"For the New Generation"

Captain Silver for the Sega Master System

Some bad games really are funnier than others. The mere thought of a game like Club Drive or E.T. always brings a smile to my face. Some games, however, don't even have that redeeming quality about them. They are simply lousy games that don't entertain or provide any unintentional pleasure. A more pressing problem about this second type of bad game is that it's very difficult to write about. Bad games are much easier when you can take the Seanbaby approach of pointing out ridiculous flaws using grandiose language. Well the game I selected this time around is Captain Silver for the Sega Master System. I thought this one would be a riot, but as I played through this game again I realized that it's not really all that funny. It is an excellent example of how to make a bad 8-bit platformer though, and I like to challenge myself and write about games that don't come up that often. Hopefully you will still find some entertainment value in this one. I sure do know how to scare off my few loyal readers!

In spite of its flaws, Captain Silver does have a special place in my heart. It was the very first boxed SMS game I ever owned. It is also the only SMS game I've ever found in my hometown. At the time all I had to play was Hang-On, Safari Hunt, the snail maze, and Captain Silver. I'm not going to pretend like I wasn't a little worried. The SMS was the first "new" system I ever bought in my early collector days. I new very little about it before I got one. With nothing else to go on I was afraid that all the games might be like this one. Thankfully I was proven wrong, but for a couple of weeks there I was really nervous.

This game is your typical lousy platform game. There must be about a thousand of them out there. You control a young sailor as he meanders across various pirate related scenes. Sometimes the enemies are in front of you and sometimes they swoop down to get you. You might die once or twice avoiding those cats. Sometimes there are pirates with guns, but they usually stand there and wait for you to kill them. I guess life at sea wasn't as great as the brochure made it sound. SMS is known for its insanely difficult games, but this one I beat in about 30 minutes. The only real challenge is the one that shouldn't be there in the first place. It is sometimes really difficult to jump. Your young hero doesn't jump very high or very far, so it's a little too easy to miss the jump, fall into a fountain, and instantly die.

I should say that your hero dies whenever he touches water. If he has such a bad reaction to water than why did he chose sailor as a profession? I guess the developers rationalized that he would drown if he fell in the water, but that fountain in the fist level has got to be about two inches deep. Oh yeah and the book says there's six levels but there's only 4. I knew there'd be something funny to write about!

I guess that's about all I have to say about the gameplay itself. Actually, I'm really surprised I've written so much about Captain Silver! After owning this game for all these years I'm still trying to figure out why it exists in the first place. My copy has a sticker on it which says that this game belongs to the new generation. It's Sega for the 90s. Well this game came out when Sega didn't even own the SMS. It was ported from a Japanese arcade game that wasn't very well liked. They also must've known by then that the Genesis was going to come out soon and make it obsolete. I just don't see anyone at the company thinking that this game was going to bring over any new fans or be of much interest to the old fans. There's just no way to explain it. Captain Silver is one of those games that probably shouldn't exist, but it does. And in a way it will always be very special for me. I guess it's not completely useless