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.