A couple weeks ago I spoke about the Ouya, and how it was pretty much dead on arrival.  It tried to be an open system with its own thriving dev community, and never took off.  Today I’d like to look at a system that is pretty much the exact opposite.  Sega may be out of the console business, but Sega consoles are still being manufactured and sold in Brazil.  Ladies and gentlemen, the last man standing from the third generation of console wars, the Sega Master System!

What is that!?

For those old enough to remember, that’s certainly not what you think of when you think of the Master System.  The model pictured above is a Master System 3, produced in 2008, and it isn’t even the most recent model.  In 2011 there was the Master System Evolution.  Somehow this even has a 6 button controller like the Master System’s successor the Genesis/Mega Drive.  Now, to be fair, these recent Master Systems don’t have a cartridge slot, and only run pre-installed games, which make them a bit more akin to those “50 in 1” old school Atari system things.  For the sticklers out there, it looks like the last version with a cartridge port came out in 2005.  So, even if you don’t count these versions, that’s still 20 years!

There must have been some clever engineering going on under the hood as well.  Games you wouldn’t consider possible on 8 bit consoles wound up getting ported to the Brazilian Master System.  Stuff like Street Fighter 2.  The load times are hideous, the animation is choppy, characters were cut, backgrounds are a bit lifeless, the music sounds like only a 2 channel MIDI, and the controls look pretty floaty, but it is better than you would expect.  They even got the announcer in!  See for yourself:

I guess it’s roughly equivalent to when Street Fighter Alpha 2 got ported to the SNES.  Either that, or an example of how the best games come out on a console at the end of its life span.  Like how Shadow of the Colossus on PS2 looks better than a lot of PS3 games.

Not everything released on it was a port, though.  There were Brazilian exclusive releases, like the 1995 Woody Woodpecker game “Férias Frustradas do Pica-Pau”.  To be fair, that was also a Mega Drive release, but it is still a Brazilian exclusive.  I don’t know if this is because Woody Woodpecker is big in Brazil, or if it was just something convenient to produce more content somehow, but it is a thing that exists.

I don’t know why it exists (I hate Woody Woodpecker), but I can’t deny that it does, in fact, exist.

The last game released on the Master System was in 1998, “Mickey’s Ultimate Challenge”.  If you want to make that your final date, then that makes for a 13 year lifespan.

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