Segaiden #006: Yamato / Champion Tennis / Star Jacker / Champion Baseball

A few more Sega arcade conversions this week, featuring—unbelievably enough!—shooters and sports games. You sense a theme taking shape here, maybe? Yamato covers a lot of the same ground (so to speak) as SG-1000's earlier ocean warfare shooter, N-Sub, though it mixes things up slightly by focusing on surface warfare. Meanwhile, Star Jacker is a scrolling shooter that plays a little more smoothly than Borderline, though its bizarre central premise and mechanic make for a curious inverted gameplay difficulty curve. On the sports side, Champion Tennis and Champion Baseball maintain the vibe of Champion Golf: Console ports of someone else's game, decent enough for 1983 but lacking in hindsight due to the massive upheavals and improvements those sports genres had lurking in the wings of history. All in all, not the most inspiring set of games ever... but definitely better than last episode's. This series has been made possible in part by the work of Omar Cornut, the Game Developers Research Institute, segaretro.org, iFixRetro, and Analogue Co. Video Works is funded via Patreon (http://www.patreon.com/gamespite) — support the show and get access to every episode up to two weeks in advance of its YouTube debut! And be sure to check out the Retronauts podcast (http://www.retronauts.com), where I (and many others!) tackle a much wider array of classic gaming topics each week.