1986 the game-developers industry had just survived its worst crisis. It developed new conzepts and reformed itself. New heroes, new mascots where needed in the new era. Nintendo had made the first step: Super mario became cult. Now sega, sega the second video game giant, had a chance too, with the creation of Alex the Kid.
Whoever bought a sega master system in the beginning of the 90er knows Alex kidd. How do I know? Sega Picked up Nintendos clever ideas to ship every to every gameboy with a tetris game. In the case of the of the Sega Master System, the game was even pre installed. if you did not put a modul in the slot, you heard after a few seconds the Alex Kidd Theme.
I loved the music.The themes in the first levels are legendary. The graphics were well done too, although some argue that the graphic for Mario had more details. On the other hand, Alex the kid had much more different ... Helicopter and motorcycle did not exist in the nintendo game
Although the controlling of the character was really bad in comparision to Mario. How often did I jjump into nothing. Fortunately the boss fights were only 'scissor, stone and paper games' where you could even predict the order the boss would choose. So I have managed with several retries to play through the game in a few hours. I thought that was done really great until i heard that some manage to play the game in less than a half hour.
Even if you can consider the first part as a real success, the brand 'alex kidd' was not established. it seemed like as if Sega could not decide what to do with the mascot. The second part 'The Lost Stars' looked completly different and the Thirs part had nothing to do with first. Additionally Sonic had rolled in and became Sega's new mascot. On the Sega Mega Drive Alex Kidd was not worth mentioning. The last part of the seres was 'Alex Kidd in Shinobi World' .