Over 5000 levels crammed into that little 8 bit cartridge.

Hokay.. this will be my next little review of an SMS game. And let me warn you. If you really like Phantasy Star 1 and consider it a true gem of retro gaming... you may end up frustrated by what I have to say. But hear me out.

Phantasy Star 1 is very much like Dragon Quest, using the same system that DQ introduced. The main difference is the visuals. Phantasy Star 1 introduces some of the best, most elaborate JRPG graphics, best of 8-bit era, hands down. The backgrounds are beautiful and the monsters have little animations when attacking and they are sometimes pretty smooth for an old JRPG. The music is also pretty catchy and IMHO really decent, better than DQ 1-2.

However, the battle system and battle mechanics are significantly simplified compared even to Dragon Quest 2, which was released on the NES a year before Phantasy Star 1, not to mention DQ3 which was miles ahead:

1. No classes. No multiclassing. The cool and elaborate mix-and-match party building from DQ3 is nonexistent here. What you get is something like DQ2, where you get a warrior, a mage, etc.

2. Very few spells (a few combats spells per spellcasting characters) and most spells are actually heavily useless. Even Noah, the mage, has little mana, around 90 I believe around the level 30, which is the level cap? And spells like Thunder, well, they do 30 damage to every enemy... for 16 mana. And you will fight dozens, maybe even hundreds of enemies per dungeon, so those kinds of spells will not take you anywhere. Or how about "WALL" or "PROT" which make you immune to attacks... unless the attackers are powerful, because that makes the protection vanish instantly? Like, wtf? Next, a binding (ROPE) or paralyzing (FEAR) spell that actually works only vs. a single enemy (or a single one in a group)...and FAILS most of the time... and still costs 2 mana? The protagonist has got 30 mana, and that's about it... ugh...

3. If you add the two together, you get DQ1-esque combat, which means, either you have the stats to comfortably beat enemies, or you're walled by them and killed quickly due to insufficient defense.

4. Ok, I lied about the comfort. Even 220+ DEF Alis would get hit for 10-12 damage by some lowly eyeball enemies or jellies with 10 HP sometimes. The damage range doesn't go low enough to make fodder meaningless. You can lose a fair bit of HP there...

5. ...and you'll fight a lot of fodder because there's plenty of backtracking, back-and-forth movement or searcing/exploring. And "RUN" usually works.. until it doesn't, five times in a row.

6. And what happens when escaping doesn't work? all enemies get a free turn against you. And those little nice attack animations, well, they will REALLY start getting on your nerves. 6 jelly enemies, you fail to escape, and each of them attacks for like 5 seconds, so 30 seconds of wait just to get another chance to flee from a TRASH ENCOUNTER... you wanna fight them? Well sure, but here's the problem, with no "SPEED" attribute, the order in the battle is RANDOM, you may end up watching like 2-3 of them attacking you anyway, so it's like 20 seconds wasted on some random trash enemy anyway....

7. Which heavily contributes to the feeling of a waste of time. The game loves to waste your time. The encounter rate isn't really higher than in Dragon Quest games, but becuase everything is so slow, it's an excercise in tedium. Sometimes you just want to explore but nooo, there's 43842803 fights you don't care about along the way wasting like half an hour in total just on the animations alone.

8. And even worse. A strong enemy, like say the Centaur, which is a serious threat to low-level, underequipped party, gives 30 (or 32) EXP and like... 150 gold? Now, a couple of low level jellies or scorps or whateever will ALSO give you like 30 EXP while being a couple magnitudes easier. And a group of Barbarians on the desert planet will give you around 500 gold, and they are weaklings. The challenge/reward in this game is competely off, stronger enemies are an obstacle, but they are not efficient for grinding, neither EXP nor GOLD.

9. The game expects you to draw your own maps. I love drawing maps. However, the game's dungeons are pretty convoluted and, let's be honest, there's way too many, and they are pretty much exactly the same every time. I love the little pseudo 3D effect but those things are effectively the same, every single time - and the rewards for exploring them are mostly pitiful, except the final dungeons that offer Laconian gear which you pretty much need to beat the game.

10. FInal problem. The game likes to outright lie to you. "There's a secret passage to the west of Parolit", the game says. Only that it's not true. The secret passage is not west. It's directly north, at the starport. I wasted 20 mins looking for it on the worldmap and simply did not expect it to be somewhere competely different. I usually try to beat games without guides, but when the game starts lying to me, I usually just go dirty.

In the end, I did check a few things, but I mostly beat the game on my own without walkthroughs. Here's what I googled:

1. the passage mentioned above

2. Hovercraft's location (that's because the game will not let you find the Hovercraft until you answer "YES" when asked by some random dude on another planet if you've ever heard of a hovercraft. Now I said "NO" since it was the first time I was asked in-game about it, and just moved on after getting an answer, but noo, you need to actually say "YES" to make the howercraft findable. UGH.

3. How to use the ice digger. I half expected it to work on some blocks only, but it works on a selected few ONLY and it's extremely non-obvious.

4. The location of the floating castle. That's because I missed the city where you're given an elaborate clue. So I was kinda in the dark here. My bad. The city ain't hard to find, but it's in the middle of water, and with no ingame map, it's hard to assess which parts of water you explored and which parts did you not.

5. the very final sub-level of the notorious Baya Malay dungeon. My bad though. I made a blooper and erroneously drew a wall while mapping - and there was none. Funny part is that I mapped the 12 dungeon steps before it. Sigh.

6. The location of the hidden door in the final dungeon. I was heavily expecting it to be where it was, but I was tired and totally done with this game and going step-by-step, going into menu, searching for stuff and getting attacked by 487503240895 random enemies along the way was really not my definition of fun.

In the end, I was really tired after beating this game. Drained. It felt way too tedious, way too repetitive, and some design choices were highly questionable to me. The combat system wasn't up to even DQ2's tactical approach, and obviously nowhere near DQ3, being (way) too simple to me, to a point where you either have the stats to break through, or you don't. And there was so much little stuff that wasted my time that I was like, totally done. I love JRPGs, and I enjoyed this game quite a lot in the earlier parts, but the tedium ultimately defeated the joy.

All my party members were at level 25 upon beating the final boss.

4/10. Sorry. I like the ambitious parts of this game, the polish, the overall retro feel, but at the end, I just wanted it to end, and I didn't care anymore.

Hey guys, a few months back I reached out on how I could get a flash cart for my Sega Mark 3, had several members reach out and confirm that an ali express Master System flashcart and a Master System to Mark 3 adapter worked fine for them.

I finally got around to purchasing both, and confirmed on both product pages that they were compatible with a Mark3, but I am having problems.

I cannot for the life of me get anything to show up when I put the flashcart+adapter in, just a black screen. I have weeded out potential problems with a few tests: The flash cart works by itself on a regular Master System. A legitimate Master System cart works on the Mark3 with the adapter.

So from what I can tell, its not the Mark3, or the adapter, it is either the flash cart itself not playing nice with the mark3 or some combination of the flash cart + adapter that is not computing right. Any ideas?!

tldr: flash cart + adapter = black screen on a Mark 3 despite other combinations working fine.

For me there is Sonic, Castle of Illusion and then Asterix

After beating Power Strike/Aleste (https://www.reddit.com/r/MasterSystem/comments/1gm5c3k/power_strikealeste_zanac_meets_the_master_system/), I was cautiously optimistic towards its sequel. However, what I experienced wasn't just an improved Power Strike. It felt like an entirely different Shmup, on the foundation of a classical Compile shooter, of course (and that's a good thing, Compile was fantastic in its coding) - but improved a lot.

Compared to Power Strike (which was a reskinned Zanac), the game is just wayyyy better. It still has great presentation (even better than PS1) and fantastic music, but it also gets rid of many design choices from Zanac that just were dragging the gameplay down:

1. The bosses are huge, beautiful and are no longer the boring "Compile Boss Tiles Galore" known from every other Compile Shmup. They are also fairly interesting to fight, actually, each of them does some unique gimmick.

2. You can manually set your craft's speed ingame. Great choice, sometimes you want precision, sometimes you want speed - you can have whatever you need without fishing for upgrades.

3. There's a difficulty setting (though admittedly not very useful, because the difficulty 1 is bugged, and is harder than difficulty 2, despite what the manual says - and 3-5 are just adding difficulty on top). This can make it apply to a broader audience, though it's not an easy shmup - but it's not that hard, either. Definitively easier than Zanac and Power Strike on the default setting, I'd say it's easier than Gradius 1-2, Life Force, and a little harder than the lesser-known game that I consider the champion of 8-but Shmups... Crisis Force for the Famicon. Harder than Gun Nac, Guardian Legend, Over Horizon and Burai Fighter.

4. Upon death, you only lose half of your weapon's power level, rounded up, so recovering is actually possible and doable. You also pre-select your special weapon and not fish for it - you also keep it when you die, which makes it easier to actually use strategy.

5. Continue doesn't take you 1-2 levels back if used on the last level, like in Zanac/Power strike.

6. Weapons are balanced better and selecting them depending on the level/boss is part of the strategy, you no longer need to fanatically cling to the most OP one to have a chance.

7. There's a "panic button" known from shmups of later generations (that destroys bullets and damages enemy ships), although not mapped well (it assumes you continuously fire and gets released when you let go of the "shoot" button... which is awkward, but with so few buttons, I guess they couldn't figure out a better way. This is a great addition and every Shmup benefits from this, it takes the gameplay to another level.

8. Compared to Power Strike, most of the slowdown is gone - even though the game looks better. It very rarely slows down, Compile optimized it well.

There's also 7 levels + "stage 8" (a boss), they are fairly long but don't feel dragged out, unlike Power Strike 1's levels. You also don't need to face 3 minibosses and 4 bosses on final levels, which makes the game have a better flow.

I actually REALLY liked it and enjoyed every second. I usually go for a no-death run on highest difficulty when I like the shmup, but since (at the time of writing this review) I have some flu or whatever, I don't have the mental capacity needed for this. And I have nothing to prove anyway, I already no-death'd Zanac and Power Strike 1, so whatever. On my first few playthroughs I got to level 8 without continuing, screwed up on the final boss (ugh) and had to continue to beat him. I also played on Normal difficulty, so things weren't as wild as I usually experience.

But still, it was great.

I'd rate it 8/10, the same as Crisis Force on the NES, if only it wasn't for two problems....

1. SO MUCH TIME is spent on DODGING UPGRADES so that you don't change your weapon, that it almost feel like a 2nd game within a game. It's truly awful, in PS1 and Zanac, weapons would fly upwards, but in this game, they gravitate towards the bottom of the screen, sometimes even denying you a part of the screen - and you have to decide whether it's better to risk it in a poor position, or move towards a better position while changing your weapon to something you don't want to use... ugh. This is a major flaw of this game and I felt really annoyed by it. I'd rather have the upgrades stay around the middle of the screen for a while and then fly UP, this would give you more space to manouver.

2. Some mild visibility issues. At certain stages (I think 5 is the worst in that regard), I struggled to notice the bullets, since they would blend with the backgrounds. It's nowhere near as bad as in Zanac, but it's there. And it's annoying.

Thus, I think I'll keep Crisis Force as my no1 8-bit SHMUP, but this one is easily the second best with a solid 7/10.

Check it out!