My first love was the ZX Spectrum, but my first salacious affair was with the Sega Master System, many years later.
It was a time in the UK when consoles were hardly even a thing. We'd somehow missed the NES wave that was gripping the US, and we were still clinging to our 8-bit micros or the new 16-bit STs and Amigas. No-one seemed particularly keen to swap £1.99 budget cassettes for £29.99 cartridges.
So, getting the Sega Master System was both extremely exciting and also a tacit acceptance that new games would arrive a couple of times a year, rather than every few weeks.
And it was totally worth it. To my naive 14 year old mind, the games were basically arcade perfect... Of course, this was a measure of my own lack of exposure to actual arcades, rather than the port quality itself. But the games were definitely more polished than the Speccy games I was used to. As such, I have extremely rosy memories of virtually every game I found a way to play. Sometimes unjustly.
Like, for example, Psycho Fox by Vic Tokai.
Psycho Fox is a side scrolling platformer where you play the eponymous fox, but also a range of other animals with different abilities. You run to the left, jump on enemies to kill them, fight a boss every three levels... so it's just like Super Mario Bros, right?
Well, that's how I remember it. It was Sega's Mario, and in my mind it was just as good. Of course, I hadn't played Super Mario Bros at the time, and it would be years before I played Sonic. As such, I had no real frame of reference to judge Psycho Fox's strengths and, more importantly, weaknesses...
Because Psycho Fox has a fatal flaw which means we live in a world dominated by Sonic and Mario, rather than a crow-throwing fox...
Movement.
There's just something off about the movement in this game. The acceleration curve is too shallow, it takes forever to get moving. As such, jumps always require a run up, and escaping from enemies can feel like wading through treacle. 90% of the deaths you'll suffer are because you can't get up enough speed fast enough. And it is extremely frustrating.
It's a shame, because it's otherwise a great game. It has a Sonic-esque blue-sky feel to it, the character work is awesome, and the extra animals add an interesting dimension to how you play the game (Tiger can move fast, Monkey can jump high etc). The range of levels is interesting and includes the usual tropes (desert world, ice world with slippery momentum) and the boss fights have some novel quirks.
Overall, it's definitely worth a look. But to truly enjoy it, you will need to unlearn all of the instincts you've build up from more fluid Sonic and Mario games. You need to think about every jump, and really take your time.
What about you? Did you play Psycho Fox back then? Have you played it since? Did it hold up for you?
