Jeremy Parish

Segaiden #012: Hustle Chumy / Flicky / Girl's Garden (Patreon)

Published:

2021-04-21 13:00:06

Imported:

2024-04

Tags:

sega segaiden sg-1000

Content

Today marks the seventh anniversary of this video project. Seventh! Wild. It's evolved a lot over time, and I've made plenty of false starts and failed experiments in that time. But I'm very happy with the current direction of this endeavor, and I hope the world holds itself together long enough for me to make some real headway with it over the next... years? Decades? Anyway, this episode is a case-in-point.

In fact, this week's video may be my favorite so far. I'm not talking about my favorite in the SG-1000 retrospectives, though certainly it focuses on the strongest batch of releases the platform had seen to this date—I mean, this is possibly my favorite video since this venture started seven years ago today, period. All the pieces fit together: Good games, some fun writing, solid production values, effective (and properly lit/focused) on-camera bits, and I even recorded some excellent B-roll footage of myself playing Flicky.

My video efforts have been entirely self-taught, and I'm always striving to improve the quality of my work. Those of you who have been around since the start have definitely seen things improve from a pretty rocky beginning. I couldn't have gotten to this point without the support (moral, financial, and material) from the many people who believe in my efforts to curate and connect the history of video games. Thank you, everyone, for your ongoing support! I promise to continue doing my best to up my game for the next seven years (and beyond!).

Files

Hustle Chumy / Flicky / Girl's Garden retrospective: Ladies' night | Segaiden #012

Sega embraces its feminine side as 1984 comes to a close, with not one but two games starring a female protagonist, and the result is the single strongest set of games we've seen to date on SG-1000. And there are only three titles this week instead of four, because there was so much to say about each of them! 1984 was a bit of a soft year for SG-1000 (for reasons I speculate on in this episode), but it certainly ends on a strong note. The stage is set for the console to finally come into its own in 1985 as the platform evolves into the Mark III/Master System. I know this series of videos got off to a pretty painful start with some iffy releases, and it didn't help that my video capture setup didn't reproduce the system's colors accurately. But from this point on, the games will be much stronger... and I'm capturing from original hardware now, so everything will look great, too. This episode's games: Hustle Chumy would have been a high point in any other episode so far, but here it's a distant third. Just to calibrate your expectations for the other games. Flicky is a Mappy-inspired arcade platformer converted to SG-1000 quite convincingly. The background color is a little pukey, and it drops the iguana enemies, but it plays great. Girl's Garden isn't quite as durable as Flicky, but it's a technically impressive game that gave a legendary developer his start. This series has been made possible in part by the work of Omar Cornut, the Game Developers Research Institute, segaretro.org, iFixRetro, and Analogue Co. Video Works is funded via Patreon (http://www.patreon.com/gamespite) — support the show and get access to every episode up to two weeks in advance of its YouTube debut! And be sure to check out the Retronauts podcast (http://www.retronauts.com), where I (and many others!) tackle a much wider array of classic gaming topics each week.