Developer: Data East
Publisher: Sega
Release Date: September 1989
Recently I was thinking about how positive I have been toward the Sega Master System. 70% of them have been good so far? That's way too many. I've got to find some lesser games to balance things out. To do this I decided to go back to a game I have a bit of a history with. Captain Silver was one of the first SMS game I ever owned. I found it thrifting in my tiny hometown which I always thought was odd. It's hard to believe anyone in my town ever owned a Master System, but we had an Atari 7800 so I guess it's not that strange. I didn't have many SMS games at the time, so I played it enough for form a fairly strong opinion. That opinion was that it had to be one of the worst games on the console. Acquiring more games didn't change my opinion much either. It was always one I ranked near the bottom. Several years after buying it I was playing some games for Twin Galaxies. My main goal was setting the record on Hang-On, but I had some extra room on my VHS tape. I decided to get a high score on Captain Silver since none had been submitted so far. My Hang-On record was beaten fairly quickly by someone with more focus than me, but my Captain Silver record stood for years. I spent nearly a decade being the Captain Silver world champion. In spite of this, however, I'm not sure if I fully understood the game. I play it now and it's not quite the trainwreck I remember. Is it actually a better game that I had thought, or am I just getting soft in my golden years?
I can certainly tell that Captain Silver started life as an arcade game. It comes from the post-crash and pre-Street Fighter era where shooters and intense platformers ruled. Master System was full of arcade adaptations, and for the most part they tried to keep them authentic. Captain Silver certainly feels like a game that is still trying to eat your quarters. You move slowly and the enemies just keep coming. In the first level they are mostly dispatched with one hit, but as the levels go on, they become more difficult to defeat. I've never been a huge fan of these slow-moving side-scrollers, but I can't say it doesn't execute. The controls are fine, and I never had trouble attacking or jumping. I just find the whole thing a bit dull. There's nothing too exciting about slowly swinging a sword at a slow-moving enemy, even when there are several slow-moving enemies on the screen at the same time. There are a few branching paths and moving platforms that add some much-needed variety, and I enjoy earning extra lives by collecting letters that spell out Captain Silver from defeated enemies. There are also shops that sell a few power-ups, but unless you haven't upgraded your weapon all the way they are pretty useless. It just doesn't make much sense saving up 30,000 coins to buy an invincibility potion that only lasts about thirty seconds. Nothing they try keeps it from being uninteresting. It's certainly not one of the worst things I've ever played. However, there is another big problem with the American version of the game.
In most regions Captain Silver came out in 1988 with six levels. The American version came out a year later, and for some reason they took out two of the levels. The instruction manual even says there are six levels, but they are nowhere to be found. With the two levels missing Captain Silver takes a miniscule ten minutes to play through. Nobody is going to beat it on their first try, but it's not a particularly hard game either. By 1989 this kind of brevity was unacceptable. I can't think of a shorter game that wasn't insanely hard. Cybernoid only lasts about ten minutes, but it would take hours to get good enough to finish it. Captain Silver just doesn't have the challenge level to justify being so short. It is novel having an SMS game that I can actually finish, but it's not the most satisfying win.
I started this review by predicting that I was going to like Captain Silver more than I expected. I enjoyed it for the first couple of minutes, so I actually thought that it was better than I remembered. I suppose it was to a degree, but that's only because I thought it was one of the worst games of all time. At the very least I can say that it's not the worst game on Master System, and it probably won't be the worst game released in the US either. The controls and graphics are fine, and it can be entertaining in short bursts. As a complete package, however, it is too short and too basic to generate much interest. The Master System was known for its arcade ports, and Captain Silver was released after so many better ones had already been released. It even came out a month after the Genesis was released. Nobody was thinking about Captain Silver when there was 16-bit Altered Beast to play. Of course, it could be a better game than I'm giving it credit for. Maybe I'm just bitter because someone beat my record.
So, after all that Captain Silver still ends up in the bad section. At least it's near the top, and I'm even putting it above Robodemons. It is 138 overall which makes it the third best bad game I have ranked so far. On the Master System specific list, it ranks 10 out of 11. It's better than 20-em-1, but it is the worst of the American games I have played so far. There are 114 US games, so we'll have to get through 104 more to see if that dubious record holds. That would make it stronger than my Captain Silver record, but at least I'm not bitter about it. I just think about how somewhere out there someone played Captain Silver even more than I did. This is one of those stories where nobody wins.
Sega Master System Quality Percentage: 7/11 or 63.63%
No comments:
Post a Comment