No known public copies exist, and I don’t think any ROM dumps have been released. The sole record of its existence may be a video (8 minutes) on the Youtube channel of higenekodo:

They have more videos on their channel than this one, including one of another possibly-unreleased Unisystem adaption of a Sunsoft Famicom game, the Wing of Madoola (16 minutes):

Both games have added scoring systems and other changes to adapt them for arcade play. Without ROM dumps though, we can’t know the full extent of the changes. Wing of Madoola seems to have been given an English localization, and had Gauntlet-ish timed health loss added to prevent player stalling, but it’s not known what changes were made to Blaster Master’s play to keep them moving. Blaster Master was also made less free-roaming: once you defeat the boss of an area and collect the powerup, the player is taken directly to the entrance of the next area, and each area begins with a map screen giving an overview of the area. And collected vehicle weapons appear in the corner of the screen, which suggests that the pause screen was removed.

I love hearing about games being adapted in design to meet different needs, like arcade play, and I’d love to try these modified versions some day to see what other changes were planned. Maybe they’ll come to light, eventually. I can only hope.

rodneylives

The Hebereke bunch were already a random bunch of crazies, but they’re cute crazies. Sunsoft’s localizers tried to inject them with a dose of hip-serum. Here’s a brief summary:

Hebe the penguin Changes: Rechristened “Bop-Louie,” given big eyes

O-chan the cat-suited girl Changes: Made a wall-eyed lizard not in any kind of suit, renamed “Freeon-Leon”

Jennifer the fish/frog thing Changes: Renamed “Gil”

Sukezaemon the ghost Changes: Renamed “Shades”

Kid Fenris notes, in a pair of posts, that, in the recently-released sequel for Switch, the localized versions make cameos during the return to base cutscene!

Hebereke had a much more productive live in Japan, where the series got several sequels. The changed characters are a relic of the time when Sunsoft seemed uncertain of how to approach overseas markets. Blaster Mastered was (and is) revered, but didn’t sell as well as they expected, so they released a weird kind of sequel called Fester’s Quest, with Addams Family characters. They localized a Game Boy version of Hudson’s Bomber King (renamed to “Robowarrior”in English) as a sequel to Blaster Master, called Blaster Master Boy, and sponsored another sequel, made by Software Creations, for the Genesis.

Back on the NES, the license for a Terminator 2 game fell through, so they rebranded it as Journey to Silius, and not being able to get the Superman license scuttled plans to release another game completely, despite a hasty renaming to “Sunman.” Was there ever another game publisher so cursed with licensing issues as Sunsoft?

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Sunsoft has released some animations of Hebe and his friends on their Youtube channel. Each is very short, and entirely in Japanese, but most of them don’t have words anyway, and they’re all of a style of humor that I don’t think they make a huge amount of sense even in their native language.

They’re all collected in this playlist, but a couple of selections should help you understand what you’re in for. All of these are about one minute long.

Hebe buys a toy gun:

Hebe and Sukezaemon race on what I’m going to call jet-powered “vehicles”:

And, trouble with bird poop:

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