Master System, Game Gear games coming to the Wii Virtual Console
Late last week (January 25, 2008), Sega announced it had officially agreed to start putting its Master System and Game Gear games up for grab on the Wii’s Virtual Console service. IGN states that Fantasy Zone and Fist of the North Star (retooled and released in North America as Black Belt) will be the first of such games to launch onto the service next month in Japan and shortly thereafter in North America and Europe.
While the Master System wasn’t actually Sega’s first console (in Japan, it was referred to as the Sega Mark III), it was the first to see release outside of Japan and its competition with the NES throughout the mid and late ‘80s was the basis for the first post-Atari console war.
The Master System actually held the superior hardware of the two, as anyone who got hopelessly lost in the confusing yet then-technologically amazing dungeons of the original Phantasy Star can attest. Its library was painfully small and bereft of most third party publishers which had then been whisked away by the NES’s runaway success and Nintendo’s infamously draconian third party policies. The aforementioned Phantasy Star may be the system’s only truly noteworthy title.
Sega’s support for the console quickly vanished when the Genesis rolled into Japanese and North American shores. However, the Master System performed quite well in Europe, lasting into the mid 90s.
The Game Gear, on the other hand, fared a little better. In many ways it was a shrunken-down version of the Master System but the color screen and fact that Sega was more than willing to throw around ad dollars (as opposed to the older color Atari Lynx) turned it into, if nothing else, a blip on the Game Boy’s monochrome radar. Third-party support was only somewhat less anemic than it was on the Master System, though, and the combination of a higher price tag and far shorter battery life relegated the portable to a perpetual second-place position under its less colorful competitor.
But hey, it’ll all be worth to see more people playing the sorely underrated Game Gear Sonic games.
Read [IGN] Also Read [1UP] Also Read [Joystiq]
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This is not exactly a reply. I am vision impaired ans so I try to read but fall short sometimes. I am wanting to know if the original GameGear Games can be played on the WII? I have over a thousand dollars in games or more in my game gear system but can no longer see the original player unit screen. Can I play the original game gear games on this new WII system? I will buy a system to play my game gear games on if I find one that wil play the original games from the game gear console. Thanks Tim
on March 24, 2008 at 09:46 PM - LINKYou can’t play the actual Game Gear cartridges on the Wii. You just download them from the Virtual Console service.
on March 24, 2008 at 09:51 PM - LINK