Intensive Gaming Diary

The blog about videogames.

Tag: nes

My Tiny Collection of Sega Master System Games

Posted on by Viljami

I have an adapter that can bring me to games of the game system that was originally released before Mega Drive. This gaming console is Sega Master System. It wasn’t the first console that was manufactured by Sega. It was although something that could be a challenge for Nintendo Entertainment System. NES was released in 1983. Some years later Master System was released.

The complete game library of Sega Master System has a bit over 300 games. Mega Drive was strongly advertised to be a 16-bit system. Master System is a 8-bit system. It sold something from 10 to 13 million units worldwide. After all this was not enough for Sega that wanted to dominate the markets. The sligt failure of Master System caused Sega to really invest in the development of Mega Drive.

What am I playing my Master System games with? Well, I have a Retro Trio console that I can play Mega Drive games with. Already some years ago I was lucky to spot an adapter that enables you to play Master System games on a Mega Drive. It was also cheap but very difficult to find from any game shop or even elctronics web shop.

I have collected for Master System already some time. About a month ago I bought three more games for it. I already had this game that features Mickey Mouse. The game is titled Castle of Illusion. It’s a fun platformer type of a game. Three other games are Wonder Boy, Super Space Invaders and Psycho Fox.

It has to be said that if we make a comparison between NES and MS and think about all games that were released NES has more of them. In fact NES has about two times more games than MS. This is of course clear since NES was such a popular system back in the 80s and especially before the release of its serious competitor Sega MD. In fact it is said that back in 1988 Nintendo held 83 percentage of the video game market (in North America alone).

The latest addition to my Sega MS collection will be Bubble Bobble. I have ordered it but it hasn’t yet arrived (that’s why it isn’t in the featured image of this blog post). Bubble Bobble is an exciting game and it was released in the 80s for several gaming systems. It was released also for PC, C-64 and  NES. You can probably right now hear the theme music already playing if you are familiar with this game. This game is familair to me and I was introduced to it in the form of a PC game. I used to play it a lot when I was a kid. Today, I enjoy more the console version because I can use a game pad to play it. It is said also that the MS version was the best.

I can recommend any of these MS games if you got interested. These four games weren’t actually so expensive. Psycho Fox was 40 euros. Other games were something below 30 euros. Bubble Bobble was a bit more expensive. It cost me 75 euros. I have seen these prices going up a bit in last five years or so. Retro games seem to have a higher price today as this hobby seems to be popular.

My Current Tiny Collection of NES Games

Posted on by Viljami

I didn’t have a Nintendo Entertainment System when I was a child. It didn’t prevent me from getting my hands to this console. I remember that at least two of my friends from school had this gaming system. We played Super Mario and Mega Man just to name a few of my favorites. This nostalgic feeling is the reason I started collecting NES games.

I have a retro gaming console that can handle NES, SNES, Mega Drive, Game Boy and Master System game cartridges. That’s right. I play my 80s and 90s retro games from real physichal cartridges. I have used also emulators on different computers, including Raspberry Pi, but I find it satisfying to play my retro games the way that I do.

I have also an original NES controller that I use while I play NES games. Let’s get to my collection. I have 12 NES games. I have been collecting games of this game console for about three years. That’s when I got the first game of this system.

The first game in this collection was Super Mario Bros. 3. It is in my opinion maybe the best game and definitely the best platformer game for this legendary gaming system. If you look carefully to this image we have here you can find that I have Double Dragon 1 and 2, Big Foot, Gremlins 2, Kid Ikarus, Gradius, The Adventure of Link, Tetris, Total Recall, Ice Climber and Gauntlet 2.

There are still some games I would like to buy and add to my collection. Some of these games are Mega Man, Metal Gear Solid, Super Mario 1 and 2, Punch Out, Probotector and some others that just don’t come to mind right now. There are also many great games that I don’t even yet know about. I have imagined that I would some day get a CRT television that would enable me to play shooter games like Duck Hunt. There are also some very good shooters for PlayStation 1.

How much have I paid for these games. I think the most expensive from these games is the Zelda game. It cost me 80 euros. I just had to buy it. This game is a bit rare so I was lucky to even have an opportunity to buy it. I buy my NES games usually from different game shops. Sometimes I find a game from flee market. Because of corona I haven’t been to flee markets a lot lately but this I know is going to change. The cheapest games in this collection are somewhere around 15 euros.

So for this small collection you can probably spend something from 300 euros to 500 euros. I suggest that if you are going to play your NES games also and not just collect them just buy them like two or three games at a time. This way you can enjoy playing them. I think one of the most important ways to enjoy games that bring you nostalgia is to just give them enough time. You can definitely spend two to three hours for one game. You can also try to complete them. To this day I haven’t been able to beat Super Mario Bros 3. I have spent lot of time in trying to do so.

I think you have already some good ideas for starting to collect NES cartridges to your own collection. Buying retro games can also be a way to invest your money in case you become financially challenged some day. There are lots of collectors out there. I almost forgot one good title and that is the first Final Fantasy. This is a one rare game. Also some NES games are very expensive today. You can see a game that costs several hundreds of euros or even more than that.

Why Am I a SEGA Person?

Posted on by Viljami

Sega was my key to this whole video gaming hobby. I think it was 1993 when I got my Sega Mega Drive. I played a lot of it. This was of course making me not to play so much NES, SNES and even later Nintendo 64 and GameCube. Lately I have tried to catch up on Nintendo’s retro stuff. I have even studied some Game Boy games.

Nothing created such a rage inside me than a Mega Drive game that I was trying to beat. You can say that Mega Drive games are a bit repetitive in their nature so you had to be perfect on a try and if you failed you had to start all over again until you eventually would run out of lives and after that continues. Yeah. We didn’t have lots of memory for saved games back then.

Sega also made me to be angry to my mates that were playing some Streets of Rage 2 with me in collaboration mode. It became aggresive so suddenly. As I was playing with my brother we had many arguments. We were told that we took the game too seriously. We were separated and we both couldn’t play Mega Drive for that day anymore. This made me think even when I was a small ten-year-old child. And I didn’t take it so seriously. There was just something about how Sega made players a bit frustrated. I think that is some of the appeal of this franchise.

After Sega my life with Nintendo’s gaming products was again pushed towards later times because it happened that I bought a Sony PlayStation in 1997. This of course made me distant also to Sega Saturn. I have only lately been again interested in it. As PlayStation had real 3D games I thought it would absolutely have so much more to offer compared to Saturn. This thinking has changed, maybe just this year, and I have been interested in Saturns games which aren’t actually so much 3D games but it has some very interesting titles that Sony doens’t have.

So these choices made me to play certain games. Today I understand that the variety of different and good or decent game titles are from many different consoles and every consoles have at least some good or decent games be it that many of the best games are released on certain systems. This makes me definitely interested in exclusives. And this interest hasn’t faded when it comes to modern consoles.

What I was essentially missing a lot as a child were mainly NES, SNES and Game Boy titles. Later I missed some Saturn titles and N64 and GameCube titles. I also didn’t ever get a Dreamcast. So what caught my attention was first Sega and then Sony. Did I follow Sony a lot? Maybe not. I never had a PS2. Can you think about this? I hardly can.

All in all we can say that there are for all of us these gaming consoles that brought us to the hobby or maybe to some to the profession. It is your own curiosity that makes you want to dig deep and try to discover some old games that you haven’t yet played. And this is also what makes video gaming interesting.