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MORE Pictures of Television Games in Meatspace
- Thread starter Dracula
- Start date
Sega Master System & Games (1987 or so)
I just really like the look of this thing. A black ziggurat with obscure markings. I love that they decided to print the console's connection layout right on the front of it, as if plugging it into your television -- sorry, TV SYSTEM -- is some sort of space-age future tech. And I like the burgundy labels on the carts. Even without the splash of artwork the Mark III carts have, the synergy with the label on the front of the POWER BASE makes for a pleasing presentation. It feels somewhere between the utilitarian lines of the NES and the alien curves of the Mega Drive. Professional, a little futuristic, but not exactly thrilling.
Then there's the games, with their legendary terrible graphic design. The serif font, graph paper background, and navy blue color, paired with typically minimalistic artwork, confused a lot of US buyers. Are they games or textbooks? Heck, I almost passed up one of the system's best, Zillion, because the art they decided to use is so vague. It depicts one of the game's ubiquitous computer kiosk screens, but divorced of context, it made me think the game might be about spreadsheets or something.
These are honestly so bad that they wrap right back around to appealing for me. It's right on the line between awful and brilliant. Like how TransBot features the name of the game over a photograph of someone's hand holding the game card, which also has the name of the game.
I don't know exactly what was going through Sega of America's minds when they came up with these designs. Maybe it was similar thinking to Nintendo - they knew consumers felt betrayed by the overzealous artwork of the Atari age, promising epic oil paintings but delivering a few bleeps and bloops. But Nintendo's answer to this problem -- the minimalistic "black box" series -- is considered iconic, while the SMS is a laughingstock. But if you were to look at them together, you might notice they aren't that different. It's just a few choices that set them apart.
Anyway, I also think the boxes look great on a shelf.
My kit came with the infamous Light Phaser. Oddly, the gun only worked on only the older of my two cathode ray tube TV SYSTEMS. The look of it reinforces the sci-fi feel of the console. And hey, the gun isn't just a cool accessory, it's also featured in the anime Zillion, which was co-developed by Sega and Tatsunoko to tie in with the Mark III. Bizarrely, neither Zillion (the game), nor its SMS sequel, uses the light gun.
So far, I've got a handful of games. I purchased Zillion, TransBot, and Space Harrier. Zillion is the real heavy-hitter here, and the one I've spent the most time with. I've been mapping out the game's maze-like world and loving it. Space Harrier I've been unable to get working -- I get an error when I boot it up. I've bought a second copy to see if it's a problem with the cart or the console. TransBot is a great 10-minute-burst kind of game. And I kinda like transforming robits, y'know.
My system also came bundled with Hang-On/Safari Hunt, Shooting Gallery, Missile Defense 3-D, and a boxed copy of Out Run. The latter, like Space Harrier, also doesn't work, and was advertised as such in the listing. I'm not sure how often carts fail for this console (and yes, I've cleaned everything thoroughly). Everything else works fine, though, but of course I won't be able to play Missile Defense without those keen 3-D goggles.
I've waffled on owning one of these things for the better part of a decade and a half. But I'm glad I dived in. There's tons of weird stuff to tease out of this library, and unlike some other obscure gaming machines (narrows eyes at PC Engine), it's not too expensive to collect for.
This rabbit hole just keeps on goin'...
I'll go right ahead and admit that probably 75% of my reasons for purchasing this console amount to "aesthetics." I love the way the dumb thing looks. It's slimmer and slicker than the big black pyramid of the SMS. It has a hinged cart door. The joypad ports are in the opposite order you'd expect. But the flat white shape with its bright yellow pause button, and the controller docks on the sides, gives it the feel of a futuristic cassette player or something like that. Both systems have the attitude of futuristic objects designed for two different futures.
I actually managed to get the box with this one, too. Bizarrely, it illustrates the system with a peripheral that's not in the box: this "Sega Telecom" thing that plugs into the back and apparently communicates with a radar dish that mounts on your TV. I have no clue what it was used for. There's a diagram on the side of the box that illustrates a number of other Mark III peripherals, ranging from the expected joysticks and steering wheel controllers to some more unexpected stuff like a keyboard, cassette player, and receipt printer.
I'm no expert on the development of the Mark III, but what this tells me is they intended for it to be a more robust computing system like the MSX or the Commodore. Since the Japanese console has an even smaller game library than the US one, I imagine this didn't work out especially well.
Oh and the game packaging is beautiful as well. I love the "GOLD CARTRIDGE" logo and the illustrations on the cover. The carts have artwork on them too (expect galleries later).
The only thing I kind of regret about this purchase is that it came with only one controller, and it's this weird SJ-150 model that I don't super love. The buttons are rubber, and the d-pad is more sensitive than the SMS controllers. It has this little screw-on plastic nipple so you can approximate an analogue stick or maybe a tiny joystick, but it's not comfortable to use. At some point I'm going to probably try to track down a controller or two like the ones that were packaged with the console.
Not that I need to. The Mark III has the same joypad jacks as both the SMS and the Genesis, so I can basically use any controller I want. It's not strictly necessary.
None of this is strictly necessary.
Hope you enjoyed the photos!!!
I'll go right ahead and admit that probably 75% of my reasons for purchasing this console amount to "aesthetics." I love the way the dumb thing looks. It's slimmer and slicker than the big black pyramid of the SMS. It has a hinged cart door. The joypad ports are in the opposite order you'd expect. But the flat white shape with its bright yellow pause button, and the controller docks on the sides, gives it the feel of a futuristic cassette player or something like that. Both systems have the attitude of futuristic objects designed for two different futures.
I actually managed to get the box with this one, too. Bizarrely, it illustrates the system with a peripheral that's not in the box: this "Sega Telecom" thing that plugs into the back and apparently communicates with a radar dish that mounts on your TV. I have no clue what it was used for. There's a diagram on the side of the box that illustrates a number of other Mark III peripherals, ranging from the expected joysticks and steering wheel controllers to some more unexpected stuff like a keyboard, cassette player, and receipt printer.
I'm no expert on the development of the Mark III, but what this tells me is they intended for it to be a more robust computing system like the MSX or the Commodore. Since the Japanese console has an even smaller game library than the US one, I imagine this didn't work out especially well.
Oh and the game packaging is beautiful as well. I love the "GOLD CARTRIDGE" logo and the illustrations on the cover. The carts have artwork on them too (expect galleries later).
The only thing I kind of regret about this purchase is that it came with only one controller, and it's this weird SJ-150 model that I don't super love. The buttons are rubber, and the d-pad is more sensitive than the SMS controllers. It has this little screw-on plastic nipple so you can approximate an analogue stick or maybe a tiny joystick, but it's not comfortable to use. At some point I'm going to probably try to track down a controller or two like the ones that were packaged with the console.
Not that I need to. The Mark III has the same joypad jacks as both the SMS and the Genesis, so I can basically use any controller I want. It's not strictly necessary.
None of this is strictly necessary.
Hope you enjoyed the photos!!!
Alien Syndrome (Sega Mark III Gold Cartridge, Sega, 1987)
Here's one of two Mark III games I own at the moment. You gotta love Sega's blatant theft of the Xenomorph design - not that this was unique to Alien Syndrome, of course. I also love the choice of rendering the spaceship refugees as all exactly the same person. This is how they appear in the game, but just looks a tad ridiculous in rendered form. The gal with them is the second-player character, who I think is named Mary. Ricky, the beefy hero, is giving off some strong Reb Brown vibes.
Sometimes I like to use this space to compare Japanese and American package art, but Master System is a special case. There's just no comparison. There's charm to both camps.
Oh, and the "FM" at the bottom of the box means the game can access the FM sound chip that comes as an add-on part for the Mark III, or baked into the Japanese Master System.
Mark III instruction manuals are uniformly printed in this blood-red Xerox color. On the back of the box, the packaging shows a single screenshot and has a line of text making sure you know you can't use this game with the SC-3000 or the SG-1000.
In my limited experience with SMS and Mark III games, it looks like they by and large carried any artwork over from the Japanese manuals. I checked in the American Alien Syndrome manual and saw that it was basically the same. Here's the page where they show all the bosses.
And here's the cart in the system.
Alien Syndrome as a game is what I'd call "serviceable." It's a top-down arcade action shooting thing, where the objective is to board a ship, rescue all the refugees (by touching them), then fight the ship's boss alien before heading to the next ship. There's gun power-ups, point bonuses, and warps hidden in wall panels around the ships, and the ships get more maze-like as you proceed. As soon as you enter a screen, enemies pop into existence one after the other at random points, and they always reappear if you exit and re-enter a screen. The bosses are huge colorful things, but they are a massive pain if you didn't bring a weapon power-up, and you lose the power-up if you die during the battle. The game has two-player mode, but it's alternating. It's a perfectly cromulent 20-minute arcade time-waster, but I find that it is fairly dry compared to some of Sega's other arcade conversions on the console.
Here's one of two Mark III games I own at the moment. You gotta love Sega's blatant theft of the Xenomorph design - not that this was unique to Alien Syndrome, of course. I also love the choice of rendering the spaceship refugees as all exactly the same person. This is how they appear in the game, but just looks a tad ridiculous in rendered form. The gal with them is the second-player character, who I think is named Mary. Ricky, the beefy hero, is giving off some strong Reb Brown vibes.
Sometimes I like to use this space to compare Japanese and American package art, but Master System is a special case. There's just no comparison. There's charm to both camps.
Oh, and the "FM" at the bottom of the box means the game can access the FM sound chip that comes as an add-on part for the Mark III, or baked into the Japanese Master System.
Mark III instruction manuals are uniformly printed in this blood-red Xerox color. On the back of the box, the packaging shows a single screenshot and has a line of text making sure you know you can't use this game with the SC-3000 or the SG-1000.
In my limited experience with SMS and Mark III games, it looks like they by and large carried any artwork over from the Japanese manuals. I checked in the American Alien Syndrome manual and saw that it was basically the same. Here's the page where they show all the bosses.
And here's the cart in the system.
Alien Syndrome as a game is what I'd call "serviceable." It's a top-down arcade action shooting thing, where the objective is to board a ship, rescue all the refugees (by touching them), then fight the ship's boss alien before heading to the next ship. There's gun power-ups, point bonuses, and warps hidden in wall panels around the ships, and the ships get more maze-like as you proceed. As soon as you enter a screen, enemies pop into existence one after the other at random points, and they always reappear if you exit and re-enter a screen. The bosses are huge colorful things, but they are a massive pain if you didn't bring a weapon power-up, and you lose the power-up if you die during the battle. The game has two-player mode, but it's alternating. It's a perfectly cromulent 20-minute arcade time-waster, but I find that it is fairly dry compared to some of Sega's other arcade conversions on the console.
I got a new camera, may as well use it, I guess, so... Bump!
This is from the original eBay listing of my Donkey Kong 3 cart:
As you can see, it comes with a case, which I've found I really like for storing games, so there's not piles of games lying around with dust getting on their contacts or whatever, plus it looks nice on the shelf (shelf not pictured, because I need to do some work on them lol). You'll also notice, of course, that the sticker is absolutely mangled. I ended up buying a replacement off Etsy, because A. this is Donkey Kong 3 and I don't plan to sell it, but even if I did, it's Donkey Kong 3 so I'm not going to make a mint off it and B. it was cheap and turned out great, I think:
The sticker is different from the one that was originally on my cartridge, and while Donkey Kong himself is ever so slightly more orange than I'd like him, I think it turned out great. Looks much better this way, at least. Here's a picture of the cart running (the line on the screen is the partial reflection of a window with the blinds closed):
...which also shows a bit of my retro setup. That's my precious 20 inch SDTV with a front AV input and, around back, an S-Video input (which I'm not using for my Famicom, sadly, but I have a switcher hooked up to it now with five other systems attached to it). Also my Switch is next to it, on the left of the SDTV is a small HDTV that I use occasionally to play Switch stuff on TV, but not very often since I usually play that handheld.
Post more pictures of your gaming crap, please!
This is from the original eBay listing of my Donkey Kong 3 cart:
As you can see, it comes with a case, which I've found I really like for storing games, so there's not piles of games lying around with dust getting on their contacts or whatever, plus it looks nice on the shelf (shelf not pictured, because I need to do some work on them lol). You'll also notice, of course, that the sticker is absolutely mangled. I ended up buying a replacement off Etsy, because A. this is Donkey Kong 3 and I don't plan to sell it, but even if I did, it's Donkey Kong 3 so I'm not going to make a mint off it and B. it was cheap and turned out great, I think:
The sticker is different from the one that was originally on my cartridge, and while Donkey Kong himself is ever so slightly more orange than I'd like him, I think it turned out great. Looks much better this way, at least. Here's a picture of the cart running (the line on the screen is the partial reflection of a window with the blinds closed):
...which also shows a bit of my retro setup. That's my precious 20 inch SDTV with a front AV input and, around back, an S-Video input (which I'm not using for my Famicom, sadly, but I have a switcher hooked up to it now with five other systems attached to it). Also my Switch is next to it, on the left of the SDTV is a small HDTV that I use occasionally to play Switch stuff on TV, but not very often since I usually play that handheld.
Post more pictures of your gaming crap, please!
Got a game many of you probably haven't seen before (I certainly hadn't!):
Alright so obviously, this is homebrew. It's an NES port of the Bomb Sweeper Game & Watch game, which is one of the more complicated ones - it's basically a puzzle game where you have to figure out how to get to the bomb to diffuse it before time runs out. It's simple, but quite fun! I actually recommend trying a rom of it out. As near as I can tell, this was released via the Nintendo Age forums in the early 2000s - I have no idea who developed it, whether this cart was manufactured or just a reused legit cart (I suspect the latter), etc. I wasn't on those forums at any time, so I don't know. There's an archive of them, but I haven't delved into it to find out.
In any case, I don't really care how "legit" this is or isn't, because it's intended for my Game & Watch display! I'll have to rearrange things to get it to fit in there, especially if I decide to display the box and cartridge separately, but I think it's really cool. I'd photograph the inside of the manual, by the way, but it's only three pages long and other than some control info, just repeats what it says on the back of the box. Still, cool that they made one.
Alright so obviously, this is homebrew. It's an NES port of the Bomb Sweeper Game & Watch game, which is one of the more complicated ones - it's basically a puzzle game where you have to figure out how to get to the bomb to diffuse it before time runs out. It's simple, but quite fun! I actually recommend trying a rom of it out. As near as I can tell, this was released via the Nintendo Age forums in the early 2000s - I have no idea who developed it, whether this cart was manufactured or just a reused legit cart (I suspect the latter), etc. I wasn't on those forums at any time, so I don't know. There's an archive of them, but I haven't delved into it to find out.
In any case, I don't really care how "legit" this is or isn't, because it's intended for my Game & Watch display! I'll have to rearrange things to get it to fit in there, especially if I decide to display the box and cartridge separately, but I think it's really cool. I'd photograph the inside of the manual, by the way, but it's only three pages long and other than some control info, just repeats what it says on the back of the box. Still, cool that they made one.
