From the Memory Bank: My History with Video Games

Reflections: "Asterix" (Master System)

These days, I'm sad to say, I haven't been exploring game libraries as much as I used to. I've mostly been discovering games by watching chronology-based YouTube video series and Twitch streamers.

I've been slacking, you could say.

But still, watching people talk about and play games has also done the job of helping me to discover many great games and hidden gems. It is, in fact, how I came across the subject of today's piece: Asterix, with which I was, previously, only vaguely familiar (I'd seen its name mentioned in Master System-related best-of lists). The game was being played by a Twitch streamer called Stellardeth during one of his Viewers' Choice streams, and immediately it looked interesting to me.

That was the case because it had the unmistakable look of a Sega-developed platformer, and in the ten or so years in which I've been playing them, I've been loving all of Sega's and Aspect's action-platformers (all of their Disney games and Batman Returns, specifically) and looking to discover more of them.

Lately, though, I just haven't been doing so. I've been slacking, like I said.

But seeing this game in action motivated me to finally get back into the practice.

So a few days later, I played Asterix for the first time!

Asterix, if you don't know, is a Sega-developed Master System game that was released exclusively in PAL regions in 1991. The Asterix comic series was hugely popular in those regions, so the company, I'm guessing, sought to use its name brand to further increase the Master System's install base in Europe and Australia, in which the console was seeing its greatest success. Or maybe the company acquired the license simply because it wanted to prove, once again, that it could make a great game out of any intellectual property.

What it able to do so with Asterix? Was it able to successfully produce another must-play licensed game? Or did it uncharacteristically miss the mark?

Those are questions that I intend to answer in this piece!

 So if you're not familiar with this game, you should know that it's based on the popular French comic series Asterix (which is also known as Asterix and Obelix). The series has been around since the 1950s, and over the years, it's been adapted to all types of mediums: story books, audio books, animated movies, board games, and, of course, video games.

Asterix for the Master System is one of several games based on the series (the first of them were released way back in the early 80s on the Atari 2600). It stars heroes Asterix and Obelix--two Gaulish warriors who are always doing what they can to prevent their village from becoming an occupied territory of the all-conquering Roman Empire--and chronicles one of their adventures.

The manual informs of us the game's backstory: In 50 B.C., almost all of Gaul is occupied by the Romans. Only only village of indomitable Gauls is able to hold out. Its inhabitants are able to successfully resist the Roman legionnaires' siege thanks to a magic potion that has been concocted by the druid Getafix. This potion makes villagers invincible and helps them to resist the legionnaires' numerous takeover attempts.

Roman general Julius Caesar is well aware of Getafix's special talent and decides that the best thing to do is remove him as a threat. He orders his best soldiers to snatch the druid and bring him to Rome, where he can be imprisoned. They do so when he foolishly goes for a casual stroll outside the village.

So now the villagers are at a loss. Their potion supply is dwindling, and if they don't rescue Getafix soon, their efforts will fail and their village will become just another territory of the Roman Empire. In desperation, the village chief, Vitalstatistix, immediately orders Asterix and Obelix to rescue Getafix and bring him back at any cost!

So as you can tell by merely reading the story's description, Asterix is an unserious cartoon series, and its heroes' adventures are comical in nature. And these qualities make for a game that's humorous and lighthearted in tone.

It is, in that sense, very much like all of the era's other 8-bit mascot-based platformers. It feels spiritually connected to the Super Mario Bros. and Alex Kidds of the world and will absolutely remind you of them.

It's a pure period piece.

Asterix repeats the aforementioned story in its intro, and it does so partly with some superbly rendered images of the game's characters and locations. Seeing these images immediately fills you with the sense that Asterix had some real passion and effort put into its creation and that it's going to offer a high-quality gaming experience.

The game's artwork in general is one of its biggest strengths, and I'll definitely have more to say about it at other points in this piece!

 Your goal in Asterix is to clear 21 stages that are broken up into 8 separate rounds (all chapters, save for the first and last of them, are comprised of three separate rounds).

The game has, in general, two types of stages: those in which your goal is to simply traverse your way to the endpoint and exit through a door, and those in which you can't make your exit until you find a key that opens a locked door at the stage's endpoint.

You can traverse stages with either Asterix of Obelix, each of whom has different physical abilities. Asterix is small and fast, and he can crouch down low enough to enter into narrow passages and hop his way through them. Obelix, conversely, is large and slow, but he's much more powerful than Asterix, and thus he can smash his way through certain blocks and consequently access areas that his friend can't.

Early on, in the first two rounds, the game forces you to play as each character, individually, so that you can become familiar with his respective play-style. But from then on, you're able to choose whichever character you prefer to play as at the time.

In your first play-through, there's no way of knowing which stages are easier or harder for which character, so you're stuck having to randomly choose between the two characters and learn through experience. (I made the personal decision to play as Asterix exclusively in my first play-through and Obelix exclusively in my subsequent play-through. Because that, I felt, was the best way for me to get the complete experience.

Some stages are straightforward while others are labyrinthine in nature and require you to explore their spaces and thus search for the single or multiple items that will help you to advance to their endpoints. Some of them have alternate paths, many of which can be found by jumping over walls or dropping into suspicious-looking gaps, and secret areas that are packed with goodies and other surprises (like secret boss fights).

The best part is that stages' level-design is sometimes different for each character--considerably so in some instances--and resultantly, you can have unique experience within a given stage depending upon the character you select! In other instances, the stages remain unchanged, but they have paths that can only be accessed by a certain character (for the smaller Asterix, there are narrow paths that only he can squeeze into, and for the strong, brutish Obelix, there are paths to which he can gain exclusive access by breaking the blocks that obstruct them).

So each time you play through the game, you can have completely different experience! This game-design decision is really cool, and it feels very forward-thinking.

Asterix also has a 2-player mode. In this mode, Player 1 takes control of Asterix while Player 2 controls Obelix. The players alternate turns, with each continuing to be in control until he or she clears a round.

Then there are the gameplay elements that are communicated to you via the HUD that's located at the screen's top. Here are the basics:

You start the game with 3 lives, and you can accumulate up to 99 of them.

You start out, also, with three units of health, and you can earn three additional units over the course of the adventure.

You have a bone counter that controls your access to the bonus stage. If the counter reaches 50 during any point in a round, it'll reset, and after you clear the round, you'll enter the bonus stage and attempt to earn big points. (I'll talk more about the bonus stage in a moment.)

You have a score-counter that has actual impact on the game. It's useful because it awards you an extra life every for every 10,000 points that you earn (you get points for collecting items and killing enemies, and after a round's completion, the game tallies your remaining time and awards you 100 points for every 10 seconds that drain). The counter resets to 0 if you Game Over.

You have two item slots: The one on the left holds an action item and specifically the last weapon that you picked up. The one on the right is the key slot that displays a key icon after you pick up a key.

And there's a timer. You have 400 ticks to complete a round (about 10 minutes in real time), and if time runs out, you lose a life.

Otherwise, as you learn in another manner, you have unlimited continues.

If, like I said, your bone counter reaches 50 at any point during a round, you earn access to the bonus stage--the Dogmatix Bonus Stage, as it's called. Before starting the stage, you have to choose your difficulty: Easy, Normal or Hard. You do so by pressing either Button 1 or 2 to stop the selector that rapidly cycles through the three frames. (It lands on frames in a seemingly random fashion, but you can actually control where it lands by focusing intently and reading the selector's movement and pressing a button right as it's passing over the difficulty that you prefer.)

In this stage, you take control of Dogmatix, Obelix's pet dog, and traverse an autoscrolling stage that challenges you to pop hovering balloons.

There are three types of balloons, and you earn a variable number of points for popping each type. Red balloons are worth 100 points, and you pop them by jumping on them once. Yellow balloons are worth 300 points, and you pop them by jumping on them twice. And green balloons are worth 1,000 points, and you can pop them by jumping on them three times. Note that the balloons won't change color or pop until after you leap off of them.

There's a strategy element to these stages: Sometimes you have to use lower balloons to get to higher ones, and it helps to allow sets of balloons to scroll onscreen so that you can get a clear view of how they're arranged and then platform accordingly. If, instead, you just mindlessly jump on the first balloon that scrolls onto the screen and quickly pop it, you'll likely miss out on the chance to reach higher-positioned balloons, which are usually worth more points, and wind up remaining mostly grounded during this stage.

The higher the difficulty level, the more tricky the balloons' configurations are.

In truth, because you accumulate bones so slowly and the bone counter resets when you Game Over, you probably won't see the bonus stage in your first play-through, in which you're likely to die dozens of times as you engage in the process of learning the rounds' layouts. You'll more likely see the bonus stage for the first time during your subsequent play-through, though probably only once or twice.

Then there are the items and weapons.

There are two types of items, almost all of which are contained within jars that you can break with your strikes. The first are the basic items that are available to both characters:

• Single bones and cross bones, which add one and three bones to your bone counter, respectively.
• Coins add 200 points to your score.
• Bags of gold add 500 points to your score.
• Meat replenishes 1 unit of health. If your health is full, meat will instead award you 100 points.
• Blue Bottles replenish 2 units of health. If your health is full, a blue bottle will instead award you 100 points.
• A key allows you to open a locked door. It'll remain in your inventory if you lose a life but not if you Game Over.
• A heart icon increases your health gauge by one unit. If you're already at maximum capacity (six units), a heart icon will instead award you 100 points. Heart icons are dropped by certain bosses after you defeat them.

Note that bones, coins, bags of gold and meat are also hidden in breakable blocks and otherwise dropped randomly by fallen enemies.

Weapons, conversely, are exclusive to the individual characters.

Asterix has two weapons.

The first is the Explosive Potion, which he can use to kill enemies and destroy breakable blocks. He throws each potion in an arc, and it explodes three seconds after he releases it (he can't be hurt by the explosion).

This potion also has a secondary use: If it's thrown into water, its explosion will create a traversable water spout that dissipates after about 4 seconds (be aware that sometimes, for whatever reason, a potion won't create a water spout if it kills a nearby enemy).

Asterix can throw two explosive potions at a time, and he can't throw another until one of the two onscreen potions explodes.

His other weapon is the Solid Potion, which he can use to create makeshift bridges on water, lava and also some enemies. These bridges form about 1 second after they land on the targeted liquid or enemy and dissipate after about 8 seconds. Asterix can continuously throw these potions and make series of bridges.

Obelix has only one exclusive weapon: the Rock, which functions as both an attack item (an arcing projectile) and his means for creating both water spouts and makeshift bridges, both of which last roughly the same amount of time as those created by Asterix's potions.

The heroes' only commonly wielded weapon is the Fire Potion, which is used to light up dark rooms and melt ice. It's the game's most situational weapon and only appears two or three times.

The heroes can use their running momentum to throw their weapons at variable distances and consequently attack enemies and make bridges from any distance. Though, because the game's running physics are multivariate, it's sometimes difficult to get weapons to land exactly where you want them to, which can cause you problems at certain points in the game. You might have to practice throwing potions while running to get a firm handle on the process' physics.

You keep your weapons when you die but not when you Game Over.

 There are two types of controls: basic controls and those that are exclusive to each character.

First there are the basic controls, which are standard for the genre: You move right or left with the d-pad's right and left directionals. You crouch or climb down a rope or vine by pressing down on the d-pad. You climb up ropes and vines by pressing up on the d-pad. You press Button 2 to jump and swim upward. You press Button 2 plus Down to execute a crouch jump. You press Button 1 to throw a punch when you're on the ground and deliver a downward strike while you're aerial (note that you can't punch when you're crouching because the down-plus-attack input is reserved for weapon-use). And you press the Pause button on the console's main unit (or whichever controller button that "Pause" is mapped to on your emulator) to pause the action.

When you obtain a weapon, you throw it in a different way depending upon your current position. If you're standing or running, you press Up plus Button 1 to throw it. If you're crouching, you press Button 1 to drop it one tile over.

Also, like I said, you can control the distance at which a weapon is thrown. If you throw it while you're stationary, it travels a standard distance: three tiles over. But if you throw it while running, it'll travel greater distances!

How far it travels is variable: The faster you're running when you release it, the farther it'll travel. You can throw a weapon as far as ten tiles over or approximately 62% of the screen's length)!

For an 8-bit game, these types of throwing physics seem really advanced.

This is a 90s-era Sega platformer, so the movement controls are, unexpectedly, as refined as can be.

The characters move left and right in a fluid and smooth motion and do so with just the right amount of acceleration, and their jumps are highly responsive to input and able to be fully modulated and are thus just as smooth as their ground movements. Their deceleration motions cause them to slide forward a bit, but this physical quirk will rarely cause you issues (it'll only cause potential problems in one or two instances, like when you're jumping onto moving platforms that are one-tile in length and traveling very fast).

The characters can carry momentum into their crouches, from both running and jumping motions, and slide forward while in said position. Asterix, specifically, can use this technique to slide into narrow passages, Super Mario-style, and hop his way through them (Obelix is too large to do so).

Swimming movements and controls are also smooth and fluid (much more so, I'd say, than Super Mario Bros.'s similarly styled swimming movements and controls). Though, there is one small problem with the process of swimming: jumping out from the water. The characters are often resistant to this action, so in most cases, you have to really mash the button to get them to execute the jump.

This becomes annoying, more so, when the body of water from which you're trying to escape is low-lying and close to a screen border whose encroachment prompts a downward screen transition. In these instances, you'll find yourself stuck in a loop of failing to emerge from the water and instead repeatedly bobbing down and transitioning to a lower screen! Overall this control issue isn't a huge deal, but there are certain stage segments in which it can get you killed in a hurry (like in Round 3-2's opening segment, in which you'll suffer repeated damage if you continuously fail to escape from a water body that's occupied by an aggressive, pursing drill-nosed fish).

Climbing is absent of such flaws, and it's easy to climb and slide down ropes and jump off of them.

During bonus stages, you control Dogmatix (Asterix and Obelix's canine pal), whose movement and jumping controls are similar to the main characters', which is to say that they, too, are smooth and fluid.

The other difference between Asterix and Obelix are the attacks that they execute.

Asterix's ground attack is an uppercut, and his aerial attack is a downward punch. Obelix's ground attack is an overhand punch that can destroy both enemies and breakable blocks, and his aerial attack is a ground pound-pound that can do the same (when it's uninterrupted by enemies, it can be used to plow through entire columns of breakable blocks).

Both characters can use their air attacks to spring off of enemies and gain height (similarly to how Mario can spring off of Goombas, Koopa Troopers, etc.).

Hit-detection for aerial attacks is very forgiving, so you can take out enemies with such attacks even by hitting them from the side!

Almost all minor enemies can be instantly be killed by any of the heroes' attacks (only late-game pot-lurking enemies and one or two others are immune to them).

 So, as I said earlier, Asterix has two different stage types: those in which your goal is to simply traverse your way to the endpoint and exit through a door, and those in which you can't make your exit until you find a key that opens a locked door at the stage's endpoint.

Though, this is a simplified explanation of how the game's stage structuring works. It's one that leaves out an important detail: There is, in reality, a lot of complexity to stages' structuring, and by that, I mean to say that the two different stage types actually come in a number of variant forms.

During the adventure, you'll traverse your way through straightforward stages, yes, but also autoscrolling stages, puzzle- and exploration-based stages, and even one that requires you to speedrun your way to the exit! Some stages are fun and breezy, others are purely challenging, and the rest are varying degrees of weird and interesting.

Among the most memorable to me are an autoscrolling stage in which you have to continuously race ahead and clear away obstructing blocks so that the transporting moving platforms can keep moving forward; a fortification stage in which you have to use your attacks to light cannon fuses and then enter the cannons in time to blast yourself forward; a ship stage in which you have to (a) cling to a rope that's wrapped around a flying eagle's neck and climb up and down to avoid obstacles and (b) then later traverse your way across streaming water and series of large water spouts by tactically using your potions to climb on them; and the aforementioned speedrun stage, in which you have to stay in constant motion if you hope to survive (seriously: you'll die if you don't start running the moment the action begins).

And the best part, like I said, is that some of the stages' challenges and structuring changes depending upon which character you're using. In the aforementioned autoscrolling stage, for instance, Asterix is forced by an obstruction to jump off of the moving platform and then regain access to it by running along an upper level, blowing up breakable floor blocks, and dropping down in time to catch his ride before it exits the screen (assuming he doesn't fail to blow up the blocks and get crushed); whereas Obelix's general goal is to clear away large columns of breakable blocks so that transporting moving platforms can continue traveling forward.

So if you alternate between the characters or invent your own special selection method (play three stages with Asterix and then three with Obelix, for instance), you can have a different experience each time you play through the game!

And this works to provide the game a high level of replayability.

My only complaint is that a few stages are too short and that there's really not much to them. In such stages, you advance a few screens, find a key on an easily accessed roof or upper platform, and then head to a nearby exit. That's it. And the sense that I get as I play through these stages is that the designers were trying to balance out the late-game's high difficulty by throwing in a number of pathetically easy stages. I would have liked for the designers to be consistent in their approach to level design and remain unafraid to challenge the player at every turn.

The game's stages are often multi-level and apt to stretch in every which direction. So at one or multiple points, you can cause the screen to transition upward or downward by encroaching upon its borders. Though, it's not always obvious when you can do this. A lot of the time, there's no clear indication that a gap in a floor or a ceiling is a transition point, so if you see one, you have to discover whether or not it's a transition point by getting close to it and trying to travel through it. In the case of floor gaps, this entails dropping or swimming down into them and hoping that that they're not actually death pits.

You have to experiment, basically, and be brave enough to launch yourself offscreen and throw yourself into gaps.

What's obvious is that Asterix takes heavy inspiration from Super Mario Bros. and is an homage to it in many ways. It controls similarly, as I've said. It includes mechanics like going down pipes and bouncing off of enemies to gain greater height. It has enemies that function almost identically to Piranha Plants, Lakitus and Podoboos. And it even has secret access points that transport you up into Coin Heaven-like bonus segments in which you can, likewise, collect a lot of goodies.

Asterix contains many references and homages to Nintendo's groundbreaking classic, and it's always fun to look for and identify them.

As an old-school enthusiast, I consider doing so to be an essential part of the experience. Because it's another way in which you can derive joy from the game and gain an appreciation for how it builds upon its inspiration's classic formula.

Asterix has boss battles, but there only a few of them, and they're mostly frontloaded into the game's opening one-third. Past Round 4-3, there are no further boss battles--not even in the final round, which instead challenges you to clear an autoscrolling stage in which you ride on a chariot and simply dodge spear-attacks and jutting spikes.

I don't have much to say about this other than that it's a weird design choice.

The bosses, themselves, are nothing out of the ordinary. They have simple patterns and operate in rudimentary ways, and you can easily defeat them by standing in obvious safe spots and striking at the right moments.

 Asterix is stylistically similar to Sega's Master System Disney games, and that becomes immediately obvious to you the moment you take a look at its HUD, whose design is highly reminiscent of the latters'. (It makes sense because Asterix's developers also worked on most of the company's Master System and Game Gear Disney games.)

By saying this, I mean to convey to you that Asterix is, of course, an all-around great-looking 8-bit video game.

Its environments are delightfully designed and full of character and thus fun to observe and examine. Its textures and backgrounds are well-drawn, highly detailed, and vivid in appearance (despite their being a little dark in tone), and they help to form visually pleasing, often-memorable forest, cave, town, ship and castle environments. And its heroes, Asterix and Obelix, are finely rendered and look stunningly close to their comics counterparts, and its enemy design is on that same level.

Also, its character animation is excellent. It produces heroes and enemies that run, jump, spin, swim and fly around with multiple frames of animation and thus in a smooth, flowing, and pretty realistic manner.

Each chapter has a lead-in image and text that give you a sense of where the action is taking place and how Asterix and Obelix feel about the current leg of their journey. To me, the lead-in images are one of the most memorable parts of the package. They, much like the ones displayed in the intro, are superbly rendered and very charming, and they add a ton of class to the game and speak of the high production value that went into its creation.

Additionally, the game leads into its stages with cool curtain-reveal and reverse-curtain screen transitions that go a long way toward exhibiting for you the type of extra effort that the artists put into the game's presentation.

The result is a great-looking and -feeling game and one that's artistically and stylistically superior to the majority of its contemporaries.

Asterix's having great visuals and animation is, as I've said, no surprise because Sega had (and still has) some of the best artists in the business. As expected, they strongly demonstrate their talent here and consequently produce one of the console's best-looking games. (I don't put it on the level of the company's Mickey Mouse-starring Illusion games, which are some of the most visually impressive 8-bit games in existence, but still I consider it to be high up there.)

Though, the game does have two obvious technical issues. The first is the slowdown that occurs when multiple enemies are onscreen and when multiple blocks are being destroyed at one time. Thankfully it only occurs on occasion, and thus it doesn't disrupt the action in a significant way.

The second is a clipping issue that can, conversely, have a consequential impact on your experience. Sometimes it can work in your favor and allow you to bypass barriers by (a) releasing the down-directional as you're crouch-hopping around in a narrow passage and (b) having Asterix throw a potion when he's crouching under breakable blocks and pushing up against a wall, which will, at times, result in the potion clipping up into into the blocks and destroying them (the problem here is that Asterix isn't supposed to be able to break overlying blocks).

But in other instances, it can cause you to become permanently stuck on a wall. If this happens to you, you'll have no choice but to wait out the timer, which can take several minutes. The good news, though, is that the odds of this type of clipping occurring is very low.

These clipping issues don't hurt the game in any meaningful way, no, but they can make it feel a little unpolished.

 There's nothing surprising about Asterix's music, either. It's exactly what you expect to a hear in a game of this type.

I'm not saying that to downplay it or express indifference to what it does, no. What I mean to imply, rather, is that it possesses the appropriate type of character and does a fine job of setting tone and infusing spirit into the game's environments.

It helps to create the type of spaces that you want to visit in a cartoony Super Mario Bros.-inspired platformer: cheerful forest, village and snowy-mountain areas; mysterious caves and pyramids; unease-inducing pirate ships; and ominous castles. At the same time, it delights you and inspires you to imagine.

Also, it has that classic Master System vibe that instantly transports you back in time to those days when you used to play around with the console at your friend's house and discover games that looked and sounded curiously and enchantingly different from the ones that you played on your NES. And it makes you feel good to be playing and enjoying games of their type 35-plus years later.

I can't say that the game's tunes are among the most memorable that I've ever heard, no, but still I consider them to be very good. They possess all of the qualities of a solidly composed platformer tunes: They're nicely constructed, spirited in nature, and of good quality.

They do their job well.

It's the same deal with the sound effects: They do the job that you expect them to do. They provide predictable-but-nevertheless-aurally-satisfying accompaniment to jumping, attacking, swimming and the act of descending down pipes and pots (which, in a nice homage, prompts a Super Mario Bros.-like arpeggiated series of notes), and they nicely approximate blocks breaking, explosive blasts, and water gushing.

They're well-produced and help to complete a high-quality sound-design effort.

 Asterix has a well-devised, mostly ideal progressive difficulty. It does exactly what you prefer for this type of game to do: It starts out easy and thus provides you the time that you need to acclimate yourself to its controls and learn its systems, then it gradually increases in difficulty in just the right increments.

In truth, its difficulty is a little unbalanced early on, and there are one or two instances in which you traverse a stage that's a lot harder than the five or six that follow (the autoscrolling stage that I talked about earlier is definitely one of them). Also, there are a number of instances when it goes into troll mode and cruelly punishes you for going down certain pipes by having them dump you into instant-death traps (so without knowing, Sega created the template for every awful Super Mario Maker stage).

So there are times when it veers off course a bit and hurts itself by disrupting the natural-feeling flow that it was otherwise creating.

But the good news is that when it does deviate in this way, it's always quick to correct itself and get back where it needs to be.

It helps, also, that it hands out a lot of extra lives (the more you explore, the more you'll find)!

Overall, I say, Asterix's difficulty is fairly high but very manageable, and because it has unlimited continues, you should be able to beat it in about an hour to an hour and a half.

Closing Thoughts

 So did Sega do it? Did it once again prove that it could take any random property and make a good game out of it?

Well, the obvious answer, I say enthusiastically, is "yes!" Asterix is a very good game and a symbol of the type of ambition and effort that 90s-era Sega put into the creation of its products. It has everything that you want from an 8-bit platformer: charming, imagination-stirring visuals; high-spirited, delight-inducing music; smooth, fluid controls; and platforming action that's challenging without being frustrating (for the most part).

And, of course, it's simply fun to play! It provides you a lot of enjoyable, satisfying platforming action!

Also, like most of Sega's other 90s-era Master System games, it doesn't deliver action in a formulaic, predictable manner. Rather, it strives to remain creative and consistently hit you with new ideas. It eschews iteration and tries its hardest to give you something new and different in each stage. And it makes the bold choice to provide you two characters who perform in distinct and interesting ways and in extension level design that changes depending upon which of them you choose to play as.

And the result is a platformer that's rich with variety and filled with unique and fun challenges.

So yeah--Asterix is a very good platformer, and I like it a lot.

The reason that I don't rank it as "great" is because I feel as though it's not quite as good as the other Sega-developed Master System games that I've played. It's not on the level of the company's Mickey Mouse- and Donald Duck-starring Disney games and Batman Returns, all of which I consider to be top-tier 8-bit action games.

The fact is that a fair amount of its stages are too short and otherwise lack for real substance, its boss battles are a joke, some of its mazes are questionably designed, and it simply isn't as large in scope or as ambitious as the aforementioned games.

For those reasons, it fails to meet the standard that they set.

But even then, it manages to be a high-tier platformer and one of the most solid 8-bit offerings that you can find.

I strongly recommend it to anyone who's a fan of the genre or action games in general.

Asterix is a true gem, and I'm happy to have discovered it. I very much enjoyed my time with it, and I definitely plan to revisit it in the future!

 And now that I've had a taste of Asterix's brand of action, I'm absolutely hungry for more of it! That's why I'm looking forward to discovering and playing its two Master System sequels--Asterix and the Secret Mission and Asterix and the Great Rescue--which are said to improve upon the original.

If that turns out to be true, then I'm sure that I'll adore them and feel inspired to rank them among Sega's best 8-bit creations.

I know, from doing research, that there are plenty of other Asterix games in the wild, and I hope to come across them, too, as I'm delving into and exploring other platforms' libraries.

How my journey into Asterix's larger world will go, I don't know. These things are hard to predict.

The only thing that I can tell you is that Asterix for Master System is a promising starting game.