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Thread: Sega Master System card-based games

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    Cherry (Level 1)
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    Default Sega Master System card-based games

    Is there a special trick to getting card-based games to work on the SMS? I have Ghost House, which is my only card game, and whenever I try to play it, I just get the instruction screen that says to insert a card or cartridge. This occurred with two separate systems. I also have the 3D glasses, which work fine. I'm thinking it's a bum card, but I want to make sure I'm not doing something wrong.
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    Cherry (Level 1)
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    On recommendation of someone at another board, I cleaned the contacts of the card using an eraser. Worked like a charm!

    Since I answered my own question, feel free to make this a general SMS card thread. So... Did anyone actually buy these card games back in the day? What's your favorite?
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    Strawberry (Level 2) guitargary75's Avatar
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    It's sad to say, but I have never played them. I'm gonna have to get some now.

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    Anybody remember the "SMS Gnomes"? You know, the one's that steal your instruction manuals! They have a taste for card based booklets.

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    Cherry (Level 1)
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    The gnomes spared me the Ghost House manual, but they took the plastic sleeve. Jerks!
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    Cherry (Level 1) Nikademus1969's Avatar
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    The only SMS card game I had was Spy Vs Spy. I thought it was fun.

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    Ghost House was great fun!!! It was one of the few Master System games that my local video store rented when I was younger. I rented the hell out of Ghost House and Fantasy Zone.
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    Strawberry (Level 2) grolt's Avatar
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    The Sega Card games are all basically terrible. While I love me my Master System, I pretty much really dislike all the Card games. F-16 Fighting Falcon is probably the ugliest game ever made, although I give it props for requiring both controllers to be operated by the player in some crazy kind of flying simulation. Transbot, Teddy Boy and Ghost House are all simplistic and uber-repetetive, especially considering you can never finish any of them before they loop. Spy vs. Spy is nearly ALF-worthy as one of the worst games for the system. Fun in a good-bad way, I guess. Super Tennis is about as advanced as playing Virtua Tennis on the Dreamcast VMU. I love the fact that the SMS could accept card-based games, but they sure could have utilized them better.
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    "Ai Oboete Imasu Ka?" Flashback2012's Avatar
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    The card based games were an interesting novelty. I always thought it was neat my SMS could accept games on both cart and card even if I never really understood why. The only one I remember ever putting any time into was Ghost House. Didn't alot of those card based games come out on cart in Europe?

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    Strawberry (Level 2) grolt's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Flashback2012 View Post
    The card based games were an interesting novelty. I always thought it was neat my SMS could accept games on both cart and card even if I never really understood why. The only one I remember ever putting any time into was Ghost House. Didn't alot of those card based games come out on cart in Europe?
    Yes, and there were also additional cart games that came out as cards overseas as well. Bank Panic, Hang-on, Great Baseball, and Great Soccer. I forgot to mention My Hero, which might be the most infuriating game of all. One hit, you're dead, and it plays so fast and clunky that it's near impossible.
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    Cherry (Level 1)
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    Agree with you on everything except Spy vs. Spy. One of the best and most addictive 2P games of my childhood. We never got tired of it.

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    Quote Originally Posted by rarebucky View Post
    Agree with you on everything except Spy vs. Spy. One of the best and most addictive 2P games of my childhood. We never got tired of it.
    Me too. Spy vs. Spy is excellent for multiplayer! Or it was...

    You guys need to realize the games are old before talking is the worst game ever made.

    BTW, I never played a card game. My Spy vs. Spy is in cartridge. In Brasil there's no card games released so they released in cartridges.

    And Ghost House, I never played it, but played a lot Chapolim vs. Dracula. A "licensed hack" of it. Brazilian too, in cartridge. And it was a great game to me. Because of the license of the TV show too.

    That's those things you love when you are a kid. =D

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    Peach (Level 3)
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    I had a bunch of them in the day, but I haven't reacquired any since getting another SMS a while bakc.

    I really liked Ghost House - I played that forever. Transbot was kind of cool, though it never got challenging enough IIRC. I kind of liked Quartet, too, but it was like Transbot in that it never got very hard.

    Spy vs. Spy on the SMS was pretty much a port of the c64 game, right? If so it's awesome.
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    Cherry (Level 1)
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    The outrun sms card game was fun and didn't look to bad. I guess Sega was trying to save money on carts and thought people would gobble these up. I could care less for the card based games but without that card slot, I wouldn't be able to play the wonderful 3-d games

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    Insert Coin (Level 0) playgeneration's Avatar
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    Theres no Outrun card, or Quartet card, both games were only released on cartridge.

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    Apple (Level 5) Matt-El's Avatar
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    Teddy Boy is extremely fun, but I recommend the arcade version more.

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    I actually enjoyed several of the card games back in the day. I actually didn't totally hate F-16 fighting Falcon at the time, though it's my least favorite one now. If I ever buy an SMS again, I definitely will get Ghost House, My Hero, and Teddy Boy. Those 3 are actually really fun, and Ghost House has surprisingly decent visuals for such a small game. I played the hell out of it when I was a kid.

    In general, the card games were the smallest SMS games because they could only hold like 512K or something (I don't know the actual size). So you'd have to expect that you're not going to get much more than an arcade-style game. There are plenty of black-box variants on the NES that had similar levels of depth (Wrecking Crew, Balloon Fight, etc.) but I think we're all a bit more forgiving on those games because they were developed by the same people who worked on Kid Icarus, Metroid and Zelda--games we have an extreme appreciation of. As such, I think I percieve these NES games as having a lot more character and personality than some of these SMS games just because of my association with the other, higher-profile games that look and sound similar. But the three SMS card games that I mentioned really are good, despite this.

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    Apple (Level 5) Sweater Fish Deluxe's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Graham Mitchell View Post
    In general, the card games were the smallest SMS games because they could only hold like 512K or something (I don't know the actual size).
    Actually, the card games max out at 32KB (maybe they could be bankswitched to hold more? I don't know), so they were really a throwback to the earlier days of videogaming, which may be why many people didn't like them. They feel more like ColecoVision games than Master System games because they used many of the same design elements as earlier games because of the limited ROM size, though as you pointed out some of them did have pretty nice graphics.


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    ServBot (Level 11) tom's Avatar
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    The card games are a throwback to their previous system, Sega Mark III, which had a card- and cart slot (like the later SMS). Called 'MyCards', they could hold up to 256KB in 1985 (source: The Encyclopedia of Game Machines: Consoles, Handhelds and Home Computers 1972-2005)
    Last edited by tom; 04-16-2008 at 05:00 PM.

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    Kirby (Level 13) zektor's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Sweater Fish Deluxe View Post
    Actually, the card games max out at 32KB (maybe they could be bankswitched to hold more? I don't know), so they were really a throwback to the earlier days of videogaming, which may be why many people didn't like them. They feel more like ColecoVision games than Master System games because they used many of the same design elements as earlier games because of the limited ROM size, though as you pointed out some of them did have pretty nice graphics.


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    I had a card once (Soccer maybe?) that was 128k and submitted it to Omar over at SMS Power to analyze. He thought it was quite odd....

    I owned all of the card games back in the day when they came out. Although repetitive, I loved Ghost House and Transbot myself.

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