I had a gamegear in the 90s and fucking loved it. There were so many sonic titles that were doing things that other sonic games didn't. Sonic Labyrinth was about sonic losing his speed, and needing to use his fucking brain to find chaos emeralds to get his speed back. Tails' adventure was about Tails saving the forest using machinery. It's how I learned that tails was a genius engineer who made bombs and robots. Sonic Drift 1 and 2 were the first cart racers for sonic. It was hilarious seeing knuckle's giant fist appear out of his kart to down other opponents.
I saw a video where someone operated on one of these and replaced the screen with a modern lit lcd, new capaciters, and added lithium batteries and a charging system for it. If I remember correctly he got about a day of runtime with this setup.
Parents got me one for Christmas on clearance after it was discontinued. And a bunch of cheap games to go with it. Loved that thing. They soon realized their oversight and also bought the wall and car plug ins. Kept working until about ‘06/‘07 before the capacitors crapped out. Didn’t know it was repairable then and chucked it. Figured 10-11 years was a good run. Still remember the GBC coming out and my neighbor was super excited for it and I’m like “Why? Sega did color years ago.” Anyway, still play GG games via emulation at least weekly. Totally underrated
@jaywest3734 it is in some ways. It was consistently rated higher... but it really shouldn't have been in many cases, such as Mortal Kombat being great on Game Gear and other such feats of similar impressiveness, generally missing from game boy green years.
As a kid who had the Game Gear... and eventually got the Gameboy color years later... you didn't miss much. The Game Gear had a huge problem in that it required 6 batteries... and drained quickly,. You couldn't play any game for very long. Game boy was way simpler and I ended up spending many happy hours playing Kirby, Zelda, Mario, Pokemon
@RAMIRO0 Not just the battery life, but the expensive price tag for both the hardware itself as well as the software too. Software side of things, GG games were $10(or $15 in some cases) more expensive than GB game software as well!
@@lonebanana6753my cousin had game gear and we simply plugged it into plug socket and play for hours. It really wasn’t a problem. You sit on couch or bed, plug in and enjoy.
It should be noted that a lot of original Game Gears are slowly decaying. There are places you can download circuit boards to print off (with a circuit printer) and kits to fix screens/speakers
The only thing that kept me from getting a Game Gear is that I had a Genesis. When I saw GG games in magazines, it just felt like they were inferior 8-Bit versions of games I already had. So instead I had a Game Boy which appeared to have more original games, of games I didn't have.
The Game Gear was, and still is, my favorite console of all time. My brother and I even had the cable to connect our Game Gears together, and regularly used it to compete in Dr. Robotnik's Mean Bean Machine. As for the battery life, we simply just used a LOT of AAs. I'm sure my brother and I are soley responsible for a significant portion of the AA's in the NY/NJ landfills. Oh, and 3 hours was optimistic. It was more like 2.5 hours of gameplay, as they would die just 20 minutes before arriving to our grandparents house. When our Game Gears died, we knew were were close. And as soon as we got there, grandma would give us jumbo packs of AA batteries (and ice cream). We did eventually get car chargers.
Fun fact: The latest licensed Game Gear game is GG Aleste 3 on 2020. Primarily for the Game Gear Micro. At least the game also can be played on the Switch and PS4 as an emulated Game Gear game.
Sega made an official exernal rechargeable battery pack and there were also knock off ones. I had some bricks that clipped in the original battery compartments on the sides. Those plus the clip on screen magnifier made it so ridiculously awesome. Never got the tv adapter but wanted it. Also Beavis and Butthead was a nice title that def got some hours put in.
I have three of these. Two were found in the trash (bulk trash, for one week, the city will haul away almost anything you pile on the curb), and one was given to me by a friend. All three have defective screens. I've never looked into fixing them.
I loved and cherished my GG. Some of the best gaming moments of my life happened with that thing in my hands. I had an AC adapter, car adapter and a sack of rechargeable batteries so I never felt the squeeze of the SIX AAs every three hours.
I also feel the GG had an excellent and distinctive sound chip which, just like it's color palette, was slightly better than the MS. True, it drained batteries dry like the Y2K bug was about to hit a decade early, but it was still a great system.
What remains a mystery to me is why they never released am improved version with lower battery consumption. But I suppose they wasted there engineering resources on console addons instead.
It was a LED tech problem. Blue LED came in 1992, which was able to emit blue light. Mixing it with red and green, you got a variety of colours. Before that, backlight was needed (flourescent).
I had a Game Gear back in the day. I loved it, but it was barely portable. I had to play with it plugged in if I wanted to play for more than 2.5 hours. Still, it was awesome! Yet another gem of a video, Mi’Lady. ❤❤❤❤❤
I still have my childhood Game Gear. Despite it being beyond dead and not working whether I use batteries or an AC adapter, I just can't get rid of it. I may have been born in 94, but I grew up on the old stuff.
What an underrated gem of a channel.I remember my Game Gear so fondly until it was lost in an airport terminal, honestly one of the if not the best portable gaming system of the 90s. Being able to play Sonic on the go was fantastic.
It chugged through 6 AA batteries after 2-3 hours of gameplay. I ended up getting the AC adapter meaning that I had to sit next to a wall outlet to play Sonic on the game gear. Trying to play Sonic on the game gear compared to the Master System or the Genesis was another impossibly difficult task too. If Sonic wasn't able to pick up a ring after being hit those games wouldn't be playable. Sonic Chaos is thr only one that I beat without a level select code. The first boss of Sonic 2 on the Game Gear is a nightmare in itself. There was no save system either. Regardless, I put tons of hours into it.
I never had a game gear, but my cousin did. I played the GG version of Sonic 2 on it numerous times, and while game gear was ahead of its time it was too expensive and ate batteries like a beast.
Still have my original GG and got it recapped to play and build my collection. One small tidbit I learned about collecting is that the console is region free so any version works on my system.
My parents bought Game Gear's for me and my brother when we were younger for summer vacation car trips. Dad got us the AC adapter for the hotel and was smart enough to go to Radio Shack and buy universal car adapters and a car AC splitter so the both of us could be playing at the same time. They even got the link cable and copies of Power Rangers for us to play against each other. We never did. Found a copy of Shining Force 2 at a local game trader and enjoyed replaying it many times.
Great machine, I had one, but ultimately it was the non-portable portable handheld, due to chronic battery life and bulky size. I didn't realise it held on so long and was still available when the PS2 launched, shame they didn't upside the screen, down size the console and get better battery life out of it with a revised version. I reckon they would have a market for a revised collectors version now (not a tiny thing!). My favourite games were Sonic, Alien 3, Streets of Range. If I recall it had OutRun and it was awful, and it had a turn based strategy game called Crystal Warriors (?) I could never get to grips with it.
Battery life 100% killed the console. Otherwise it had so much going for it. A lot of people who held onto it... they almost exclusively kept the device at home on its charger which essentially meant people by virtue of the horrible battery life had to treat this portable console like a home console (Genesis, etc.)
I recently picked up a modded DMG Gameboy. It’s backlit and the whole 9 yards… Had Nintendo put a backlight in there it would have been absolute game over for every other handheld.
Got one when I was 15, my dad “finished “ a small room (12x12) addition I moved into and I had a little tv and small alarm radio for entertainment and that was about it because my older brother kept the PlayStation in his room. I got it at a garage sale with Sonic and Columns for about $25 with a DC adapter, So glad for the DC adapter because I played it so much, until I got the mini psone.
I'd say two major problems handicapped the Game Gear. In the short term, it was the battery life. But in the long term, the bad capacitors lead a lot of them getting junked instead of refurbished. One of my friends had one and I enjoyed the heck out of it... even if remembering Dr. Robotnik's Mean Bean Machine gave me PTSD!
I remember being in primary school and everybody wanted a gamegear. I had a friend who had one with a TV tuner he could insent into the cartridge slot. I was so jealous. 😅
i got a free NES from a cousin when my uncle bought him a game gear... a few months later he wanted his nes back in exchange for the game gear haha but i was hooked on the nes... the he got an atari jaguar... and still wanted the nes back...
Without having watched this video yet, and as a former Game Gear owner I can tell you my problems with it. The Sega Game Gear had a messed up backlighting system that give you a headache if you played it for long, that is really my only complaint about it, but that was a major complaint, it was very difficult to enjoy being unable to play it for long without getting a headache.
As a child I had a GG for a period. It ate too many batteries. Constantly buying batteries and later constantly re-charging rechargable batteries for hours for
I had it as a kid here in Greece, before i bought Game Boy pocket and Color. Game Gear was much better but was too ahead of its time and the battery thing was a major issue.
it's incredible that the last game gear game is GG Aleste 3, published in 2020 inside the fifth variant of GG Micro, the white one (or inside the GG Aleste collection for switch/ps4). Great console the GG, i loved it so much back in the days. It's a shame that many great games didnt left the japan market (sylvan tales, the two shining force, moldorian, coca cola kid, buster fight, the mc donald platform...)
I loved my Game Gear, but a bag of rechargeable batteries was absolutely required. I could never afford the TV tuner, but I really really wanted one. LTT recently did a video where they replaced the screen with modern parts, and it looked incredible. I wish I had held on to my old Game Gear, as I'd love to do this upgrade. The original backlight was a flourescent tube, so those modern LED's probably significantly expand the battery life.
I actually had the Magic Knight Rayearth Game Gear. Nothing really special about it. Just a red Game Gear with the Magic Knight Rayeart logo on it and it came with the MKR RPG packed in. It unfortunately got water damaged in a house fire, so it isn't working, but I kick around the idea of getting a working Gear and trading out the guts to get it up and running again.
I had a Game Gear when I was a kid in the early 90s and I loved it. Yeah, it was huge and the battery life sucked. But I was always turned off by the Gameboy's monochrome, unlit screen. Thus I, like probably most GG owners, either used the rechargeable battery pack or played with it plugged into the wall.
Well I grew up in the 90s in the UK and I never met or knew anyone that owned a Game Gear. Not a single person. I did not even know the system existed until about 5 years ago...seriously!! Everyone had a Game Boy on the other hand.
I owned a game gear for most of the 90’s and even had the nearly all of the accessories as well. Back then I didn’t know it could play master system and the same was for the genesis. I had the usual power adapters for home and car. More importantly I had the rechargeable battery pack. This meant I could play for more than three hours at a time. I also remember that if you had the ac adapter plugged into the wall before connecting to the battery pack you could recharge it while it was connected to the game gear. I also had the screen magnifier which for certain games was helpful. Though I did eventually end up with a sega nomad i wish i hadn’t let my mother pawn to pay bills. Unfortunately it was incomplete as I lacked the battery compartment. At least I had my reachable battery back then to power it. I was probably the only kid in my town that walked around playing street fighter two for the genesis back then.
Back then, rechargeable batteries were quite expensive, so it wasn't really feasible. The AC adapter also didn't have a built-in transformer, so when I was visiting relatives in China at one point and plugged it into the 220V outlet, it instantly fried the adaptor, and since China's market hadn't started to sell the unit I couldn't get a replacement adapter until after going back to the west.
3:30 "...we went from the masters system ability to *display* 64 colors to the game gears 4096 colors!" Both of these numbers are wrong. The Sega MS had a *palette* of 64 colors and could *display* 31 colors while the Game Gear had a *palette* of 4096 colors but could only *display* 32 colors. So the onscreen comparison is Sega MS: 31 colors and Sega GG: 32 colors. Don't get it twisted.
I loved the gamegear in the 90s. Yes, the battery life sucked but even with the ac adapter, mine would overheat and turn itself off anyway, I used to get so mad at it lol. I wonder if anyone else had this problem, maybe it was just mine.
I knew a guy who had the TV TUNER. Back on one of the army bases during a 24 hour duty we managed to hook it up to the cable line and watch cable tv through it. I was surprised. I only owned Sonic 2, Master of Darkness, and Shining Force: Sword of Hajya. I bought a carrying case, the screen magnifier, and the AC adapter so I was basically plugged in as the battery use was terrible. I think I would have loved getting the minis. My old Game Gear barely has a display (unusable), and the sound is very muted. It would need a restoration by someone who knows how.
I wanted the GameGear SO BAD when I was a kid! I ended up being a GameBoy kid, and while I LOVED it, a little sliver of the ol' lizard brain kept daydreaming about colored, backlit Sanic 💙 I now have two gamegears, both in great disrepair, but ONE DAY I'll max one of them out with all possible repairs and upgrades! I'll definitely be making a video about it! Side note, HUGE kudos to you for the quality, and FREQUENCY of your content! It takes me AGES to make a video. You're an inspiration, and I hope to match your skills someday!
I had the Gamegear as a Kid Germany (former east germany), i never saw Gamegear games on sale. So i was stuck with a 4 in 1 and Global Gladiators. This lead to another problem, at that time i had to buy the games on my own and wouldn't get them as birthday or christmas present. But even if i got money, it wasn't enough to buy new games, even if i would've found one. New SMS/Gamegear games where as expensive as AAA titles today. So i solely resorted to buying used games. Since these games wheren't sold locally, i never got them in my area. This was another thing with the Sega Master System, this was more popular and i could get used games. But it's fun to mention, that the Gamegear was technically so advanced, that it was even graphically better then the Gameboy Color, that was released 7 years later. So in a way i would say, the Gamegear was just too far ahead of it's time.
I got a game gear when it came out. I think it was for Christmas. It came with Columns and was the only game I ended up owning. I might have rented games for it, but I can't remember. Sadly I lost the console to a house fire in a couple years or so later. I remember wanting the TV tuner add on. Aside from the game gear I owned an original game boy and psp. Once I got my first pocket pc my gaming habits changed and I never bought another handheld. I still think about the game gear from to time and it's awesome to see this video!
Portable consoles in general seem to get a lot less attention and love in retrospect, despite often having impressive hardware/software sales at the time! Not being a Nintendo system probably doesn't help, either. :(
I have two Game Gears on my shelf and play them every so often--still fun. The way it fits in the hand, the simple, yet hard, gameplay...it's just great.
I always felt like the Game Gear was genuinely a much cooler system then the Game Boy. Granted, I never grew up when they were initially at war, however I did have a Game Gear my dad had purchased from a store many years prior & I got to grow up with that until it broke & subsequently was sold around 2018. I never truly got into Pokémon which probably helps in my disinterest in the Game Boy, although I love the Super Mario Land games & love all things Kirby, I don't feel the rest of the library of the Game Boy's holds up well today. Even the Game Boy Color has this issue in my opinion, with failing to deliver solid titles that withstood the test of time, or they DID deliver solid titles however today their worth hundreds of dollars because of their rarity (Metal Gear Solid, Resident Evil Gaiden, Shantae, etc.) Today I now have both a GBC &, as of yesterday, a Game Gear, both in great condition & working order, & I gotta say the Game Gear is more comfortable & easier to use then the GBC. It could be bias just because I had one growing up, but I really think the library on the Game Gear holds up better then the Game Boy's, & it's features allow it to still feel great to use all these years later. Also, I don't think the battery life itself is what people hate about it, it's the fact your constantly buying batteries that makes people annoyed. The Nintendo Switch holds a similar 3-6 hour life span before it dies, however obviously the Switch uses rechargeable batteries. As long as you find rechargeable batteries online for the Game Gear, you should be good!
It was my dream gadget back in 1992. For the first time I had seen a Game Gear up close, I thought it blows Game boy away with LCD color screen! However, being a broke elementary kid, my years of saving up my school allowance is not enough to afford it.
I never had one, but I remember being in church one day as a little kid, this teenager in front of me opened up this briefcase and there was a gameboy, gamegear, walkman, and some other stuff. He played Sonic on the Gamegear the entire time and I had a blast watching it. Really my only memory of the thing lol.
I am old enough to remember when the SEGA Game Gear was released. My Dad had surprised me with one Christmas morning of 1991. Sonic the Hedgehog 2 was the pack-in game, so I definitely burned through countless AA batteries for those few hours of Sonic and Tails. At 7:10, you mention the need for an AC adapter, or car plug to keep our gaming on the go. Well, Ms. Decade, do you recall the officially licensed, SEGA Game Gear Battery pack (Model #2105)? It was (is) a rechargeable pack that provided an alternative to spending a fortune on AA batteries by having something which can be charged and reused. It was designed to clip onto a user's belt. As an interesting tidbit of information, the Game Gear is a 9V console just like the Genesis, and the Game Gear's battery pack uses the same type of DC plug as the Genesis. You were able to connect the battery pack to the Genesis and make it "portable" as well. I used a Sony "Watchman" from Radio Shack as a screen. How nerdy was that?
I had one of the blue ones when I was a kid, I think it came with Lion King. The only other game I remember playing on GG was NBA Jam, which I did love. The one thing I remember not liking about Game Gear was its size, as a kid the Game Boy just felt better in my hands. I also could never have put in the kind of hours like I did on Pokemon Blue version with the Game Gear's battery life
I grew up with the game gear. Never had a crazy assortment of games for it, but we has Sonic 2, either Sonic Chaos or Triple Trouble, I don't remember which, Aladdin, and I want to say we had the Castle of Illusion port, but I could just be remembering the genesis version. It may drain batteries like an ice cube in the desert, but the quality is undeniable.
I got one for christmas back in... I don't know, probably 1994. I remember I thought it was so cool that I could play something like a Master System while in the toilet. That was amazing to me back then.
My fondest memory of the Game Gear was "playing" Pokemon Yellow on it. Hear me out - using the official Game Gear TV Tuner, it was possible to connect a console of you had the right cables. By using it as a screen for an N64, Pokemon Yellow could be played via Pokemon Stadium's GB Tower. The poor thing died of leaky capacitors many years later.
Cost a fortune and essentially DRANK batteries. I knew one person who had one as a kid, and they were a late 20’s man. Everyone had a game boy, they were cheap and the batteries lasted a lot longer.
My gut feel is that the main issue with the Game Gear is purely that not many had it. I think anecdotally battery life was poor but I don't know how much truth there was in this. But I remember my friend had one and I was totally blown away and spent his entire birthday party tucked in the corner of a room playing Sonic on it. Glad to see you cover this wee classic. Definitely deserves more respect than it gets.
"I think anecdotally battery life was poor but I don't know how much truth there was in this." as a GG owner in my youth, it was 100% true. The batteries would get a few hours max. That, and the poor screen quality (visibility) and resolution is what made me prefer my trusty old Game Boy despite it being monochrome and non-backlit.
Had one growing up, it absolutely ate up batteries. I usually played it with a power supply, which kind of defeats the point of it being portable. Had some quality puzzlers on it. Klax and Woody Pop being firm favourites of mine
I loved mine - fave games were Dragon Bruce Lee, and it ran Master System games so i had golden axe, desert strike, paperboy and i had the TV tuner for it.
Excellent video. Great tribute to the Sega Game Gear. I borrowed one from my best friend back in 1992 and played Shinobi among other games. I was very impressed with the graphics. They looked better than the 8-bit graphics the NES or Game Boy had. So I incorrectly assumed the Game Gear was a 16-bit system. But that just shows how impressive it was. It was the PSP of its day., in my opinion.
I think piracy was a bit of an issue for both, it was easy to get a hold of multicarts back in the day which would also be shared around. This was in scandinavia
Gameboy was especially disappointing because they didn’t re-release game gear with a backlit, colored display till the Gameboy SP given the Game Gear’s superior presentation. My mother enjoyed playing Columns. My uncles worked in transit Night Shifts and they both had Game Gear with the TV Tuner. Game Gear was ahead of its time. Very versatile and appealing to all ages.
I had a game gear briefly when they became more affordable and the that thing went through batteries a mile a minute. Six brand new ones lasted less than five minutes. If it wasn't for the mains adapter it'd be unplayable.
As a Sega kid in the 90s I love the choices of background music in this video, although, it would remiss if I didn't point out that the Game Gear port of Sonic, as seen in the Mega Collection Plus on PS2, Xbox and PC, there are some differences, for example, on Jungle Zone Act 2, as you ascend the waterfall, on the Master System, the screen locks behind you, meaning that any attempt to descend would be instant death! This was not so on the Game Gear version and why it is as such in aforementioned collections! And if you didn't already know that, then, well, there you go, you learn something new every day! The Master System Sonic was the first game I ever played and I distinctly remember that being a pain for 7 year old me and then being shocked when I saw gameplay of the Game Gear version at school on one of those "bring your toys in days" near the end of term! You know the ones!
I remember at school they had "bring in a toy day". Some kids brought in their action men, barbies, or 'cool' gadgets. A good few people brought in their game boys but nobody but me brought in a Game Gear. I remember the furore and shock about how cool it looked; there was no getting away that its coloured, back-lit, larger screen was lightyears ahead of the Game Boy. Young kids were acting like it was some sort of alchemical magic. Clearly somewhere along the line Sega dropped the ball on marketing this thing to parents or kids, as no one had heard of it.
Still have my Game Gear. Unfortunately it doesn’t really work right anymore probably due to sitting for so long. I remember buying the tv tuner back then as it went on clearance. Couldn’t get it to tune in so I returned it for a different one and same problem. Just brought it back and got my money back. But I loved the game gear.
I owned both the game boy and the game gear when they were first released. Game gear was one of the first video game systems I had where my mother actually enjoyed playing it. Her favorite game was COLUMNS, and between the backlit screen and the bright, colorful graphics. She had a lot of fun with it. That fun continued to this day where she plays games like candy crush. The game gear was a very good system and ahead of its time but its main problem was it’s battery power. It would go through AAA batteries like shit through a goose. If they could have figured out a way to introduce nickel cadmium battery packs during its launch rather than later on in its life, they might have done better, but if they had access to today’s lithium ion battery technology, the game gear would have been a menace to Nintendo. In fact: Sega probably could have been the first company to pull off a system with as much success as the Nintendo switch if they had played their cards right. Sega was always interested in making portable video game systems like the Sega Nomad even when it didn’t make much sense to be able to play on a small screen and plug into a larger television. Sega was always trying to figure out ways to milk their adapters. You could play Sega master system games on game gear, for example.
Because it got 3 hours of gaming for 6 AA batteries. Do you know how expensive that was in the mid-90's? I owned one, but never played it outside my home.
Sega Game Gear (I adore it) a rechargeable (massive) battery pack was made for it, which I used provided a cost effective way to play (for about 2 hrs) but for me this was perfect as my attention span wouldn't allow for me to play much longer than an hour anyways. Just a couple cents. great video, m'lady
I love the Master System but I've never even attempted collecting for the Game Gear. As you said, there are better options today, rather than using the original hardware, which has its issues (especially with capacitors). I agree it has an awesome library, and as a Shinobi fan I really want to play the two GG Shinobi.
The games are so cheap, cheaper than Master System games even. Not many people have working GGs anymore so the games are being mass off loaded. And these Analog Pockets / Retrons are niche after market consoles which require an adapter to make the GG games play. Very few people will or have bought into that. Net result... if you have a working GG or aftermarket console+GG adapter for it now is a great time to buy these games up cheap at like $1-$2 a go for many titles on the system.
As a kid in the early 90s, my mom & I would check the Goodwill every weekday and we found a Game Gear for cheap. My parents had already bought me a Genesis from a garage sale with the mickey mouse game from this video & two others. Which was a steal because the Genesis had just came out in NA at the time. So then also finding a cheap Game Gear, was really cool as a little kid getting into video games because we wouldn't have had the money, otherwise. Anyone who had one knew about the battery life, so you would play in short incraments. I seem to remember a light that would warn you when the batteries were low, as well. Something that I didn't see covered in this video, but maybe its just because of differences in video game media in NA, from elsewhere, was the Game Gear _really_ got hammered with negative reviews related to its "bulky" size. The Gameboy was viewed as something you could realistically bring with you out into the world, whereas the Game Gear's bulk, along with the poor battery life, was argued to be a death sentence for the innovative handheld.
I had a game gear and the wall adapter. The games were mostly lacking but I did have some real gems. I'm looking to buy one now but they are hard to find working.
I had a game gear back in the 90’s. I loved it. Had the TV Jawn too. I bought it over the Gameboy. But eventually had to get a Gamboy for obvious reasons .
This is my favorite handheld and wish it got more love, but the batteries were the biggest reason it failed I believe. I spent hours playing under my parents computer desk playing Streets of Rage, Sonic the Hedgehog and Home Alone with the power adapter plugged in 😂 we would only use batteries when going on car rides and once we got to our family members house out came the batteries and in the ac adapter.
While I'd argue the Sony PSP vs the Nintendo DS was a bigger handheld battle than the Sega Game Gear versus Nintendo Game Boy, you could also argue that the performance gap was larger between the GG and GB vs the PSP and DS to the point that the following respective generation the Game Gear could outperform the Game Boy Color whereas the PSP was about on par with the 3DS. Sure the GG ate batteries like I eat french fries, (I remember my cousin having the rechargeable battery pack and even then opting to keep it plugged in unless he went outside), but in the few cases where you had games on both handhelds, the GG version would often be superior.
I got a Game Gear for Christmas in 92, about a year before I had a Genesis. Armed with Sonic 1&2, Mortal Kombat, Shinobi, Streets of Rage and a few more carts, along with power adapters because F using batteries in there 😂, that thing was a road trip warrior for me. I would have collected more carts for it when I was still collecting, but by that time it was hard to find original, unmodified, hardware at a decent price and no one was making a good 3rd party option until Retron put out there Retron5 adapter. Alas, I put on my special hat, eye patch and shoulder parrot and grabbed the best games from the digital ocean of things. I definitely would recommend checking out some of the GG games out there if you get a chance. Show that poor system some love!
Love the game gear, had one back in the day and used outdoor for short periods of course because of battery duration. There is a non official fm radio tuner.
I had a gamegear in the 90s and fucking loved it. There were so many sonic titles that were doing things that other sonic games didn't. Sonic Labyrinth was about sonic losing his speed, and needing to use his fucking brain to find chaos emeralds to get his speed back. Tails' adventure was about Tails saving the forest using machinery. It's how I learned that tails was a genius engineer who made bombs and robots. Sonic Drift 1 and 2 were the first cart racers for sonic. It was hilarious seeing knuckle's giant fist appear out of his kart to down other opponents.
I saw a video where someone operated on one of these and replaced the screen with a modern lit lcd, new capaciters, and added lithium batteries and a charging system for it. If I remember correctly he got about a day of runtime with this setup.
Parents got me one for Christmas on clearance after it was discontinued. And a bunch of cheap games to go with it. Loved that thing. They soon realized their oversight and also bought the wall and car plug ins.
Kept working until about ‘06/‘07 before the capacitors crapped out. Didn’t know it was repairable then and chucked it. Figured 10-11 years was a good run.
Still remember the GBC coming out and my neighbor was super excited for it and I’m like “Why? Sega did color years ago.”
Anyway, still play GG games via emulation at least weekly. Totally underrated
Gameboy was better than Game Gear is the reason why lol.
@jaywest3734 it is in some ways. It was consistently rated higher... but it really shouldn't have been in many cases, such as Mortal Kombat being great on Game Gear and other such feats of similar impressiveness, generally missing from game boy green years.
@@jaywest3734 no tf it wasn't
That’s how I felt when the Wii and Switch came out I’m like Sega did this years ago
I always wanted a Game Gear as a kid. I had a Gameboy and a Mega Drive and I loved them but I wanted to play Sonic on the go. Such a cool console.
As a kid who had the Game Gear... and eventually got the Gameboy color years later... you didn't miss much. The Game Gear had a huge problem in that it required 6 batteries... and drained quickly,. You couldn't play any game for very long.
Game boy was way simpler and I ended up spending many happy hours playing Kirby, Zelda, Mario, Pokemon
@RAMIRO0 Not just the battery life, but the expensive price tag for both the hardware itself as well as the software too. Software side of things, GG games were $10(or $15 in some cases) more expensive than GB game software as well!
It was reversed for me, i wanted the Gameboy but got the Game Gear 😂But i love it still today ❤❤
@@lonebanana6753my cousin had game gear and we simply plugged it into plug socket and play for hours. It really wasn’t a problem. You sit on couch or bed, plug in and enjoy.
It should be noted that a lot of original Game Gears are slowly decaying. There are places you can download circuit boards to print off (with a circuit printer) and kits to fix screens/speakers
Nice we have emulation. Hopefully it never goes away.
The only thing that kept me from getting a Game Gear is that I had a Genesis. When I saw GG games in magazines, it just felt like they were inferior 8-Bit versions of games I already had. So instead I had a Game Boy which appeared to have more original games, of games I didn't have.
Yh your right tho
The Game Gear was, and still is, my favorite console of all time. My brother and I even had the cable to connect our Game Gears together, and regularly used it to compete in Dr. Robotnik's Mean Bean Machine. As for the battery life, we simply just used a LOT of AAs. I'm sure my brother and I are soley responsible for a significant portion of the AA's in the NY/NJ landfills. Oh, and 3 hours was optimistic. It was more like 2.5 hours of gameplay, as they would die just 20 minutes before arriving to our grandparents house. When our Game Gears died, we knew were were close. And as soon as we got there, grandma would give us jumbo packs of AA batteries (and ice cream). We did eventually get car chargers.
Fun fact: The latest licensed Game Gear game is GG Aleste 3 on 2020. Primarily for the Game Gear Micro.
At least the game also can be played on the Switch and PS4 as an emulated Game Gear game.
I had a Game Gear as a kid. Before that NES. Dad got me one so I could have something to do in long car rides. It was super fun!
I was always told id get car sick looking down 😖
Sega made an official exernal rechargeable battery pack and there were also knock off ones. I had some bricks that clipped in the original battery compartments on the sides. Those plus the clip on screen magnifier made it so ridiculously awesome. Never got the tv adapter but wanted it. Also Beavis and Butthead was a nice title that def got some hours put in.
I have three of these. Two were found in the trash (bulk trash, for one week, the city will haul away almost anything you pile on the curb), and one was given to me by a friend. All three have defective screens. I've never looked into fixing them.
I loved and cherished my GG. Some of the best gaming moments of my life happened with that thing in my hands. I had an AC adapter, car adapter and a sack of rechargeable batteries so I never felt the squeeze of the SIX AAs every three hours.
I also feel the GG had an excellent and distinctive sound chip which, just like it's color palette, was slightly better than the MS. True, it drained batteries dry like the Y2K bug was about to hit a decade early, but it was still a great system.
The colour palette is 4096, it could display 32 out of them. The master system could display as many but out of a palette of 64.
What remains a mystery to me is why they never released am improved version with lower battery consumption. But I suppose they wasted there engineering resources on console addons instead.
The problem was that technology wasn't really there yet; much like using max brightness on phones kills the battery, so to did a color display.
It was a LED tech problem. Blue LED came in 1992, which was able to emit blue light. Mixing it with red and green, you got a variety of colours. Before that, backlight was needed (flourescent).
I had a Game Gear back in the day. I loved it, but it was barely portable. I had to play with it plugged in if I wanted to play for more than 2.5 hours. Still, it was awesome!
Yet another gem of a video, Mi’Lady. ❤❤❤❤❤
I agree, whilst I never owned one back in the day (I owned several down the line)- my mate had one and I used to play it daily. Great little system!
I still have my childhood Game Gear. Despite it being beyond dead and not working whether I use batteries or an AC adapter, I just can't get rid of it. I may have been born in 94, but I grew up on the old stuff.
Probably needs the capacitors replaced
Great question. 🤔
What an underrated gem of a channel.I remember my Game Gear so fondly until it was lost in an airport terminal, honestly one of the if not the best portable gaming system of the 90s. Being able to play Sonic on the go was fantastic.
I have it its mine forever bwahaha
It chugged through 6 AA batteries after 2-3 hours of gameplay. I ended up getting the AC adapter meaning that I had to sit next to a wall outlet to play Sonic on the game gear. Trying to play Sonic on the game gear compared to the Master System or the Genesis was another impossibly difficult task too. If Sonic wasn't able to pick up a ring after being hit those games wouldn't be playable.
Sonic Chaos is thr only one that I beat without a level select code. The first boss of Sonic 2 on the Game Gear is a nightmare in itself. There was no save system either. Regardless, I put tons of hours into it.
I never had a game gear, but my cousin did. I played the GG version of Sonic 2 on it numerous times, and while game gear was ahead of its time it was too expensive and ate batteries like a beast.
Still have my original GG and got it recapped to play and build my collection. One small tidbit I learned about collecting is that the console is region free so any version works on my system.
My parents bought Game Gear's for me and my brother when we were younger for summer vacation car trips. Dad got us the AC adapter for the hotel and was smart enough to go to Radio Shack and buy universal car adapters and a car AC splitter so the both of us could be playing at the same time. They even got the link cable and copies of Power Rangers for us to play against each other. We never did. Found a copy of Shining Force 2 at a local game trader and enjoyed replaying it many times.
I had a Gameboy but I always envied my friend's Game Gear. The only downside I could see at the time was the poor battery life.
That was the main reason why I never botherd. The Gameboy already ran through batteries too fast for my taste.
The GG library was terrible....
@@willcail All of the master system games. The selection was massive.
Great machine, I had one, but ultimately it was the non-portable portable handheld, due to chronic battery life and bulky size. I didn't realise it held on so long and was still available when the PS2 launched, shame they didn't upside the screen, down size the console and get better battery life out of it with a revised version. I reckon they would have a market for a revised collectors version now (not a tiny thing!).
My favourite games were Sonic, Alien 3, Streets of Range. If I recall it had OutRun and it was awful, and it had a turn based strategy game called Crystal Warriors (?) I could never get to grips with it.
Battery life 100% killed the console.
Otherwise it had so much going for it. A lot of people who held onto it... they almost exclusively kept the device at home on its charger which essentially meant people by virtue of the horrible battery life had to treat this portable console like a home console (Genesis, etc.)
I recently picked up a modded DMG Gameboy. It’s backlit and the whole 9 yards… Had Nintendo put a backlight in there it would have been absolute game over for every other handheld.
Got one when I was 15, my dad “finished “ a small room (12x12) addition I moved into and I had a little tv and small alarm radio for entertainment and that was about it because my older brother kept the PlayStation in his room.
I got it at a garage sale with Sonic and Columns for about $25 with a DC adapter, So glad for the DC adapter because I played it so much, until I got the mini psone.
I'd say two major problems handicapped the Game Gear. In the short term, it was the battery life. But in the long term, the bad capacitors lead a lot of them getting junked instead of refurbished. One of my friends had one and I enjoyed the heck out of it... even if remembering Dr. Robotnik's Mean Bean Machine gave me PTSD!
I remember being in primary school and everybody wanted a gamegear. I had a friend who had one with a TV tuner he could insent into the cartridge slot. I was so jealous. 😅
i got a free NES from a cousin when my uncle bought him a game gear... a few months later he wanted his nes back in exchange for the game gear haha but i was hooked on the nes... the he got an atari jaguar... and still wanted the nes back...
The Game Gear had some cool stuff. Got to play some of its titles on 3DS.
Without having watched this video yet, and as a former Game Gear owner I can tell you my problems with it. The Sega Game Gear had a messed up backlighting system that give you a headache if you played it for long, that is really my only complaint about it, but that was a major complaint, it was very difficult to enjoy being unable to play it for long without getting a headache.
...I wonder if the TV Tuner pack could even get channels now?
As a child I had a GG for a period. It ate too many batteries. Constantly buying batteries and later constantly re-charging rechargable batteries for hours for
Battery life matters, and this thing chewed through them at an amazing rate. Most of the time you had to have it plugged in with its DC adapter.
I wish I still had mine, was my first console 😢 loved Sonic 2 with the paragliding section!
I had it as a kid here in Greece, before i bought Game Boy pocket and Color. Game Gear was much better but was too ahead of its time and the battery thing was a major issue.
it's incredible that the last game gear game is GG Aleste 3, published in 2020 inside the fifth variant of GG Micro, the white one (or inside the GG Aleste collection for switch/ps4).
Great console the GG, i loved it so much back in the days. It's a shame that many great games didnt left the japan market (sylvan tales, the two shining force, moldorian, coca cola kid, buster fight, the mc donald platform...)
I loved my Game Gear, but a bag of rechargeable batteries was absolutely required. I could never afford the TV tuner, but I really really wanted one. LTT recently did a video where they replaced the screen with modern parts, and it looked incredible. I wish I had held on to my old Game Gear, as I'd love to do this upgrade. The original backlight was a flourescent tube, so those modern LED's probably significantly expand the battery life.
I wish I had kept my original gameboy sigh!
I actually had the Magic Knight Rayearth Game Gear. Nothing really special about it. Just a red Game Gear with the Magic Knight Rayeart logo on it and it came with the MKR RPG packed in.
It unfortunately got water damaged in a house fire, so it isn't working, but I kick around the idea of getting a working Gear and trading out the guts to get it up and running again.
Rodney Dangerfield's favourite handheld *loosens tie*
No respect at all, I tell ya!
I had a Game Gear when I was a kid in the early 90s and I loved it. Yeah, it was huge and the battery life sucked. But I was always turned off by the Gameboy's monochrome, unlit screen. Thus I, like probably most GG owners, either used the rechargeable battery pack or played with it plugged into the wall.
Great console. Had a lot of fun as a kid in the 90s with Mortal Kombat 2, Streets of Rage, and Shinobi.
Game gear and Lynx to me felt extremely similar in dimension, ability, and unfortunately... Battery life. That's what really killed it imo
Had a friend with a game gear, he never used it because the battery cost was absurd
Well I grew up in the 90s in the UK and I never met or knew anyone that owned a Game Gear. Not a single person. I did not even know the system existed until about 5 years ago...seriously!! Everyone had a Game Boy on the other hand.
I owned a game gear for most of the 90’s and even had the nearly all of the accessories as well. Back then I didn’t know it could play master system and the same was for the genesis. I had the usual power adapters for home and car. More importantly I had the rechargeable battery pack. This meant I could play for more than three hours at a time. I also remember that if you had the ac adapter plugged into the wall before connecting to the battery pack you could recharge it while it was connected to the game gear. I also had the screen magnifier which for certain games was helpful. Though I did eventually end up with a sega nomad i wish i hadn’t let my mother pawn to pay bills. Unfortunately it was incomplete as I lacked the battery compartment. At least I had my reachable battery back then to power it. I was probably the only kid in my town that walked around playing street fighter two for the genesis back then.
Back then, rechargeable batteries were quite expensive, so it wasn't really feasible. The AC adapter also didn't have a built-in transformer, so when I was visiting relatives in China at one point and plugged it into the 220V outlet, it instantly fried the adaptor, and since China's market hadn't started to sell the unit I couldn't get a replacement adapter until after going back to the west.
3:30 "...we went from the masters system ability to *display* 64 colors to the game gears 4096 colors!"
Both of these numbers are wrong. The Sega MS had a *palette* of 64 colors and could *display* 31 colors while the Game Gear had a *palette* of 4096 colors but could only *display* 32 colors. So the onscreen comparison is Sega MS: 31 colors and Sega GG: 32 colors. Don't get it twisted.
I loved the gamegear in the 90s. Yes, the battery life sucked but even with the ac adapter, mine would overheat and turn itself off anyway, I used to get so mad at it lol. I wonder if anyone else had this problem, maybe it was just mine.
I don't recall ever having problems with overheating hardware when connected to an outlet with the AC with mine.
I knew a guy who had the TV TUNER. Back on one of the army bases during a 24 hour duty we managed to hook it up to the cable line and watch cable tv through it. I was surprised. I only owned Sonic 2, Master of Darkness, and Shining Force: Sword of Hajya. I bought a carrying case, the screen magnifier, and the AC adapter so I was basically plugged in as the battery use was terrible. I think I would have loved getting the minis. My old Game Gear barely has a display (unusable), and the sound is very muted. It would need a restoration by someone who knows how.
I wanted the GameGear SO BAD when I was a kid! I ended up being a GameBoy kid, and while I LOVED it, a little sliver of the ol' lizard brain kept daydreaming about colored, backlit Sanic 💙
I now have two gamegears, both in great disrepair, but ONE DAY I'll max one of them out with all possible repairs and upgrades! I'll definitely be making a video about it!
Side note, HUGE kudos to you for the quality, and FREQUENCY of your content! It takes me AGES to make a video. You're an inspiration, and I hope to match your skills someday!
I had the Gamegear as a Kid Germany (former east germany), i never saw Gamegear games on sale. So i was stuck with a 4 in 1 and Global Gladiators. This lead to another problem, at that time i had to buy the games on my own and wouldn't get them as birthday or christmas present. But even if i got money, it wasn't enough to buy new games, even if i would've found one. New SMS/Gamegear games where as expensive as AAA titles today. So i solely resorted to buying used games. Since these games wheren't sold locally, i never got them in my area.
This was another thing with the Sega Master System, this was more popular and i could get used games.
But it's fun to mention, that the Gamegear was technically so advanced, that it was even graphically better then the Gameboy Color, that was released 7 years later.
So in a way i would say, the Gamegear was just too far ahead of it's time.
I got a game gear when it came out. I think it was for Christmas. It came with Columns and was the only game I ended up owning. I might have rented games for it, but I can't remember. Sadly I lost the console to a house fire in a couple years or so later. I remember wanting the TV tuner add on. Aside from the game gear I owned an original game boy and psp. Once I got my first pocket pc my gaming habits changed and I never bought another handheld. I still think about the game gear from to time and it's awesome to see this video!
Hi, Lady Decade! I had one of these and LOVED IT. I spent countless hours playing Mortal Kombat II on it.
Portable consoles in general seem to get a lot less attention and love in retrospect, despite often having impressive hardware/software sales at the time!
Not being a Nintendo system probably doesn't help, either. :(
I have two Game Gears on my shelf and play them every so often--still fun. The way it fits in the hand, the simple, yet hard, gameplay...it's just great.
I always felt like the Game Gear was genuinely a much cooler system then the Game Boy. Granted, I never grew up when they were initially at war, however I did have a Game Gear my dad had purchased from a store many years prior & I got to grow up with that until it broke & subsequently was sold around 2018. I never truly got into Pokémon which probably helps in my disinterest in the Game Boy, although I love the Super Mario Land games & love all things Kirby, I don't feel the rest of the library of the Game Boy's holds up well today. Even the Game Boy Color has this issue in my opinion, with failing to deliver solid titles that withstood the test of time, or they DID deliver solid titles however today their worth hundreds of dollars because of their rarity (Metal Gear Solid, Resident Evil Gaiden, Shantae, etc.) Today I now have both a GBC &, as of yesterday, a Game Gear, both in great condition & working order, & I gotta say the Game Gear is more comfortable & easier to use then the GBC.
It could be bias just because I had one growing up, but I really think the library on the Game Gear holds up better then the Game Boy's, & it's features allow it to still feel great to use all these years later. Also, I don't think the battery life itself is what people hate about it, it's the fact your constantly buying batteries that makes people annoyed. The Nintendo Switch holds a similar 3-6 hour life span before it dies, however obviously the Switch uses rechargeable batteries. As long as you find rechargeable batteries online for the Game Gear, you should be good!
I tried to give the Game Gear respect, but the batteries died before I could get the words out.
Well said
my friend had a Game Gear in 1991 and it had a copy of sonic 2 plus a TV adapter and a power cable , it was cool to have a little TV it was great
It was my dream gadget back in 1992. For the first time I had seen a Game Gear up close, I thought it blows Game boy away with LCD color screen! However, being a broke elementary kid, my years of saving up my school allowance is not enough to afford it.
I never had one, but I remember being in church one day as a little kid, this teenager in front of me opened up this briefcase and there was a gameboy, gamegear, walkman, and some other stuff. He played Sonic on the Gamegear the entire time and I had a blast watching it. Really my only memory of the thing lol.
I am old enough to remember when the SEGA Game Gear was released. My Dad had surprised me with one Christmas morning of 1991. Sonic the Hedgehog 2 was the pack-in game, so I definitely burned through countless AA batteries for those few hours of Sonic and Tails.
At 7:10, you mention the need for an AC adapter, or car plug to keep our gaming on the go. Well, Ms. Decade, do you recall the officially licensed, SEGA Game Gear Battery pack (Model #2105)? It was (is) a rechargeable pack that provided an alternative to spending a fortune on AA batteries by having something which can be charged and reused. It was designed to clip onto a user's belt.
As an interesting tidbit of information, the Game Gear is a 9V console just like the Genesis, and the Game Gear's battery pack uses the same type of DC plug as the Genesis. You were able to connect the battery pack to the Genesis and make it "portable" as well. I used a Sony "Watchman" from Radio Shack as a screen. How nerdy was that?
I had one of the blue ones when I was a kid, I think it came with Lion King. The only other game I remember playing on GG was NBA Jam, which I did love. The one thing I remember not liking about Game Gear was its size, as a kid the Game Boy just felt better in my hands. I also could never have put in the kind of hours like I did on Pokemon Blue version with the Game Gear's battery life
The Sega Game Gear was my first handheld system. My dad had it laying around, and I found it. Cool Spot was one of the games I played.
I grew up with the game gear. Never had a crazy assortment of games for it, but we has Sonic 2, either Sonic Chaos or Triple Trouble, I don't remember which, Aladdin, and I want to say we had the Castle of Illusion port, but I could just be remembering the genesis version.
It may drain batteries like an ice cube in the desert, but the quality is undeniable.
I got one for christmas back in... I don't know, probably 1994. I remember I thought it was so cool that I could play something like a Master System while in the toilet. That was amazing to me back then.
it was my first foray into the dedicated gaming world. even with a huge batterypack that also allowed for better grip, the battery still didnt last.
My fondest memory of the Game Gear was "playing" Pokemon Yellow on it.
Hear me out - using the official Game Gear TV Tuner, it was possible to connect a console of you had the right cables.
By using it as a screen for an N64, Pokemon Yellow could be played via Pokemon Stadium's GB Tower.
The poor thing died of leaky capacitors many years later.
Cost a fortune and essentially DRANK batteries. I knew one person who had one as a kid, and they were a late 20’s man. Everyone had a game boy, they were cheap and the batteries lasted a lot longer.
My gut feel is that the main issue with the Game Gear is purely that not many had it. I think anecdotally battery life was poor but I don't know how much truth there was in this.
But I remember my friend had one and I was totally blown away and spent his entire birthday party tucked in the corner of a room playing Sonic on it.
Glad to see you cover this wee classic. Definitely deserves more respect than it gets.
u could over ride the poor battery life with a batterry pack i would get 9 hours on a single charge.
"I think anecdotally battery life was poor but I don't know how much truth there was in this." as a GG owner in my youth, it was 100% true. The batteries would get a few hours max. That, and the poor screen quality (visibility) and resolution is what made me prefer my trusty old Game Boy despite it being monochrome and non-backlit.
Battery life was terrible.
not if you had a battery pack I could enjoy 9 hours and night time play which was a luxary then. @@skaldlouiscyphre2453
I had one of them, use to lay under the covers at night and watch tv on it with the television adapter lol😂 loved it
Fascinating, I had no idea about that early history of Sega consoles. Your videos are always informative!
Had one growing up, it absolutely ate up batteries. I usually played it with a power supply, which kind of defeats the point of it being portable. Had some quality puzzlers on it. Klax and Woody Pop being firm favourites of mine
I loved mine - fave games were Dragon Bruce Lee, and it ran Master System games so i had golden axe, desert strike, paperboy and i had the TV tuner for it.
Excellent video. Great tribute to the Sega Game Gear. I borrowed one from my best friend back in 1992 and played Shinobi among other games. I was very impressed with the graphics. They looked better than the 8-bit graphics the NES or Game Boy had. So I incorrectly assumed the Game Gear was a 16-bit system. But that just shows how impressive it was. It was the PSP of its day., in my opinion.
I think piracy was a bit of an issue for both, it was easy to get a hold of multicarts back in the day which would also be shared around. This was in scandinavia
the game gear was my favorite handle back in the day I played it a lot. Now the steam deck reminds me of my old game gear and I love it just as much.
Gameboy was especially disappointing because they didn’t re-release game gear with a backlit, colored display till the Gameboy SP given the Game Gear’s superior presentation.
My mother enjoyed playing Columns.
My uncles worked in transit Night Shifts and they both had Game Gear with the TV Tuner.
Game Gear was ahead of its time.
Very versatile and appealing to all ages.
I had a game gear briefly when they became more affordable and the that thing went through batteries a mile a minute. Six brand new ones lasted less than five minutes. If it wasn't for the mains adapter it'd be unplayable.
Great video! I got one for Christmas as a kid, loved it but always played it plugged in.
As a Sega kid in the 90s I love the choices of background music in this video, although, it would remiss if I didn't point out that the Game Gear port of Sonic, as seen in the Mega Collection Plus on PS2, Xbox and PC, there are some differences, for example, on Jungle Zone Act 2, as you ascend the waterfall, on the Master System, the screen locks behind you, meaning that any attempt to descend would be instant death! This was not so on the Game Gear version and why it is as such in aforementioned collections! And if you didn't already know that, then, well, there you go, you learn something new every day! The Master System Sonic was the first game I ever played and I distinctly remember that being a pain for 7 year old me and then being shocked when I saw gameplay of the Game Gear version at school on one of those "bring your toys in days" near the end of term! You know the ones!
I remember at school they had "bring in a toy day". Some kids brought in their action men, barbies, or 'cool' gadgets. A good few people brought in their game boys but nobody but me brought in a Game Gear. I remember the furore and shock about how cool it looked; there was no getting away that its coloured, back-lit, larger screen was lightyears ahead of the Game Boy. Young kids were acting like it was some sort of alchemical magic.
Clearly somewhere along the line Sega dropped the ball on marketing this thing to parents or kids, as no one had heard of it.
Is the thumbnail referring to the handheld or yourself?
Still have my Game Gear. Unfortunately it doesn’t really work right anymore probably due to sitting for so long. I remember buying the tv tuner back then as it went on clearance. Couldn’t get it to tune in so I returned it for a different one and same problem. Just brought it back and got my money back. But I loved the game gear.
Love my game gear,and always spoke of what it could do in 1990 which nobody else could do until decades later
I owned both the game boy and the game gear when they were first released. Game gear was one of the first video game systems I had where my mother actually enjoyed playing it. Her favorite game was COLUMNS, and between the backlit screen and the bright, colorful graphics. She had a lot of fun with it. That fun continued to this day where she plays games like candy crush.
The game gear was a very good system and ahead of its time but its main problem was it’s battery power. It would go through AAA batteries like shit through a goose. If they could have figured out a way to introduce nickel cadmium battery packs during its launch rather than later on in its life, they might have done better, but if they had access to today’s lithium ion battery technology, the game gear would have been a menace to Nintendo.
In fact: Sega probably could have been the first company to pull off a system with as much success as the Nintendo switch if they had played their cards right.
Sega was always interested in making portable video game systems like the Sega Nomad even when it didn’t make much sense to be able to play on a small screen and plug into a larger television. Sega was always trying to figure out ways to milk their adapters. You could play Sega master system games on game gear, for example.
Because it got 3 hours of gaming for 6 AA batteries. Do you know how expensive that was in the mid-90's?
I owned one, but never played it outside my home.
Sega Game Gear (I adore it) a rechargeable (massive) battery pack was made for it, which I used provided a cost effective way to play (for about 2 hrs) but for me this was perfect as my attention span wouldn't allow for me to play much longer than an hour anyways. Just a couple cents. great video, m'lady
I had a gamegear in the late 90's... It ate batteries like hell and I had a TV tuner for it... It was nice for the time I must admit.
My younger brother had a Game Gear, it became mine when he lost interest in it. I still occasionally plug it into the wall to play some Sonic Drift 2.
I love the Master System but I've never even attempted collecting for the Game Gear. As you said, there are better options today, rather than using the original hardware, which has its issues (especially with capacitors). I agree it has an awesome library, and as a Shinobi fan I really want to play the two GG Shinobi.
The games are so cheap, cheaper than Master System games even.
Not many people have working GGs anymore so the games are being mass off loaded.
And these Analog Pockets / Retrons are niche after market consoles which require an adapter to make the GG games play. Very few people will or have bought into that.
Net result... if you have a working GG or aftermarket console+GG adapter for it now is a great time to buy these games up cheap at like $1-$2 a go for many titles on the system.
if only people knew that recapping a game gear cost only a few dollars hehe
As a kid in the early 90s, my mom & I would check the Goodwill every weekday and we found a Game Gear for cheap. My parents had already bought me a Genesis from a garage sale with the mickey mouse game from this video & two others. Which was a steal because the Genesis had just came out in NA at the time. So then also finding a cheap Game Gear, was really cool as a little kid getting into video games because we wouldn't have had the money, otherwise.
Anyone who had one knew about the battery life, so you would play in short incraments. I seem to remember a light that would warn you when the batteries were low, as well. Something that I didn't see covered in this video, but maybe its just because of differences in video game media in NA, from elsewhere, was the Game Gear _really_ got hammered with negative reviews related to its "bulky" size. The Gameboy was viewed as something you could realistically bring with you out into the world, whereas the Game Gear's bulk, along with the poor battery life, was argued to be a death sentence for the innovative handheld.
I had a game gear and the wall adapter. The games were mostly lacking but I did have some real gems. I'm looking to buy one now but they are hard to find working.
I had a game gear back in the 90’s. I loved it. Had the TV Jawn too. I bought it over the Gameboy. But eventually had to get a Gamboy for obvious reasons .
This is my favorite handheld and wish it got more love, but the batteries were the biggest reason it failed I believe. I spent hours playing under my parents computer desk playing Streets of Rage, Sonic the Hedgehog and Home Alone with the power adapter plugged in 😂 we would only use batteries when going on car rides and once we got to our family members house out came the batteries and in the ac adapter.
i bought it instead of an a megadrive in a airportshop with sonic and tv tunner and it was awesome the problem was the energy consumption
While I'd argue the Sony PSP vs the Nintendo DS was a bigger handheld battle than the Sega Game Gear versus Nintendo Game Boy, you could also argue that the performance gap was larger between the GG and GB vs the PSP and DS to the point that the following respective generation the Game Gear could outperform the Game Boy Color whereas the PSP was about on par with the 3DS. Sure the GG ate batteries like I eat french fries, (I remember my cousin having the rechargeable battery pack and even then opting to keep it plugged in unless he went outside), but in the few cases where you had games on both handhelds, the GG version would often be superior.
I got a Game Gear for Christmas in 92, about a year before I had a Genesis. Armed with Sonic 1&2, Mortal Kombat, Shinobi, Streets of Rage and a few more carts, along with power adapters because F using batteries in there 😂, that thing was a road trip warrior for me. I would have collected more carts for it when I was still collecting, but by that time it was hard to find original, unmodified, hardware at a decent price and no one was making a good 3rd party option until Retron put out there Retron5 adapter. Alas, I put on my special hat, eye patch and shoulder parrot and grabbed the best games from the digital ocean of things. I definitely would recommend checking out some of the GG games out there if you get a chance. Show that poor system some love!
Love the game gear, had one back in the day and used outdoor for short periods of course because of battery duration. There is a non official fm radio tuner.
I loved mine. Even had the TV adapter! It was AWESOME!