The Master System

Laughable. Utterly laughable. That's what the SMS is to me. Now I know that I'll get flamed all to Hell for that comment, but I am just making a point. I actually own an SMS, and several games, but when you compare the best that the SMS has to offer even to the middle-of-the-road NES game, they pale. Of course, Nintendo was a vengeful god, and that's a large reason why many NES games were of such high quality; however, that does translate into much more customer satisfaction (and gamer satisfaction). I remember the SMS since it came out, and had watched it throughout its short and troubled life. Everybody knew that the SMS was a lesser system, that owning it was akin to having an Atari 2600 when everybody else had Nintendo, to having Gobots when everybody else had Transformers.

I felt for the Sega Master System. It had better graphics capabilities than the NES, but everything else was worse, including game quality. Sega should have faced it: they're great at making arcade hardware and arcade games, just as Nintendo are great at games but poor at making hardware. That's pretty much there is to say about it. The SMS did have some truly great games, but I could probably count them using tapster's arithmetic (try to source that reference!)