Sega Master System OutRun Review

Here is my review of OutRun the Sega Master system conversion. If you prefer your reviews to be written then my written review is below the video

Out Run was an arcade driving video game developed and published by Sega it was released into Arcades in Japan in September 1986 with its American and European release following before the end of the year. The game was very well known for many reasons including its graphics, its nonlinear gameplay, an amazing selection of selectable musical tracks and in particular for its amazing hydraulic motion simulator deluxe arcade cabinet which was such a sight to behold when I first saw it in the Arcades as a child. I was born in 1981 so the first time I had seen this I would have been a pretty young kid so the machine seemed like this giant shining beacon of fun.

The game was designed by Yu Suzuki, who apparently visited Europe to gain inspiration for the game's stages This sounds like a pretty expensive step in designing a game, on hearing that you'd think Sega had given Suzuki bags of cash and yet he only had a small team to work on the game and they were only given ten months to develop the game. The game was a huge success though both critically and commercially. In fact it was apparently the highest-grossing arcade game of 1987 worldwide not only that though it was also Sega's most successful arcade cabinet of the entire 1980s. So I bet you can guess what this kind of success leads to right? It led to a whole bunch of ports to lots of video game consoles and home computers. Outrun became one of the best-selling video games at the time selling millions of copies worldwide and spawning a number of sequels.

You read the title when you clicked on this though so you know what I am going to be talking about that's right I am going to be talking about the Sega Master System port.

Even though this game might look a little basic by now days standards you have to try to put yourself in the position people would have been in at the time. In 1987 The Master System released in Europe people often compare it to the NES and see it as Sega's response to this but in truth in England at least very few people had even seen a NES, we were mostly weened on various Micro computers some of which even after taking an age to load couldn't display enough colours to challenge the drawings you had done in school at the age of 5 let alone an arcade machines visuals.

In my humble opinion The Master System port of Outrun really manages to overcome the limitations of its hardware to deliver what at the time would have been an absolutely stunning home video game experience, sure its not the equal of its arcade counterpart but it certainly would have felt pretty close to a kid back in those days.

Outrun is at least on the surface a very simple game, it is a driving game where you are not racing against any individual, sure there are cars on the road which get in the way but there not your opponent the only opponent you have is the clock, you have to beat the clock and make sure that you keep on reaching the next checkpoint before the timer hits zero. This basic premise works almost perfectly on the Master System, the game feels pretty much just like it did in the arcade and that's the most important part of any conversion.

The visuals have received the expected downgrade but it is very clear that a whole lot of effort went into providing the same variety of settings seen in the arcade, the game features the same beach track, the same rolling green fields, the same night time driving. this game looks so much clearer than my previously reviewed game Space Harrier. Obviously its a step down from the arcade but enough detail is provided in both the foreground and the background to create a proper game world that you feel more than happy to travel through.

Sound-wise, the music in OutRun on the Master system is great but there is some difference depending on how your playing if you are playing a European copy of the game you will get what they call PSG sound, if your using Japanese Hardware with a FM chip, or hardware modded to add FM in or using an emulator with FM, then things will sound quiet different, in honesty I like both kinds of sound, the music is good no mater how your playing your Master System copy of Outrun, the only thing I am not majorly keen on is the skidding tire sound, its an annoying sound and to be its too loud in relation to the music.

Overall I would give Outrun on the Master System an 8 out of 10, I think its one of the very best arcade ports on the system its only limitations for me come from being based on an Arcade machine. Arcade ports can be a lot of fun but these games are essentially written from the ground up to munch on coins and provide quick thrills so they don't tend to have what it takes to play for hours and hours again and again in a home setting.

If you want a cart of this game then CEX charge £10 for it when they have a loose cart with the copies I can find elsewhere on line going for a little more.

Retro Game purchases October 2019

My purchases for October started on the 1st of the month when I grabbed a few bit, I got Project Gotham racing, project Gotham racing 2, conflict desert storm 2, medal of honor rising sun, and dead or alive 3 all for Xbox boxed complete for £1 each from a charity shop and then I went and got Shrek 2 for GameCube complete for £1 from a different charity shop.

On the 4th of October I travelled to a run down looking charity shop in a town I dont usually visit and I grabbed a few things, I got The incredible for GameCube complete for £1 , Wrestlemania x8 for GameCube complete for £1 and kick off for NES cart only for £1.50 , it seems like a long time since I've got a NES game that cheap.

On the 5th I went to a retro game fair which was held in a hotel conference room today, I figured it would be all £100 boxed rares and nothing I'd feel like paying for and yeah there was some stuff like that but there was also a few cheap bits to pick through.

I got the following

Columns cart only for game gear for 50p

Wave race cart only for gameboy for £1

Game boy gallery cart only for gameboy £1

Golf cart only for gameboy £1

All star baseball 2001 cart only for gameboy color £1

F-1 world grand Prix cart only for gameboy color £1

Perfect dark cart only (missing battery cover) for gameboy color £1

Super hunchback cart only for gameboy £1

Gundam SD cart only (Japanese) for gameboy £1

Total soccer manager cart only for GBA £1

Nintendo scope 6 cart only for SNES £1

PGA tour 96 cart only for SNES £1

Secret of Man cart only (Japanese) for SNES £1

Donkey Kong Land cart only (half missing label) for gameboy color £1

Kirby super deluxe cart only (Japanese) for SNES £4

Robot Wars EX cart only (Japanese) for SNES £2

Two disc only copies of Alien Trilogy , a disc only copy of grudge warriors, and a disc copy of lion and the king £1 for the lot,

A Joytech PS1 essential pack sealed , includes 3rd party 1mb memory card and 3rd party mini analogue controller

and a boxed complete Japanese SNES game that I first believed to be a pinball game for £6 but it turned out to be a blooming pachinko game which somewhat annoyed me. I have since found out its called Hissatsu Pachinko Collection 2

On the 12th during a visit to yet another charity shop I got 14 loose PSP games for £9.  I got 2 copies of Ben 10 protector of the earth, Lego Indiana Jones, GTA vice city stories , GTA liberty city stories, Miami vice, ghost rider, mercury , crash of the titans, pro evo 5, FIFA 09, star wars clone wars republic heroes, star ward battle front 2 and Colin McRae rally 2005 plus. I also grabbed Animal crossing for the Wii for £2 from this shop.

On the 15th I grabbed a few loose carts from an indy game shop, I got F-1 World Grand Prix 2 for N64 for 50pence, V-Rally Edition 99 for N64 for £1.50, 1080 Snowboarding for N64 for £2 and Batman Returns for GameGear for £1.50

On the 18th I went to a charity shop and for £5.95 I got a Nintendo Wii.  OK so first the bad part it has no sensor bar, no TV wire, no wiimote or nunchuck, it also has the door for the cube pads missing. The good part is it has its charger and its stand but more importantly it has the homebrew channel installed, a 32gig SD card in it, a 32gig USB key in the back of it.

On the 19th I popped into a indy game store and I grabbed two loose gameboy carts for £1 each today WaveRace and Nintendo World Cup.

On the 20th my daughter grabbed me Nagano Winter Olympics 98 cart only for N64 for £1, makes me more happy than anything that she thinks about me enough to grab me a game while shes hanging with her friends

On the 21st I went in an Indy game shop after work and got Adventures of lolo 2 for the NES cart only for £5. , I'd never heard of it but it said it was by Hal on the label so figured I'd give it a punt.

On the 25th I got a few bits from an indy game shop I got an American cartridge only copy of The Simpsons Bart's Nightmare for the SNES £5, Fifa 95 complete for the Megadrive £1, Fifa 97 complete for the Megadrive £1, Mega games 1 complete for the Megadrive £1, Kingdom hearts 2 for ps2 for 25p the discs good but the manual and cover have some water damage, Final fantasy x2 disc only for ps2 for 25p and Monopoly party complete for Xbox for 50p

On the 26th I once again got a call from my daughter to tell me I owe her a little bit of cash because shes been picking me up stuff again, she got me Devil may cry 1, 2 and 3 for PS2 for 50p each complete, Devil may cry 4 in a steel case complete for ps3 for £1, Uncharted 2 in a steel case complete for ps3 for £1 and Heavenly Sword for ps3 complete for £1

On the 28th I got Mission Impossible operation suma complete for the Gamecube for £2. I dont think I have ever played it but I played the living heck out of the N64 MI game.

  

My retro purchases ended on the 29th when I paid £18 for a cart only pal SNES copy of The Flintstones The Treasure of Sierra Mudrock. I have never seen it in the flesh before and wanted to buy it to review it, it's been a long time since I've wrote a new SNES review even if I've made videos for old reviews lately. After having made my Barts Nightmare video Flintstones felt like something I'd like to tackle. It did feel like a big spend on one item though.

So in October 2019 I Spent £99.95‬, an amount that has left me pretty darn shocked as I dont think I have come close to that in a long time, my purchase of the month has to be the hacked Wii though, I just think with the SD card and USB key and what I can do with it just makes it an absolute steal.

150 SNES games reviewed #11: Championship Pool

Championship Pool came out in 1993 and, as you can obviously tell from the title, it is a pool simulation. It was released for the NES, SNES, Game Boy and the Mega Drive. It was developed by Bitmasters and released by Mindscape.

 

The game is straightforward, it is a virtual version of pool, in which you can play either a one-off game, tournaments, multiplayer or even just practice. I like the presentation on this game, it offers you what looks like a wealth of choice and options but it also has a layer of style. Your opponents are represented by little pictures, you get to see the coin toss for who goes first, etc but once you actually start playing looks wise there is nothing to separate this from any budget pool game you could pick up on the live markets of various device stores.

In the past I don’t remember there being a whole lot of games based on either pool or snooker, at least not on consoles. The truth is I hadn’t even played this one when I was a kid. I brought this game for £3.50 with free postage from eBay purely for this series. I did own a pool game when I was a Mega Drive/SNES owner but it was Side Pocket on the Mega Drive and I never looked for another one as that always filled my pocketing needs. When I try to compare this in my mind to Side Pocket then that wins, but I cant really be sure if it’s a fair competition having not played Side Pocket in 10 years, and maybe I am remembering it through the eyes of a child.



The main thing that annoys me about Championship Pool is it seems to be very unforgiving even on your first opponents – you break, pocket a ball. take a shot pocket another ball. and then you miss. You would think that you would watch your opponent take their shots and then when they screw up you would be put back in control, but that’s not quite how it works. Someone decided that watching the computer play would be boring or something, so instead they’ve made it so you when you screw up, it says it’s the computers go, you get a screen saying that the computer has had its go and now it’s your turn again. You have a look and the computer has pocketed four balls – four balls which you have no idea how many shots it took it to pocket, four balls you don’t feel you could have got given six shots due to where they laid on the table the last time you saw them. So the computer’s fortune seems to almost border on an unholy pact with the Devil and you have no way of seeing how they achieved this Herculean pool feat and you just have to shrug and go OK. Problem is you then pot another ball and then miss then you get a message saying the computer took its shots and won the game, you don’t even get to see the winning shot.  This just makes me feel very disconnected from it all. I know that in a lot of games everything is decided by random dice throws or some form of statistical probability matrix but when you can see it happening you kind of forget this and get drawn in to the magic of it all.

I would rate this game four out of 10. It might have got better out of me back in the day but nowadays there are so many pool or snooker-based games you could try. Looking online it seems like the going rate for the cart only PAL is about £8. It can go for more and sometimes you see it for less, I even managed to get my cart for £3.50 with free postage. So if you have a SNES and don’t have many games it wont break the bank. I am not saying my four out of 10 is a concrete score, read the good and the bad sides and see what you think about them, it might not annoy you like it does me.

SNES Review 123: Smash TV

Nine reviews or so ago while reviewing Total Carnage I said the following ''I really wanted an excuse to come out with the gem ''Big Money, Big Prizes'' which you may realise is of course from the game Smash TV, a game I really love, I love it because basically it is based of the Arnie film The Running Man, which is not only a film I adore but is also based loosely of the book The Running Man which was written by Stephen King one of my favourite writers of all time. I don't own Smash TV though''.

Well I guess when I said that I was kind of tempting fate as I recently walked in to a local indy store and they had a Pal cartridge only copy of Smash TV and were asking £12 for it. Now this is going to sound kind of silly but I remember back when I was a kid everyone owned Smash TV and you just couldnt get rid of it, the thing was practically worthless, the kind of worthless were if you tried to trade it in for another game it would only get you about £3 of that game so really you were better off keeping it just incase you ever might just possibly one day want to play it again, so I have no idea how when or why I got rid of my original copy, but knowing me I got a good deal for it. The funny thing is though despite liking this game I havent brought a copy while I have been collecting because I just havent seen it for a low price, even £12 seemed to much for me but I managed to talk them down to £10 so I ended up buying it.

Ok so in both my Total Carange review and the above quote from it I have set the scene as far as this games story goes, so just to quickly recap the story is that your a contestant on a game show where they are trying to kill you and if you can survive and kill the enemies then you get money and you can win toasters and cars and stuff. Smash Tv was originally an arcade game in 1990, which found itself ported to the Megadrive/Genesis, Master System, Game Gear and obviously the Super NES as I am talking about it here. Its also made its way to various classic game compilations and download services. The arcade version was created by Eugene Jarvis and Mark Turmell for Williams and its a sort of well kind of sequel to the game Robotron: 2084 which was also produced by Jarvis, sequel in spiritual terms that is. The SNES conversion was handled by Beam Software, they did an excellent job of converting the game, basically if you like the arcade game then you will like the SNES game as apart from a few cut corners and a bit of Nintendo style censorship it is very much the same game. Beam Software kind of got brought and sold and moved about and renamed Infogrames Melbourne House, then Atari Melbourne House and finally Krome Studios Melbourne, the trail of them releasing games goes kind of cold around 2007 though with several sources saying the studio finally died in 2010.

In terms of gameplay the game is fairly straightforward, if you have played a twin stick shooter in the past 30 years anything from Robotron to the Geomotry wars games then you will know excactly what you are getting. Yes the SNES doesnt have a second stick but its 4 face buttons are placed in such a way that by pressing either one of them or a combination of two at a time you can shoot at every possible angle. The game is fast fun and responsive and most importantly it has the best quality any arcade style game can have and thats the ability to be easy to pick up while being difficult to master but overall feeling fair. Yes the game is hard and it slams you pretty darn har, there is also no wimping out and picking an easy difficulty here as it is actually pretty darn tough on all of the three difficulty settings available. Also you cant complete the game by playing it on easy mode as when you choose this mode you get a shortened version of the game featuring only the first stage with a few less enemies, so this sucker should have really just been called practice mode.

I played the living heck out of this game as a kid and never managed to finish it. You need to remember that this game was born in the arcades and so it was designed to make money, so really the quicker it could get you killed the more pennies it would grab, the bosses in particular are complete bullet spunges who just when you think you have them beat start shooting even more determined to take you down with them. If you want a challange then you have one here, its also a great co-operative two player game. Speaking of other players while I was playing this game my 15 year old daughter walked in the room, she was soon having a go herself and then I practically had to tear her away from it just so I could actually go to bed, and the very next day she was asking if she could go in my room to play the SNES and try and do better on Smash TV. Another sign of how good this game is would be the fact that I am going to sort out one of my other SNES pads so me and her can play it toghther sometime, which is high praise given the fact that some of these games get tossed into the bottom of a draw after I have reviewed them not to be pulled out again for who knows how long.

Ok so for those who are really into the graphics and sound in games how does Smash TV stack up? Well graphically the game is pretty simple with the main player characters and the regular enemies not being much more advanced than stick men, but the game really does flood the screen with them, and there tiny size just helps to make the large boss characters all the more impressive, but yeah this certainly is not the game to use to show of the SNES's graphical grunt work. I find the music to be very basic but also very catchy, I have caught myself humming it when away from the game which I think always says something good about a piece, its basic but it suits the mood of the game perfectly. Speaking of sound one of the most impressive things about this game sound wise is the digitised voice samples they really help with the games feel and atmosphere , little snippits like hearting the host say “Good Luck! You’ll Need It!” really add to the game.

I find that I cant help but give this game a hearty 8 out of 10, sure its not perfect but it is darn playable, and as far as co-op shooters go it might just be one of the best on the SNES. Its funny though how this game now seems to be a bit of a pain to get ahold of when I can remember people using it as a door stop back in the day and the second hand shelfs and bargain bins being full of it but I guess it just goes to show you never know how hard or easy it will be to grab something tommorow if you dont get it today. If you want a cartridge only copy around about £10 like I spent is proberbly the best you can aim for and it might take a bit of waiting and looking as plenty of people seem to be asking for around £18 to £25 for even loose carts are they actually getting that for it? Who knows but if you want to just play the game then do look on Xbox live arcade and compilation discs you might save yourself a few quid or bang a few extra retro games for you cash in the process, which root youy go though all depends if your more a collector or player either way I recomend that you give this game a bash.