Jeremy Parish
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Segaiden #045: Enduro Racer & state of the union
🕑 Added 2023-04-05 12:27:54 +0000 UTCBrace yourself, because we're about to experience a rare sight: A legitimately disappointing Master System conversion of an arcade hit. Why, such a thing hasn't been seen since the hoary days of My Hero! And yet, Enduro Racer disappoints... doubly so, in fact, if you play the hacked-up American ROM.
And this seems like a good opportunity to take a step back and give the nascent console race in the freshly reanimated zombified American console market a look. Compare Master System to NES to this point and Sega has honestly been doing a damn good job of trading punches with Nintendo, matching NES's offerings and providing quite a few unique experiences of its own. And yet, we all know how that console race turned out. I'd argue that Summer 1987 marked the turning point, the moment at which Sega's prospects for 8-bit market dominance became hopeless in the U.S., and this episode opens with a brief referendum on that state of affairs.
But mostly, I'm just annoyed by the lackluster conversion of Enduro Racer. I mean, c'mon, man. What even is this.
Comments
Rhys
smaller ROM means cheaper chips.
Sven Mascarenhas
I think the explanation for Enduro Racer is easy enough: Paperboy.
PT
The western release does have one of the most perplexing Engrish endings of all time, so I suppose it has that. But yeah, what exactly was the cost difference of cutting a game in half around that time period?
