When did the lie that girls don't play video games gain credence in America? I remember seeing little nerds of all genders in arcades in the early 1980s, so that fallacy must have taken hold around the time that the Master System arrived. Certainly that would explain why these two games, both of which featured playable female casts in their origina…

An unlikely star emerges in this week's Master System episode: The Sega Sports Pad. Required for (but not bundled with!) Great Ice Hockey, this analog-ish trackball controller ultimately didn't have much purpose in terms of deliberate tie-ins, but thanks to its alternate mode it proves surprisingly effective with a number of other titles, especiall…

A pair of games based on popular media works? Well, almost. Action Fighter clearly draws its inspiration from 1970s James Bond and his transforming Lotus Esprit, but unlike James Bond 007 for Multivision, it doesn't wear the actual Bond license. It's a much better game, though. Drawing heavy inspiration from the likes of Spy Hunter and (gulp) Xevio…

I thought the main feature this week would be TransBot, a pretty OK shooter based on a pretty good arcade game that rectifies the failings of Orguss for SG-1000 while basically swiping the concept wholesale, but no. TransBot is fine. The main feature, however, turned out to be F-16 Fighting Falcon, a game no one would reasonably ever want to play, …

Three episodes into the Master System run and already we have some familiar sights—but understandably so, since each of these games comes to Master System from arcades. So, while we may have seen Choplifter during our SG-1000 survey, we certainly didn't see this version of it; Sega based the older, Japan-only release on the Apple II game, while thi…

Sega leads off its non-pack-in Master System lineup with a solid conversion of an arcade masterpiece and a respectable original title: Fantasy Zone and Ghost House. While the former suffers some compromises in the move from System 16A arcade hardware to the less powerful home console, it retails its key features, and its charming personality still …

Well, here we go. I've already covered Sega's first console, the SG-1000, in comprehensive (if retrospectively inaccurate at times) details. Now, here we have the sequel: The American adaptation of the Mark III upgrade to SG-1000, the Master System. Or the Sega System, if we're being strictly accurate. Beginning with this episode, which covers the …

We end NES Works 1988 here with a game that (probably) actually shipped before December 1988 in scarce quantities. Aw, it's Nintendo's very first high-demand holiday rarity! They certainly would return to that well over the years. It's hard to say where to place this release in the ’88 timeline, because Nintendo originally announced Zelda II for a …

A lot of shenanigans happening with the NES timeline here at the end of 1988, a situation that I'll explore more next episode. For now, it's worth noting that this episode brings us: Two games that may or may not have actually debuted in the U.S. in December 1988, and Two games from the same franchise, possibly released simultaneously by different …

It's the most wonderful time of the year: Time for a Castlevania retrospective. As NES Works 1988 winds down, Halloween 2022 seems like the perfect time for a proper look back at Castlevania II: Simon's Quest, one of the most ambitious and frustrating games of the NES era. The second of the NES's "weird sequels," Simon's Quest combines a lot of dif…

Sunsoft blew our minds with Blaster Master, but the company did not suddenly become some 8-bit powerhouse after releasing that game. Here's the rocky portion of their road to greatness, a pair of NES conversions that will leave you scratching your head. In the case of Platoon, you'll be left wondering why they thought THIS license was suitable to a…

A curious release this week, as we come to a game that shipped twice for NES: Once with Nintendo's approval, and once illegally. Ever the rogue, that Indiana Jones. Like Tengen's early conversion of Gauntlet, Temple of Doom adapts an arcade game but makes quite a few changes to its structure, format, and objectives. Capcom didn't have the monopoly …

One of December 1988's all-timers arrives this week, and while it may not be the best-remembered of the bunch (not when the other two big releases belonged to huge ongoing franchises), but I'd argue that it's the best and most polished. It's also the most fearless; Bionic Commando didn't so much ask players to learn an entirely new style of platfor…

Two games about American youths wasting their lives. Two games with various ties to Atari. Coincidence? Yes, actually. Sometimes, this stuff just happens. Skate or Die! may bear the Ultra Games branding, but it really owes its existence to Electronic Arts—and ultimately, to the former Epyx crew that EA hired up when Atari Corp. sabotaged that compa…

In this episode, I learned that the Power Pad is not really designed for use on hardwood floors. Bring back that deep-pile ’70s shag, baby. My feet are killing me. Super Team Games gives us the last of Nintendo's casual-appeal titles for 1988. There's still one final Nintendo-published game for the year, but it's kind of the opposite of casual-appe…

This week we have a pair of perfectly tolerable games that seemingly no one remembers. Yes, by late 1988, the NES library had grown sufficiently large that it could contain games beyond "brilliant" and "execrable"—works of competent mediocrity doomed by their lukewarm nature to be relegated to the dustbin of obscurity. Cobra Command takes a mundane…

I can't believe I completely failed in this episode to draw attention to the fact that Dr. Chaos is, in fact, a Superman villain. But then again, both games this episode read like latter-day comic book villains: Good-hearted souls with the best of intentions yet who somehow strayed from the straight-and-narrow path and now simply cause pain and suf…

Remember 1942? That really bad top-down shooter? Capcom would prefer you didn't. And, to wash that bad memory from our collective mind, we have its sequel, 1943: The Battle of Midway, simultaneously a sequel and a heartfelt apology for that previous misstep. Although this arcade adaptation fails to carry over the multiplayer element from the origin…

Sunsoft gets a major glow-up this episode after a mediocre start as a publisher of ancient arcade ports and one neat-but-meager light gun shooter. No one would accuse them of half-assing it this time around, though; Blaster Master shot instantly to the top of the NES all-time greats list as soon as it debuted, and it still holds up remarkably well …

If Super Mario Bros. was the culmination of the Famicom's early history in Japan, Super Mario Bros. 2 for NES served the same role here in the U.S. Debuting as the console hit critical mass in time for its first major holiday season in America, SMB2 sent players into a huge, imaginative game world that they could tackle with their choice of four di…

By a perfectly timed request by patron TheyCallMeSleeper, this episode arrives just in time to be positioned between this channel's coverage of Super Mario Bros. and its American sequel. Of course, this Japan-only sequel has almost nothing to do with that latter game besides the addition of Luigi as the Mario Bro. whose controls and physics turn hi…

The Famicom finally reaches maturity with the arrival of Mario's greatest adventure—and perhaps the greatest action game anyone had ever created to this point in history. Pushing the Famicom hardware to its absolute limits, Super Mario Bros. would become one of the most beloved games of all time and transformed a character that began as the star of…

As we head into the final quarter of 1988, we have three classic Nintendo games appearing on what is decidedly NOT a classic Nintendo console. Atari published ports of three vintage Nintendo creations (Donkey Kong, Donkey Kong Junior, and Mario Bros.) on a variety of platforms in late 1988, including the 2600, their various 8-bit platforms, and as …

Capcom kicks off one of the most important creative threads of the NES's history: Their collaboration with Disney, back in the days when Disney was simply an animation studio struggling to reinvent itself for a new era rather than an all-consuming media megalith. Ah, but this isn't really a Capcom Disney game, is it? Appearances (and packaging logo…

Continuing the trend of "games converted badly to Famicom in 1986 and published in America two years later," we have Bits Laboratory's disastrous adaptation of Activision's Ghostbusters. A fun, frothy, fast-paced little confection in its original Commodore 64 incarnation, Ghostbusters becomes a miserable and tedious experience on NES, bogged down b…

More newcomers arrive on NES this episode, each bringing a musty conversion of an even older original work in tow. Kemco-Seika makes its NES debut with a two-year-old port of First Star Software's Spy Vs. Spy, which kinda-sorta puts a bow on the two-player trend of NES software by way of a competitive espionage adventure. Just as dated is the debut…

It's two for two for the road this week with Bubble Bobble, a game specifically designed to be played with another person, and Racket Attack, the second-ever NES tennis game which, like Nintendo's Tennis, offers support for doubles play (though not competitive play). Amidst all the moral panic about the way video games were rotting the brains of Am…

The prevailing theme for NES games in 1988 has been multiplayer. From Contra to Life Force to Jackal, many of the best games for ’88 played best with friends. (That was probably also true for games that weren't published by Konami, even.) Fittingly, episode 88 sees not but three games that uphold that trend. First, there's Jackal, a widely overlook…

The machines have risen, taking control of this trio of games and obviating humanity altogether. Well, almost altogether. R.O.B. at least demonstrates the value of mankind working together, hand-in-, uh, claw with its new synthoid overlords to defeat the vile Smicks in Robot Gyro. As for the other games, well, they're all about robo-kind's fight fo…

Although I've previously covered The Tower of Druaga on Game Boy Works, this version precedes the portable rendition by half a decade and stands as the more towering achievement of the two. So to speak. Another solid arcade-to-Famicom conversion by Namcot, Druaga's move to consoles felt like a figurative as well as literal homecoming: As an arcade …

OK, this week we have the ACTUAL debut of Irem on Famicom, but it's hard to say TOSE's take on Zippy Race makes for a splashier debut than 10-Yard Fight would have. At least 10-Yard Fight had the benefit of not having been shown up by a conversion of the same game to technically inferior hardware more than a year earlier. TOSE also helps a second p…

Well, I goofed on this episode—the production order list I work for ended up getting scrambled due a copy/paste error, and I accidentally covered Geimos and 10-Yard Fight out of sequence (they shipped right after Robot Gyro, not Robot Block). This means that 10-Yard Fight wasn't actually Irem's first Famicom! Since I was on the road when I realized…

As we move deeper into the Famicom's history, its timeline begins to diverse further and further from the American console's. Witness this week's episode, in which all three releases remained stranded in Japan. (Well, OK, Road Fighter shipped in Europe in 1992, which is such a weird and unlikely turn of events it seems like we all probably hallucin…

Three—three!—consecutive vertical shooters hit Famicom in this episode. Well, for a certain value of "vertical." All three of these games about shooting things while moving up or down along the screen, but all three take a very different approach to it. Star Force is the most traditional of the bunch, while Elevator Action combines vertical shootin…

Although the three games featured in this week's episode have already appeared in the vanilla iteration of NES Works, I promise that there's merit in revisiting them. All three titles—Nintendo's Wrecking Crew, Konami's Hyper Olympic, and Nintendo (not Irem's!) Spartan-X—hit differently on Famicom than they did on NES. Especially when one of the gam…

Sunsoft returns to Game Boy with a soul-crushingly brutal take on a movie that's about as close to being a cult classic as a major blockbuster can be: Gremlins 2 - The New Batch. It really captures the experience of being a small, helpless little fuzzy guy with stubby arms making his way through a skyscraper filled with raving murder-monsters. Alth…

You come at the king, you'd best not miss. In this case, they've come at Godzilla, the King of Monsters, and stolen his horrible little son Minilla. I personally would be happy to let Minilla languish forever in captivity, but parental instincts run deep even for a skyscraper-sized atomic-powered dinosaur... and the result is one of the best Game B…

Our shared journey through the SG-1000 library has been illuminating, and in this episode I attempt to encapsulate much of what has been covered here over the past year. This episode isn't simply a recap and recontextualization of the system, though—it's also an attempt to reconcile some issues in my coverage of the individual games. Part of what I…

In this episode, we look at the SG-1000's 1987 release lineup in its entirety... and, with those two games, we also wrap up the SG-1000 library as a whole. That's it! Go home! From now on, it's just Master System and beyond here on Segaiden. These two works are not necessarily the kind of thing you'd want to spend much time playing in the modern da…

By request of They Call Me Sleeper, here's one last Wonder Boy game until Segaiden gets to the Master System stuff: Adventure Island IV for NES. Or rather, Takahashi Meijin no Boukenjima IV for Famicom, as Hudson has never localized this one in any capacity. That's a shame, because Adventure Island IV belatedly but capably brings Master Higgins' is…

Famicom mainstay Hudson finally makes its American debut this week with two sizable hits from Japan. First, Adventure Island brings a little taste of Sega to NES by converting Wonder Boy with a thinly veiled graphical overhaul. Milon's Secret Castle goes a different route, abandoning linear action for a hunt-and-explore adventure inside a castle fu…

The penultimate set of SG-1000 games arrives as the system does its best to remain current and competitive in the medium's changing landscape with technology built around the expectations of an earlier generation of game design. Although the SG-1000 is woefully underpowered to hold its own amidst the new creative frontiers being explored on Famicom…

A brief break in the SG-1000's strong run of final releases with a set of titles that will remind you of the not-so-good ol' days when the console's library was generally pretty rough. This trio earns most of its points for effort from Ninja Princess, which converts an arcade game quite convincingly save for one massive technical hitch that has a h…

The SG-1000 didn't have much going on during 1986, with Sega's attention focused primarily on the shiny new Mark III console, but what little did make its way to the older console was pretty strong. After an indifferent shrug of a vintage-style single-screen arcade-format MSX port with Compile's C-So!, we get to the good stuff: ASCII's The Castle a…

A real sense of deja vu this week as we look at three games that have all appeared on this channel in other versions. I would like to say that these iterations are all the superior works, but Mom taught me not to be a liar. Now, this version of Dig Dug is far and away the best 8-bit home version ever published, an almost arcade-perfect rendition th…

Continuing on from last week, we go from Hang On II to just plain ol' Hang On. But this in no way feels like a downgrade; quite the contrary. With Hang On (and Teddy Boy Blues), Sega brings its home hardware into line with Nintendo's Famicom/NES, boosting the basic SG-1000 architecture with a monstrous upgrade to its graphical capabilities and esse…

This week bring us the first of a two-part episode—or should that be "the second"? Sega's imprecise SG-1000 launch date documentation makes it difficult to know if Hang On II did in fact debut before or after Hang On (no Roman numeral) for Mark III in October 1985*. But the number II there is only for show anyway, as Hang On II is literally just a …

An 8-bit heavy hitter makes its Famicom debut, right around the same time as they first dipped a toe into the SG-1000 market: Konami, eventual creators of Castlevania and Contra, here still a mere stripling of a home games developer. As on Sega's platform, Konami made its debut in Nintendo-land with two games, though I would say both turned out far…

A couple of standout releases in this episode... but first, we have to survive another version of Lode Runner. Look, I like Lode Runner. Great game. But there's been a lot of it here in the mid ’80s! This time, the monk/robot guys win. Beyond that, however, we have the final entry in Activision's brief dalliance on SG-1000 (or maybe Sega's brief da…

This week is a bit of an ouroboros: While the primary feature here is Capcom's Legendary Wings, this episode also touches on the NES release of Xevious, the game that very clearly inspired Legendary Wings (not to mention about a thousand other Japanese arcade games of the era). Xevious is by far the purer of the two, not to mention the fairer, but …