Having recently found a lot of my retro gaming collection in my garage, one of the things I found was the Sega Master System Phaser, The next thing was to find an old CRT TV as it won’t work on newer TV’s. Finally it all came together and I just got to play the Sega Phaser 3 in 1 cartridge Marksman Shooting / Trap Shooting / Safari Hunt as it’s meant to be played.
First of all getting used to the Phaser took a short while, so I practised on the Marksman Shooting game. In this game you have to shoot the targets like they do in all those cop movies, hitting the targets in the chest as they appear. To make it through each round you have to hit a percentage of the targets which is raised each round. As the rounds go on you also have to be quicker to aim as the targets appear and disappear quicker. Marksman shooting at least shows where your bullets are going to give you a way of working out your aim, which makes it easier than the other offerings, additionally you have unlimited ammo, so blasting wildly is an option here.
Next I tried the Trap shooting, which is Clay Pigeon shooting for some people. The digitised voice shouts “GO” (strangely not “pull” as you’d expect), and you have 3 shots to hit the 2 clays which come out of the trap. Once again you have to hit a percentage, but you have the limit of ammo for each pair making things more difficult. The targets are also quite small and you have no tracer to work off of so the difficulty is ramped up a bit.
The third game sees you on a safari hunt, shooting at the cartoony animals which appear, ducks fly in and out of the screen, fish jump out of the water and rabbits gambol and hop around the bottom of the screen. Your first round score has to be over 10,000 to progress which isn’t easy, especially as ammo is very limited so you need to be hitting the high scoring fish and rabbits. As already said it isn’t easy so I can’t comment on the later rounds until I’ve had a lot more practise at this difficult shooting game.
Overall Marksman Shooting / Trap Shooting / Safari Hunt for the Sega Master System and Sega Light Phaser gun is a great deal of fun to play. After all this time the game still lives up to the memories I had of it. A great introduction to shooting on the Master System and it’s gun which works remarkably well considering its age. The graphics aren’t great even for an 8 bit game but the gameplay means you hardly notice that. Sound is also only just worthy of the console but overall my score for this has to be 8/10 purely for the smile factor.
