I won the "Senna GP" and the World Championship on both difficulty settings, as well as defending my crown in the World Championship.
This is a definite downgrade from the first Super Monaco GP. While the change to battery backup is much better than the 64-character password system in the first game, it's nowhere near enough to offset the negatives. You now have the ability to name your driver and give him a nationality, as opposed to simply being "You" from "Your Country". In addition to the free run practice, they added the option to practice in wet or dry conditions (for the tracks where it can have rain), as well as running against competitors, choosing your starting position. The control options are the exact same as the first game.
For the Senna GP, instead of having just the one track that you have to run twice and finish at the top of the points in the Super Monaco GP mode in the first game, there are three tracks that Ayrton Senna picked out. In order to win this mode, I think you have to finish in the top 3 in all three races (I won all three, as well as winning two and finishing 3rd, and won the GP in both scenarios).
The meat of the game is the World Championship, which has you run the 16 F1 races of that year. They're almost all the same as the first game, which makes sense as it's simulating the actual F1 season, and there aren't going to be a lot of changes from year to year. As with the first game, you start out with one team and challenge other drivers and if you finish ahead of them multiple times, you're offered a spot in that team. This is the only way to improve the car you drive. Unlike the first game, it sometimes takes beating your rival more than twice to get the offer. Also unlike the first game, you will never get offered a spot on Madonna (the best team, which is who Senna drives for) during the season, as I defeated Senna in the first 15 races and never got asked to join. After winning the championship, you do get offered to join Madonna and then defend your title. If you choose Beginner difficulty, you aren't part of a team and therefore don't choose a rival. The races are 3 laps as opposed to 6 laps in Master difficulty. After winning the championship, unless you really want to race in Madonna's car, there's really no point in defending your crown. When you do, all it does is show the standings and then prompts you to race the next season.
Where this game falls short of the first game is in the actual racing. It's much more forgiving with regards to the barriers and curbs. Driving on the curbs and the grass off the track only gradually slows you down, unlike the first game where you take a major hit to your speed almost instantly, with you needing to get onto either the dirt or sand (whatever the brown ground is supposed to be) to get slowed down quickly. As for the barriers (signs and tire stacks), you pretty much have to hit them head on to be majorly hampered, at which point it's a crash unless you're going really slowly. You can use them like bumpers to guide you around hairpin turns. On the flipside, colliding with other cars more than makes up for that forgiveness. Unless a competitor hits you directly in the rear, you will be slowed to a crawl while the other car seems to have zero downside. They also recover in about a quarter of the time compared to the first game. Probably 95% of the difficulty comes from the other cars slamming into you.
It's also great that Senna has brief descriptions of all 16 F1 courses, giving pointers on how to adjust your car's settings for a handful of them. It's just too bad that there is no option to adjust your car's settings. From a guide I skimmed through for the Master System release, you can change your car's settings in that version. It's pretty sad that this is not part of what you would think would be a superior version.
If there wasn't the first game to compare it to, I likely would have given it a 7/10. It also doesn't help that it doesn't really add anything to the first game. Unless you can get this for relatively cheap, I'd say to skip it. If you have the choice, go with the first game.
