Segaiden #034: Action Fighter & Black Belt

Video Works by Jeremy Parish

A pair of games based on popular media works? Well, almost. Action Fighter clearly draws its inspiration from 1970s James Bond and his transforming Lotus Esprit, but unlike James Bond 007 for Multivision, it doesn't wear the actual Bond license. It's a much better game, though. Drawing heavy inspiration from the likes of Spy Hunter and (gulp) Xevious, it turns out to be an unexpected highlight of the Master System's launch period. On the other hand, Black Belt did sport a media license... in Japan. Here in the U.S., however, Sega scrubbed all of those details clean. And I do mean "scrubbed"—rather than simply redrawing the main character's sprites, the developers gave every single component of this game a visual overhaul. It's really quite an impressive effort—and yet, the underlying work still shines through. And, because it plays as a convincing Kung Fu clone, you can understand why they went to the trouble rather than just skipping over localization and publishing some other game instead.

Production notes: Why watch when you can read? Check out the massive hardcover print editions of NES Works, Super NES Works, and Virtual Boy works, available now at Limited Run Games (https://limitedrungames.com/collections/books)! Look forward to SG-1000 Works: Segaiden Vol. I, due summer 2023.

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Arcade footage captured from MiSTer with thanks to MiSTerAddOns. Most Master System footage captured from U.S. carts running through an adapter on Sega Mark III hardware with FM Sound Unit and RGB bypass modification by iFixRetro. Video upscaled to 720 with xRGB Mini Framemeister.