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Its fanatical fanbase will try and tell you otherwise, but the 8-bit Sega Master System suffered from a lack of standout titles (in the United States, anyway), and presented little competition for the Nintendo Entertainment System back in the day.
The very best Sega Master System games were often truly special, though. One of the console’s greatest offerings, the action-RPG Golvellius: Valley of Doom, will soon see new life in an iPhone port, courtesy of publisher D4 Enterprise and French retro emulation specialist DotEmu.
Developed by Compile (Puyo Puyo, Aleste, The Guardian Legend), Golvellius: Valley of Doom takes obvious inspiration from Nintendo’s The Legend of Zelda series. During Golvellius’ overworld sequences, a sword-wielding hero runs around stabbing the local indigenous creatures and gathering money to spend at shops hidden in underground caves.
Golvellius has more gameplay variety than your average Zelda clone, however. Side-view platformer sequences break up the overhead exploration segments, and the forced-scrolling corridors leading up to boss fights are distinctly shooter-like in execution.
Golvellius boasts a unique gameplay blend, and the iPhone version looks to be a faithful emulation of the original game. Gameplay is stretched to fit the full width of the iPhone’s screen, with controls mapped to a transparent control pad and action button.
Crucially, the iPhone version also includes an automatic save function — a welcome feature for anyone who has struggled with the original game’s buggy password system. Somewhere at my parents’ house, I still have multiple pages of Golvellius passwords that were copied down and then triple-checked for accuracy. Most of them worked, but the ones that didn’t…well, let’s not think about those. We live in better times now.
Golvellius: Valley of Doom will premiere in the App Store in August. No price has been announced.
The Guardian Legend was one of my favorite games for the NES. I can definitely tell that this game was done by the same developer–if I had known back when I had a Sega Genesis and the Master System Adapter, I would have picked this game up in a heartbeat! I might just pick this one up now if the price is reasonable…hopefully they make a lite edition too.