Backlog Blitz: Master System, Week Four, "The Ecco of a Half-Decent Game"

Car is fixed. Yay. Three hundred dollars later. Boo. Anyway. Went shoe shopping. Unsuccessfully. Ate Mediterranean. Successfully. Played Sega Master System games. Disappointedly. Seriously, Master System. You aren't exactly doing what Nintendon't.

Ecco the Dolphin

Finally, a good game! Controls are decent, the gameplay is great, the mystery/plot is good… Graphics are acceptable… The main problem is the music, which is…repetitive in the extreme. Overall this is pretty good.

F-16 Fighting Falcon

It’s as difficult as Top Gun, and uglier. Generally the first level shouldn’t cause me to go into a tailspin and die 30 seconds in, every single time.

Galaxy Force

I’ll give this game credit for one thing. It’s basically the SNES version of Star Fox, only on the Sega version of the NES. The faux-3D is actually done pretty well. The problem is that the space combat is nowhere near as enjoyable as Star Fox. The sound design is limp, the graphics are...alright, and the mechanics are fine. But the combat is…well, not really combat?

Gauntlet

Wow. This is probably the worst port of Gauntlet ever. I mean, it’s clunkier, uglier, less fun… The sound is nonexistent, the controls are awful, the gameplay is stripped-down (if that’s even possible), the graphics are subpar, everything is worse.