Enduro Racer (Master System)

[Melf]

Sega attempted to bring Enduro Racer's thrilling action to the Master System but sacrificed too much of what made the game such great fun. The result is a port that's competent but not much more - and that's just the Japanese version that didn't have half the game removed. Read the full review for more details.

[vintagegamecrazy]

This is indeed a rather disappointing game. It's fun for a few minutes but it's not that challenging and it's over far too quickly. I know I wouldn't be happy with it back in the day.

[Centrale]

Back in the day, I was so disappointed just by looking at screenshots of Enduro Racer and seeing the change in perspective from the arcade original, that I never tried it.

That was a mistake. When I finally did play it, I realized that it's a really fun game with a lot of depth that isn't immediately apparent. After you spend some time with it, you begin to realize that there is a fun technique to pulling off jumps without losing any speed. The upgrade system also presents some light strategy over the complete set of courses. I was so pleasantly surprised by it, and it's so playable and immediate that it's become one of my favorites. (An argument can be made that it's more playable and fair than the original arcade game, which is visually very nice but in actuality it's a pretty harsh game that quickly takes your quarters and sends you packing.)

On top of that, when I learned that the Japanese version has twice as many tracks, that was a good surprise from my perspective, here in the 21st century and far removed from the restrictions of localizations and a kid's budget. It's trivial to get it either via emulation or importing nowadays. So, the reviewer's "advice" to forget the western version and pretend it never existed, is just more noise in a sea of internet video game nerd negativity IMO. Without playing the truncated Western version first, I would likely have never been interested enough to find out about the definitive Japanese version.

TL;DR another hatchet job review of an 8-bitter here on Sega 16. Corrected score is 8.5/10