’t own felt like, I was surprised at how much I enjoyed the Master System. Although I now love the Sega Master System, that doesn’t mean it doesn’t have it’s faults, chief among which is the pause button being built into the console, instead of conveniently on the controller.

Another issue is the standard look that almost all of the game boxes and cartridge labels have, instead of flashy artwork it all seems pretty stock and boring. Finally, and it may seem trivial, but the cartridges are pretty hard to get out of the system. There is very little sticking out to grasp on to, which seems to result in transferring sweat and grease to the cartridge’s label, which seemingly helps it deteriorate.

I do, however, quite enjoy the D-pad on the Master System’s controller, a full 8 directional, concave pad that I find to be very comfortable. The 1 and 2 buttons on the controller are large, comfortable and number 1 doubles as the Start button, again perhaps there should have been a single start/pause button (like the Genesis!), but that is well past debate. The Sega Light Phaser feels much better than the NES Zapper, and for some unexplainable reason, makes shooting games more fun!

Now lets talk about games. The Master System’s library is nearly half that of the NES, which some may think that would cut down on the junk, and you’d be wrong. The Master System does have it’s share of pure gems such as; Golden Axe Warrior, Ys, Out Run, Hang On and quite a few more, but it also had it’s share of complete trash. And when I say a game is trash, it was completely unplayable. Albeit, I was using the emulation to test most games, and I did test a few games I now own and hated them on emulation, yet love them once the controller is in my hands. Let that last sentence stand for itself.

Overall I find it sad that the Sega Master System seems to be a massively overlooked system. The games that are good, are great, but sadly the games that are bad are terrible! My only true gripe goes back to the Pause button being mounted within the console itself and not on the controller. The thrift hunter within me is mostly upset that I’ve never seen a single Sega Master System game anywhere other than Disc Replay, so snagging them at a good price is going to be impossible, but at least finding them isn’t.

Sam’s Scores: Pick ups #2!

The Art of Cheating

With the Thanksgiving holiday come and gone, I’ve had time to reflect on one of my favorite Thanksgiving memories. This one has nothing to do with gathering at the table with family, nor does it have to do with the actual holiday itself, this one is video game related. It was on Thanksgiving, when I was much younger, that I beat Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Arcade Game for the NES, using cheat codes. Although I cheated it was still an outstanding feeling to have beaten the game, and even the ability to cheat and bypass parts or unlocked parts of games has it’s own euphoria that goes along with it.

Throughout the life of many gaming systems cheating has been a simple way to unlock things you’re not suppose to see yet, and sometime things you were never suppose to see at all. Cheating comes in the form of a special code entered through the controller at a certain place within the game or through cheat devices such as the Game Genie, Game Shark or the Action Replay. Whatever your chosen method, if you cheated at a game, you had way more fun than you did simply following the rules.

It is said that codes were originally used by the developers to test the game fully, without having to play all the way through. As time went on cheat codes seemingly turned into more of a bonus for the players, rather than a tool for the developers. Websites started popping up all over the internet to database these cheat codes, but as systems became out dated most sites dumped the older systems in favor of the new ones, making finding cheat codes for vintage games somewhat of a task.

I’m not saying its impossible to find the codes for the vintage games, with sites like GameWinners.com still supporting all the way back to the Atari 2600, its just harder to find the sites who have kept an accurate list of codes on their sites without removing them to make room for the newer stuff, or being overloaded with fake codes. Today I like to enjoy a game all the way through before I test out some cheat codes. There is just something about using codes to do almost anything within a game that makes it almost like a whole new game, and sometimes it literally can!

Sam’s Scores: Pick up video!

Thats right, I have gone youtube! Not always, but I felt that this score deserved a bigger presentation. If you’re a fan of pick up videos, you may enjoy mine. This doesn’t mean I’ve abandoned the article based Sam’s Scores, this just means I’m going a little more visual than articles will allow. Enjoy!

Sam’s Scores IV

The fourth edition of Sam’s Scores is upon us and there are many more scores to show!

4) – King’s Quest VI & Lamborghini American Challenge
Admittedly, I’m not a PC gamer, but that doesn’t mean I don’t enjoy them, I am just more of a console person. Usually while searching through CDs for misplaced or mistaken Playstation games, I often find PC games thrown in as well. There aren’t many titles I actively search for, but you never know what you’ll find in a thrift store CD bin. King’s Quest is completely new to me, but I had heard of the name before so I picked it up. Now, I’ve had a fond past with Lamborghini American Challenge release on the Super Nintendo, so I was well aware of what this game was and knew I had to have it, even though I still prefer the SNES version.

3) – Sega Genistick
The Sega Genistick is a joystick controller with integrated A, B and C buttons as well as the Start and a turbo feature, much like the Quickshot joysticks. Oddly enough, this looks almost identical to the Quickshot QS-177 for the Sega Genesis, with gray buttons instead of blue. This sat on the shelf for a week or so before I went in and bought it during a discount week, not a bad price….

2) – Mario Party 2 and WCW Mayhem N64
I’ve been buying any game I can for my N64, I love that thing! Even though some games are pretty lousy, if I get them cheap enough I don’t feel bad adding them to my collection. N64 games don’t pop up all that often at the thrift stores I frequent, but when they do I try to get my hands on them unless I already own them. If I don’t know a title, I’m not afraid to check it out because the price is always pretty inexpensive.

1) – N64 Tremor pak CIB
As always, like above, I’m on the look out for N64 accessories, controllers, memory cards, anything really. Back in the day, Performance was making accessories for anything they could and N64 was a hot ticket. When I came across one of their Tremor Paks (complete in box no less!) I was pretty excited, especially by the price. Sadly, when I brought it home the previous owner had left the batteries inside to corrode and leak, with a little cleaning and coaxing it trembled to life in my controller and everything turned out alright.

NES Cleaner Project

NES cleaning kits come in many forms, and over the years I’ve owned a few different kinds. Yesterday I acquired an old Doc’s Fix a System cleaning set that included a broken NES cleaning head. The NES cleaner would clip into any of your NES cartridges and you could senselessly stab your NES until it was clean.

Since the NES cleaner was broken I figured it was trash, until I had a brain storm. Why not put it into a spare NES cartridge and make it look like an NES game? Genius! At least I thought so.

I decided to use my (non-converter bearing) Gyromite cartridge for the cleaner’s new home, as it had done nothing but take up space anyway. I first removed the game’s ROM board and then modified the cleaning head to fit inside the cartridge. I also had to modify the cartridge to allow the whole thing to close properly. Everything went smoothly and turned out great.

This is a simple project if you have both items laying around, and it only took me about 10 minutes. If I had the right tools it may have taken less, but the success was the main goal and that is what I achieved. All I need to do now is remove the Gyromite label and replace it with my own concoction.

NES sized Gameboy game cases?

In the years prior to my hardcore vintage collecting addiction, I paid most of my attention to my Xbox. Within the last year and a half I’ve bought quite a few games for the NES, and when the games started to pile up I went searching for cases to put them in. All my NES games prior to this were in their own cases, whether it be a clear case with a big red Nintendo logo or a yellow, pink, purple or blue case that said Gameboy on it.

Wait, did I just say NES games in a Gameboy case? Yes, yes I did! Somewhere among my childhood I had acquired four Gameboy cases that were the same size as the NES (clam shell) cases.

The camera washed out the colors terribly, they're actually "1990's" LOUD!

I forget exactly where I got them and with all the local NES games that were floating around back then I could have gotten them from anywhere, but the fact is that I still have them. It came to me one night that I had a collection of game manuals stashed away inside one of them, so I started ripping through boxes to find out where they were. After I found them a whole new level of amazement dawned on me, which for some reason never dawned on me before, that I had never seen these things before and haven’t seen any since.

What I find remarkable is that these things are the exact same size and color as their NES counterparts, but emblazoned on the front is a black Gameboy logo, instead of Nintendo. Inside the case were 4 tiny corners, clearly cut out to fit a Gameboy game cartridge. I’m going to make a bold assumption that these were produced to accommodate the Gameboy players who wanted to keep the manuals with their games, as the manuals fit better in these cases than they would the smaller ones, obviously!

Size comparison

Sadly NES games wouldn’t fit inside these cases without a little modification, which I eventually did. Looking back I wish I hadn’t, but I needed more NES cases because I had plenty of the tiny Gameboy clam shells. You can still see the remnants of the corners that held the Gameboy game, but NES games and their manuals fit perfectly, although they do slide around a bit (sans the protection the Nintendo version afforded).

A little hard to see, so I tried to point them out.

I can’t find information on these cases anywhere, so I have no clue how many were made and how many different colors were available. To my knowledge there may only be 4 different colors because I have been fooled by VHS cases that are the exact same colors as these, while gaming hunting, but I’ve never seen anymore for the Gameboy. I would love to own a full set of these (unmodified!), although I probably won’t use them for Gameboy games, I just want to own them because I find them fascinating.

Sam’s Scores: SNES Jr. (aka SNES 2)

It seems lately that I’ve had a lot of luck on my thrift store hunts. I’m either finding huge scores, or nothing at all. You might remember the $5 Atari Jaguar I got about a month ago, well today I’m going to present to you my Super Nintendo Jr. find!

I’ve owned a normal Super Nintendo for about 12 years, but the poor thing rarely gets much love. I am a MASSIVE RPG fan and as we know the SNES’s library was rife with great RPGs, but that also means these games are either impossibly difficult to find or amazingly expensive! That isn’t to say my SNES game collection is small, I just haven’t been focusing as much time on it as I have my regular NES collection.

When I do find SNES games they’re generally sports titles, although I did score Batman Returns at a flea market a few weeks ago, which will be part of it’s own article later. Needless to say my SNES collection exists, but it isn’t as great as I wish it could be.

So every Tuesday my schedule is pretty much the same as I hit a handful of places and usually find little to nothing, but on some occasions I find great deals! The store where I found the SNES Jr is pretty hit or miss with what they have, but that day I walked along the electronics wall and saw it sitting in a clear plastic tub with 2 controllers, the power supply and the AV cable. When I went to pick the tub up, I noticed it was all taped to a shoe box underneath. I gave the box a shake and the unmistakable sound of SNES cartridges clanking around poured out of the box.

I saw the price tag and I needed to make sure it was all one price, even though it was all taped together. I found the nearest employee, who almost started having a childhood flashback right there in the store, who told me that yes it was that price and that I should probably go test it on their TVs, which I promptly did! The system had Tetris Attack already plugged in and ready to go. After getting everything hooked up the system powered on and Tetris Attack started working perfectly!

I didn’t even know what games were in the box until I got out of the store and gave them all a good once over. There was a total of 12 games, which I will be listing in the spoiler below, and sadly none of them were RPGs as I had highly hoped. Luckily most of the games that came with it are well worth the purchase, especially one in particular. The controllers included are 2 SNES controller variants I had never seen before, the SNS102 (embedded Nintendo logo instead of printed) and a normal controller with a painted L and R on the shoulder buttons.

I’ve only seen the SNES Jr on two or three occasions at Disc Replay, and even though I think they ask about $55 for the system alone they never seem to stay in stock for too long. My main goal in hunting has been to snag an NES 2, but I’m still searching high and low. Hopefully soon I’ll be able to pair one with this system, it can only be a matter of time, eh?

Driver 1 & 2

two·fer (noun) \ˈtü-fər\ – Two articles available for the price of one.

With the recent release of Driver: San Fransisco, I figured I would take the time to review the origins of the series. Both Driver 1 and 2 were given their own individual releases for the Playstation, but were also later released together as a twin pack. Driver was originally released in 1999, Driver 2 in late 2000 and the twin pack in 2004. All three of these also saw a release as the Greatest Hits series.

In the Driver series you play as Tanner, an undercover cop with exceptional driving skills who puts them to good use to bring down crime syndicates. In both games you’ll be presented with the same premise, to perform different driving based tasks to accomplish your goal without totaling your vehicle.

There are 3 base modes to play: Driving games, Take a Ride and Undercover. Driving games offers short driving missions that are based on what you’ll be doing undercover, so you can use these to brush up on your skills or just enjoy making and beating high scores. Take a Ride is where you get to openly explore and roam each city. Undercover is the main story mode of the series.

Each game gives you four different cities to explore as you progress in your undercover missions. The original Driver offers Miami, Los Angeles, San Francisco and New York while Driver 2 takes you internationally to Havana, Cuba, Rio de Janeiro as well as Chicago and Las Vegas. These cities are expansive, wide open and they’ve done a good job of making you feel like you’re actually driving around these cities.

Driver is fairly simple and although you’re playing as Tanner you never really play any character, as much as you’ll be driving around assuming Tanner is behind the wheel. The cities are fun to explore with plenty of hidden areas and jumps to find but the roads are all straight and nothing more. In Take a Ride mode you can choose Day or Night in all but Los Angeles, as well as you’ll be limited to one vehicle to explore each city in.

Driver 2 is much the same as Driver, but it’s gameplay is a bit more polished. A very useful feature in Driver 2 is the ability to exit vehicles (as long as the cops aren’t on your tail), making missions and exploring the cities even more fun as now you can ditch a nearly wrecked vehicle for any other vehicle on the streets, as well as find switches to unlock hidden areas and cars. The four new cities are once again expansive and this time the roads actually bend and curve, adding a nice touch of realism. Take a Ride, this time, offers a handful of different vehicles to start exploring each city in, or you can just take anything else driving around.

The Driver series was among the leading edge of open world games, allowing you to explore on your own terms and throwing a lot of interesting twists in along the journey. Although the series has expanded as the gaming systems have, I have to say Driver 2 is my favorite. Despite Driver 2′s graphics being a bit grittier than the original, the fact that it doesn’t really make much use of the ability to exit your vehicle and sometimes the frame rate can drop pretty drastically, it still retains the true heart of the Driver series, which seems to have been lost after the first two installments.

Wario’s Woods

Nintendo’s last game for the NES. Usually by the end of life on a game system, developers learn how to push the system to it’s limits and make very good games. It has to be a good game right?

I recently got a chance to play this “gem” and you’re wrong. It’s horrible.

The story is simple: The woods are filled by monsters and Toad is tasked to blow them up with bombs.

Pretty much there are different colored monsters and you need to stack them up and arrange them by color. Then you drop a bomb of that color on them to eliminate them.

Sounds fun right? Nope.

The game is made by the same developers that made “Dr Mario“, “Tetris Attack” and “Yoshi’s Cookie“. All are decent puzzle games. Of course all of them have the same basic idea for the game: Match the color of the game piece to eliminate it.

It’s almost like they couldn’t think of a better idea for a game.

I’m sorry, I wanted to like it, but it’s just a bad game.

Another thing about the NES version. Wario is wearing a purple hat. I know the NES has a limited color palate and can’t display a lot of colors at once, but they could have tried to make him have a yellow hat. At least the SNES version has a yellow hat.

Not everything I have to say is bad. I loved the music on both games. Shinobu Amayake & Soyo Oka on the NES version and Hiroaki Suga & Tadashi Ikegami on the SNES version made some very entertaining music.