Game Gear
The Game Gear was ahead of it’s time. In so many ways this should have defeated the Nintendo Game Boy, but a few big issues stopped it from doing so.
To start with the good, the machine had a full colour display where as the Game Boy was in black and white (or pea green and black as it actually was on the original brick Game Boy). Also you could get an adapter to play any Sega Master System cartridge on the machine. This was an awesome feature which was kinda almost like a Switch 30 years before the Switch came out.
And on top of all this you could actually get a TV tuner for the Game Gear which would allow you to watch TV in your hands. Sur ethe signal would often be bad, but you could be crafty and connect an ariel to it, or even your other games consoles into it to have a mini TV to play your N64 on. I’m sure some of you reading this had the Tuner and didn’t figure this out, because it wasn’t quite designed for it but with a piece of tape and the right cable you could get that signal to display! I recommend those of you who can to try it out!
But for all these good features the machine had some major issues which stopped it beating the Game Boy. The main one of these was that unlike the Game Boy which would take it’s time to use up 4 AA batteries, the Game Gear would chew up 6 of them in no time. I always played mine with it plugged in, but I grant you that this did defeat the point of it being a portable machine.
The second big issue was the size of the machine. It was significantly bigger than the Game Boy and wouldn’t fit in most people’s pockets.
And the third biggest issue was the games. Whilst the Game Gear does have a great library of games it didn’t have Tetris, and nor it did it have Zelda or Mario, and whilst those last two may be obvious, the machine was also a victim of coming out in the time frame where Nintendo manipulated third parties to keep many of the best games Nintendo exclusive. This changed during the time of the Game Gear’s life span and you can get games like Mortal Kombat and Aladdin on the machine, but arguably by the time most games started going cross platform the writing was on the wall for the Game Gear.
Depending where in the world you were you could get later big Sega games such as Panzer Dragoon Mini, Virtua Fighter Animation and about 3 times as many Sonic games as came out here in the UK.
Sonic Chaos, Sonic Spinball, NBA Jam, Lion King and Lemmings are all great games to play on the machine which was the biggest portable contender to Nintendo until the PSP.
