Wonder Boy 3 : The Dragon's Trap (FM sound)
35I picked up the latest issue of Retro Gamer a few days ago, mainly because of the fact it had an article on Wonder Boy 3 : The Dragon's Trap - my favourite ever Sega Master System game. This got me a bit nostalgic for the game, and also I wanted to see what it was like with the FM sound enabled. To do this I had to download a different SMS emulator, called Meka, to the one I usually use, Kega, as for some reason the FM sound doesn't work on that. It really does sound much better (although Meka did seem to have the odd issue with what sounded like tiny bits of lag every now and again, which would warp the audio for a nanosecond - don't ask me why an 8 bit system emulator would cause lagging in an i5, but you can definitely hear it's a bit unhappy sometimes. Strange).
I needed a couple of practice goes before recording to get myself familiar with the controls again (it's been a very long time since I last played this), but after that it was chocks away. I wasn't planning on doing a full playthrough, the idea with the video was more about demonstrating the FM sound. I wanted to do the first couple of dragons without dying and then get back safely to the village and wrapping things up there, which is what I do - I have left it open in such a way that I could come back and carry on playing though....
Being a bit out of practice at the game, I was being a bit cack handed sometimes and pressing the button for the item screen by mistake when I was trying to actually use an item. Also, the select and exit buttons felt like they were the wrong way around in my brain and there are times I exit the item screen by mistake instead of selecting stuff, meaning I have to then go back and do it again. D'oh!
I also forgot that you can't bring up the item screen on the boss - it just acts like a regular pause button, so there's a bit on the second boss where I hit the button, expecting to select an item and the game just pauses instead, resulting in a few seconds of me just gawping at the screen in confusion before realising and un-pausing it.
There was a sequel on the Megadrive - Wonder Boy in Monster World, which took the basic concept of the first game and massively expanded on it. I like it just as much if not more so than Wonderboy 3, it truly is superb. There was a sort of pseudo sequel to that called Monster World IV, with similar gamepay, but with a different protagonist, but I couldn't get into in the same way that I did the other two Wonder Boy games.
There has recently been a kickstarter to make a new Wonderboy game (with a slight change in name to avoid any legal issues). Find out more here:
http://www.monsterboy.com/blog/
It looks great. It did have a bit of a weird name before, but they've changed it to something a bit more sensible now.
And if you were wondering what my 2nd favourite ever Sega Master System game is, wonder no more, it's in the link below:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1QiSz2hOVbE