ALF

I have no idea who this fucker is, I think he's from some 90s American sitcom that I have never seen, but I played the fuck out of his shitty Master System game recently, so lets talk about that for a bit!

I have no idea what the story of the TV show is, but the game is all about trying to find fuel for Alf's space scooter so you can go back home to your ship and see your girlfriend again or something, it's a load of crap.

ALF on the Master System is basically an adventure game where you must find items to solve puzzles and eventually get back home.  Adventure games are usually known for being pretty lengthy, but ALF is stupidly short.

However don't let that fool you into thinking that you're going to sit down and polish off this game during a work lunch break, because ALF also suffers from being stupid hard for all the wrong reasons.

Between finding items in order to get your ship working, you must play through 3 or 4 "action stages" each one more bullshit than the last.  The screen shot above is the first one, where you must navigate a cave while fending of bats with salami.  It doesn't sound too hard, but the hit boxes are really stupid and the jumping in this game is just broken.

Most sane people would just turn it off and never look back at that point, but because I'm a huge glutton for punishment I beat the damn thing, and you get nothing more than the usual 8-bit "well done" screen at the end so really all I did was prove how adept I am at wasting my own time.

I was going to go on for a bit longer but I realise I've probably wasted enough of YOUR time talking about this shit game, so I'll end by saying that if you're looking to go retro with some Master System games, don't play this.