Eswat, meanwhile, is perhaps the quintessential Sega port. While it may have made logical sense for Sega to have given the Master System a cut-down version of the 16-Bit, the Master System version is actually a completely different game which is much more faithful to the arcade original. Hurrah!
Strongly reminiscent of the likes of Rolling Thunder and Robocop, Eswat is pretty tough. The designers may have not been able to include all the enemies from the original arcade game, but the ones who made it attack in a relentless stream of knives and bullets. Weirdly, the game actually gets easier as you play through it: in the first two levels your character is just a regular policeman with a normal gun and about a fifth of the live provided with the fancy Eswat suit you are provided with for the rest of the game.
I remember this definitely made Christmas afternoon a bit interesting that year – having been forced to repeatedly play through the first two stages, we suddenly broke through and almost completed it in one sitting. Definite flaw, that.
Mind you, despite glaring flaws, we loved and cherished both of these titles. Eswat may have been a tad uneven, but it was our first real glimpse of a console shooter and we loved it for that. Especially since it offered the kind of full-colour graphics we had so often lacked on the spectrum. Likewise, Hard Drivin’ may have been so ridiculously hard that we never had a remote chance of challenging the Phantom Photon, but it was the closest we could get to a bonafide arcade machine . Some games, it appears, are just better than the sum of their broken controller inputs and difficulty curves.
To see a vid of the difficult bits of Eswat, look here: