Video Works by Jeremy Parish

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, especially shooters. Such as... Astro Warrior, this episode's B-side, which goes from being OK...

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) Xevious, it turns out to be an unexpected highlight of the Master System's launch period. ...

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, which does some absolutely ridiculous things with the Master System's more esoteric c...

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 this U.S.- and European-exclusive upgrade draws its content and aesthetics from the comp...

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 shines through. As for the latter, Ghost House falls short of greatness due to its la...

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 Master System hardware and its three pack-in games (or rather, two pack-in games and ...

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 release early in the year but ended up kicking this particular ball down the road ove...

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:

1. Two games that may or may not have actually debuted in the U.S. in December 1988, and
2. Two games from the same franchise, possibly released simultaneously by different publishers. 

Bomberman and RoboWarrior don't share much branding in common...

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 different influences and ultimately does a lot to define the series' future... even if i...

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 platform primarily advertised and sold to children. In the case of Xenophobe, you'll...

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 on dramatic reinterpretations of coin-op titles for NES, it seems, although Temple of...

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 platform gaming as demand it as the price of entry. But once you got a handle on the grappli...

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 company.

And while Paperboy for NES comes to us from Mindscape, the original game debuted ...

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-appeal—really, the closest Nintendo themselves ever got to "git gud" difficulty on NES. B...

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 auto-scrolling shooter and turns it into a Choplifter-inspired adventure with a touc...

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 suffering (especially among Gen X kids). The ambitions greatly outstrip the execution wi...

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 original 1943 coin-op, it makes up for that shortcoming by introducing a permanent skill-up...

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 despite some unforgiving design choices that make for some incredibly difficult scena...

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 different characters, not just Mario. Despite its complicated history, SMB2 became one ...