One of the things that I picked up on my recent trip to Mandarake was my first Sega My Card. The game is simply called Hero. It is a pretty good game, Simon over on Red Parsley did a mini-review of it (along with a few other SG 1000 games) that is worth checking out here.Technically this is an SG-1000 game, but it can also be played on the Mark III. I have both so its no biggy, but I tried it out on my Mark III for a few minutes. I love the graphics. Very cool.
What I love most though is the box it came in. Sega My Cards I think have the best box design of any retro game out there. The cards are about the same size as PC Engine HU cards, but they didn`t use those boring CD cases. They went cardboard, which I love. It is like a little book that you open up and you are presented with the game and its manual:
The cover art on Hero is really great too, in fact it is one of the main things that attracted me to it. At only 525 yen (about $7) it was a really good deal, mainly because the box is pretty worn out, but I don`t care much about that. The cover still looks good and that is enough for me.
That's pretty cool! I've always found the whole "games on cards" idea interesting...
ReplyDeleteI really like the cover art, too, Sean. And the overall packaging? Wonderful!
ReplyDeleteLots of old Japanese Sega games had great box art, don't you think? I love a lot of the box art created for Mark III games, at least. I've often been tempted to start collecting them, but I already have enough systems to collect for :|
Anyway, great find. Thanks for sharing it here :)
Love, Love Love! :)
ReplyDeleteAnd I'm with you on the card board comment, what's even worse than the boring CD cases is todays plastic c*ap (see the cool GBA boxes VS the crappy DS/3DS ones).
I was always telling my friends how japanese boxes were way better than western ones and now they're basically the same (and it wasn't certainly Japan to gain anything with this...).
At least they some times do decent SE stuff (see the forth coming "Kiseki" game for PSP).
SKyrunner - thanks, games on cards are where it is at!!
ReplyDeleteBryan - I totally agree. I am officially on the hunt for CIB Mark III games (well...cheap CIB Mark III games anyway) because I absolutely love the cover art on some of those. Even my copy of baseball, the only Mark III cart I own, is great.
Dave - Yeah, I really do not like the cases that today`s games come in either. Very functional but not very attractive. True about the Japan/Overseas release divide too. The difference between Famicom and NES game boxes is massive (both have their good points, but for the most part I prefer the Famicom versions). With today`s games the actual art is usually a bit different, but they all come in the exact same plastic case, which is boring to look at.
I had no idea HERO got a SG1000 port - I sunk hours into that game on the Atari 2600 when I was a kid!
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