This was my second SMS game, and my first cartridge. I clearly remember the day my mother agreed to buy me another Master System game - or simply "Sega game" as we called it back then. And I clearly remember standing in the shop, deciding what game I wanted to have. What was I going to choose? Since I had enjoyed "Alex Kidd in Miracle World" (built in) so much, I decided to go for another Alex Kidd-game. Since Alex Kidd in Miracle World is so good, Alex Kidd in High-Tech World must also be good, right? Well... It didn't turn out that way. For a long time I ranked this game at the very bottom of my list of Master System-games, probably because I didn't understand what to do. For a young kid who hasn't learned English yet, walking around in a castle and reading (or not being able to read) lots of English text wasn't exactly what I had in mind when I chose the game at the shop. I understood that I was supposed to collect these pieces of a map, and I was able to find some of them, but most were missing. And so I gave up. I didn't understand enough of what was going on in order to play the game.
It wasn't until a little later when I started to understand the text and found some more pices of the map I realized that this wasn't such a bad game after all. Since part of the game is about figuring out where all the pieces are, it's more fun when you don't know it, though. It's not as fun solving a mystery, if you already know the solution.
By watching the two demos the game shows you, I knew that the game would change, once I just managed to find my way out of the castle. The second demo shows you Alex in a forest with ninjas, and that demo showed me what I originally had wanted this game to be - another platform game. The forests are extremely difficult though, especially the water part. You need to find a good technique for how to kill the ninjas before they start throwing ninja stars on you.
Then we have the village, which resembles the first level. Your goal here is to get a passport, so that you can get out of the village. The solution? Pray 100 times to the gods in the temple!! I'm not excactly sure how I managed to find this out as a kid (probably from spending hours and hours checking out every other possible solution), but I'm sure many kids never got any further than this. How on earth did they come up with something like that? Those japanese are crazy!
And yeah... Of course I didn't know back then that this Alex Kidd originally wasn't an Alex Kidd-game at all. Had I been born in Japan I would have taken my mother to the shop and convinced her to buy me Anmitsu Hime, as that is the game this game is a modified version of. No wonder why this game was so different than Alex Kidd in Miracle World! It wasn't made to be an Alex Kidd-game at all!
Regardless of that, I think that Alex Kidd: High-Tech World is a decent game, although not as good as the other Alex Kidd-games.
User review by tommy1983 