I do collect Master System too.
This console was a huge hit in Brazil in the late 80´s and i was a kid totally influenced by it back then. I was 12 when i got mine in the ´89 xmas with 2 games. The SMS was a very loved console here.
Unfortunally i was a lousy kid when it came to take care of my game and console boxes and manuals. My first Master System lost its box and manuals. Also, the brazilian parts of the video game had terrible quality. Soon all the cables started to snap internally, making the controllers malfunction, the ac/dc power supply to fail and the RF cable not to work any more. I used to put duct tape on my SMS so it could fix a proper working position of the cables for me to play (it has so much duct tape on it that resembled a mummy... half of the console was covered by it). A few years later (in 2000 if i´m not mistaken) i sold the console and what was left of its cartridges.
I regretted that a few years later since that SMS was a xmas present from my parents. In 2006, i found a complete one while shopping downtown with a friend. It came exactly as my first one: first model, box, manual, every piece of hardware working perfectly. I didn´t have any doubts and bought it (it costed me 14 dollars!) since it was a bargain. Then i started to track down the games again and i've never abandon it ever since.
Today i have 26 SMS games. Some of them are NA releases, some are BR and some are EUR. Most of them are complete. I wish i could change all my games for NA releases since their boxes and manuals are made of plastic and better paper. Brazilian boxes were made out of cardboard and they got easily damaged thru the years. Just some later games got proper plastic boxes, which started to happen only on 1993 here.
The SMS is one of my favorite and nostalgic video games. It was my second game console (my first was an Atari 2600) but i got a lot more emotionally attached to it. It was the dawn of a new generation for me (the NES wasn´t that strong here and the SMS had a massive marketing campaign) and it made me play way more ever since, specially because i moved to another city and i´ve spent a lot of time playing it after we moved.
Backstory aside, here are some of my favorite SMS games:
Alex Kidd in Miracle World
Fantasy Zone II: The Tears of Opa-Opa
Ghostbusters (by far the best 8-bit version of this game i've ever played)
Jogos de Verão (it translates to "Summer Games" - a localized translation of California Games)
Mônica no Castelo do Dragão (it translates to "Monica in the Dragon´s Castle" - a modified brazilian release of Wonder Boy in Monster Land)
Phantasy Star (it was completely translated to brazilian portuguese when released here)
OutRun
Zillion
Let me just add that 2 games were specially important in making the SMS popular here: Gangster Town and Jogos de Verão. Almost every SMS owner had this games back then.
HarvestDude™
