This is inspired by IrishNinja's excellent Mega Drive appreciation thread. I felt like Sega's earlier console is sadly rather unknown especially to US gamers. Plus, it had 3D!
In my country (New Zealand) the Master System was a massive success, in fact I never knew a kid who owned a NES at all and the NES selection in video shops here was tiny in comparison to the Master system section.
I remember my mother came home one day during school holidays with a SMS system when I was around 5( the mark 2 with Alex Kidd in miracle world built in). I was so excited and once my father set it up, I sat enthralled in it for hours upon hours over the course of that week. On the weekend, they took me shopping to get a game where I picked Putt and Putter which was an extremely fun mini golf game which I think is still a Master System exclusive!
Over the course of the years as I got older, I obtained heaps of games and rented them on a weekly basis too.
Some of my favourites were
Sonic the Hedgehog 1,2 & Chaos (These are all completely different to the Mega Drive ones)
Bubble bobble and rainbow islands
Putt and Putter
Road Rash (I used to love smashing Viper so much and making him come last)
Mercs
Scramble Spirits
Fantasy Zone
The SMS is also home to many excellent Sega arcade ports and many companies (Capcom and Namco in particular) licenced the rights to many of their games to Sega to make ports for the SMS too.
Some excellent ports (IMO)
- PacMania
- Strider
- PowerStrike
- Shinobi
- Outrun
- Double Dragon
- Streets of Rage
I fully recognise that whilst it's library is definitely less varied than the NES, there are a lot of games that still hold up well today. So if you get the chance to find one cheap, pick one up and experience some new games.
I apologise for the rather crap OP, I will update, add some screenshots etc when I am on my home PC.