The Sega Master System may have debuted in North America back in 1986, but games are still being released for the console all these years later, thanks to its amazing community of homebrew developers.
Case in point — earlier this week, the developer badcomputer0 announced that they had released a brand new arena-based arcade shoot 'em up for the classic 8-bit console, appropriately titled Blast Arena. This is a game that sees players fighting for survival (and a high score) within a space-themed arena as waves of increasingly difficult enemies emerge from portals and try to box them in.
Among the enemies included in Blast Arena are several snake-like robots that fill up the screen with dots, spherical ships that will hone in on the player, and sentries around the perimeter that occasionally fire a powerful laser across the stage. Players take control of a small spaceship that can shoot in four directions and have the ability to collect power-ups to add shields, freeze enemies, or upgrade their weapons. There is also a dash maneuver to use to get out of trouble whenever necessary, but we didn't find ourselves using it all that much when we played.
According to the itch.io page, badcomputer0 was responsible for the design, while another individual named Richard 'kulor' Armijo contributed music for the game. It was made using sverx's development kit, devkitSMS, which is a popular set of tools and libraries for making games for the console.
If you want to try it out yourself, you can grab Blast Arena on itch.io now for free. We've not had the chance to properly test it out on real hardware, but have played a bit on an emulator and have enjoyed what little we've seen so far.
Will you be giving it a go? Let us know in the comments!