My earliest console gaming memories are on my granddad’s Master System. Since getting into retro handhelds, I’ve been revisiting the Sega Master System games from my childhood. Check out Part 1 for more!

Super Monaco GP

My granddad and I agreed: this game sucked. But I was interested to find out: were we right in this appraisal? Yes, yes we were.

Super Monaco GP on the Master System was a cash-in on the acclaimed game of the same name on the Mega Drive. It’s an 8-bit racing game with a sort of pseudo “3d” perspective. It’s ugly, it’s boring, and it’s for some reason always in split-screen mode, even in 1-player (you just play in split-screen against a computer player two). The courses take 5-6 minutes, and there’s 16 of 'em. A whole stinking hour and a half of painfully dull F1 racing, in which you’ll almost certainly lose every race.

A split-screen screenshot of an 8-bit racing game. The track is solid grey, outside the track is solid green, and there is a map of the track at the centre of the screen. I hope you like looking at this screenshot, because this is what the entire game looks like.

You can customise your vehicle between races, and are encouraged to do a test lap of the track with your setup to check it is suitable, but that would involve dragging out the experience even more.

I played it for this post, and I’ll be happy to never play it again. Next.

Marble Madness

As I mentioned in the last post, the D-pad on my granddad’s old controller sucked, so succeeding in high-precision games was hopeless. Air Rescue went from brutal to trivial with nothing more than a change of pad. So I was looking forward to trying out Atari’s Marble Madness, a ball-rolling skill game akin to Super Monkey Ball but from an isometric perspective,[1] which was impossible on my granddad’s hardware.

A screenshot of a marble rolling game from an isometric view. The blue marble is being navigated around an apple-green coloured course, and there are several pools of green acid on the course ahead, which the marble must avoid. I never make it through the moving acid pools in one piece.

Turns out… it’s still fucking impossible. The entire game is around 6 minutes long. Six courses, each with around a minute on the clock. Each course has uneven terrain, obstacles, and “enemies” of sorts which either block or temporarily destroy your marble, costing precious seconds. As far as I can tell, unless you have unbelievable skill, it’s often better just to race through, get hit and respawn rather than slow down and carefully navigate some of the ludicrously precise gauntlets the game throws at you.

A screenshot of the blue marble rolling along narrow walkways with orange walls. There's a black 'enemy' marble on one of the walkways, and a yellow suction pipe poking up from behind one of the other walkways. The black marble will try and block your path, and the yellow pipe is a vacuum cleaner that will also make your life miserable.

My only progress was on the original hardware I could get to stage 4. Now I can get to stage 5.

My understanding is this was originally an arcade game with a trackball input. That may have made it more approachable, I don’t know. If you have a retro handheld or Sega emulator on your computer, give Marble Madness a go, let me know if you can do any better.

Sonic The Hedgehog 2

Now, this was an absolute delight to play. An improvement on the already-decent 8-bit version of Sonic The Hedgehog in every way. Whereas the original tried to be an 8-bit version of the Mega Drive classic, its sequel was completely unmoored from its Mega Drive counterpart. None of the zones or new mechanics are replicated. The only commonality is the introduction of Miles Prower[2], aka. Tails, named for being a fox with two tails. Unlike the Mega Drive, Tails isn’t playable, but is in need of rescue from the evil Dr Robotnik. This game didn’t get a US release at all until it was available to emulate on Wii.

A screenshot of Sonic facing a Meleon enemy, a colum of rings over a spring behind him, in a 'Green Hill Zone'-like environment Zone 4 is called "Green Hills Zone". Not "Green Hill Zone" from Sonic The Hedgehog. As you can see, it's completely different.

I never finished this as a child, but I did see most of the game because at some point I learned a cheat — a level select menu, likely left in from playtesting and debugging. It involved plugging the controller into port 2, holding a button combination during the intro sequence, switching over to port 1, then pressing button 2 twice.

Some things are gone altogether from both the Mega Drive version and its Master System predecessor. Levels no longer have checkpoints,[3] the “shield” item is gone, and there’s no Special zone. However, a much-welcomed mechanic is the return of ring recovery after being hit. If you remember from my last post, this Mega Drive mechanic was cut in the original 8-bit game as the hardware couldn’t render so many rings on screen, but Sonic 2 compromises by limiting the number of dropped rings to about 7, at least giving you a chance to grab one ring and survive another hit. Also coming from the Mega Drive games are breakable walls and loop-the-loops, though with simplified physics.

Screenshot of Sonic spinning over a pool of water, with rows of rings floating above the surface. Sonic can skim on the surface of water now.

The real heart of this game, of course, is its levels. Each stage has a gimmick, in a good way. Sonic gets new ways to traverse the levels, including hang gliding (which genuinely takes a bit of practice!), launching from fly-wheels, and so on. Even the water levels, usually a nightmare in Sonic, are pretty fun because they introduce several traversal mechanics: Sonic can bounce on the surface of the water by rolling at speed, large bubbles which can be entered then steered while slowly rising, and maze-like systems of pipes requiring quick-thinking to choose a direction at the junctions.

Screenshot of Sonic in a bubble, apparently in some underwater ruins.

The bosses are… Okay, I guess. They’re fun enough to fight, but not very visually impressive, probably a hardware limitation.

Screenshot of a Sonic curled into a ball, being bounced on the nose of a robotic seal. There are purple fountains with spurts of water visible in the background. A robot seal boss that can bounce Sonic on its nose.

My main complaint is a kind of old school difficulty thing. The game is not too difficult mechanically, and it’s pretty easy to acquire extra lives in each level. However, the final zone is locked if you don’t find a hidden Chaos Emerald in each preceding zone, or if you use a continue at any point, meaning you can lock yourself out of getting the proper ending easily — even in the first level. Instead you get the bad ending, in which it is implied that Tails has died even though you successfully completed all the levels up to that point. Back then this would have been considered acceptable for creating replay value. Now it just feels annoying.

A screenshot of Sonic on a hang glider in the clouds, with a Chaos Emerald visible at the top of the screen Getting this Chaos Emerald requires mastery of the hang glider.

Anyway, definitely play this one if you only ever played the Mega Drive games. It’s cool.

See you again for the final part of this series.

  1. Something of an oxymoron ↩︎

  2. A pun that went entirely over my head and probably most 90s children of the time. ↩︎

  3. No need, as they’re short levels. ↩︎