My After Burner Sega Master System Review

Here is my YouTube Review of After Burner for those who prefer it there is a written version below.

After Burner is an arcade Jet fighting combat game developed and released by Sega in 1987. The player takes control of an F-14 Tomcat fighter jet, and must clear each of the game's stages by destroying incoming enemy jets, using a machine gun and heat-seeking missiles. The game used a third-person perspective the same as Sega's earlier games Space Harrier (1985) and Out Run (1986), and runs on the Sega X Board arcade system, It was the fourth Sega game to use a hydraulic arcade cabinet, in this case the cabinet is made to look like the insides of an aircraft cockpit, with flight stick controls, a chair with a seatbelt, and hydraulic motion technology that allowed it to moves, tilt, roll and rotate the cockpit in sync with the on-screen action.

Obviously this kind of arcade machine was a real show stopper, the sort of thing that kids and adults alike would flock to. In the old days it was always hard to try and bring the arcade experience in to the home with the fact the most home consoles had no way near the power of an arcade machine, this was what made arcades popular you could experience games that simply were not possible in the confines of the average home.

The master system version might have lost the fancy cabinet, ditched the flight stick for a joypad and lost a whole lot of power but it still has a lot of heart. What you have here is Sega trying its darn best to ram this massive arcade machine into the confines of a tiny Master System Cartridge and in all honesty I don't think they did too bad a job of it. Sure the Graphics had an obvious downgrade but they seemed to be able to maintain a good sense of speed which makes the game feel just as action packed as the arcade version and given the power on hand I feel the graphics are respectable. As for the sound well its all very basic but its pretty cool when you take off to hear the game say ''get ready''. Although the music is not as good as the Arcade machine I still feel it is very catchy and matches the game well.

If you play this game today out of its historical context then its probably not going to blow your socks off but I still think its a fun distraction, if you look at what they managed to achieve at the time scaling what was advanced hardware down on to the humble little Master System I think they did a fantastic job. Over all if I was to score this game in comparison to what is available on this particular system then I think I would give it a 7 out of 10. Having a quick look around online you should be able to get a cart of this delivered for around the £7 to £10 price range.