Games That Push The Limits of the Sega Game Gear
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 29 ก.ย. 2024
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Sega's Game Gear the battery munching 90's classic
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I'm surprised Road Rash didn't get an inclusion this episode!
@@Larry you ok Larry? Haven’t heard anything out of you in a while.
I did that in my Master System Video a while ago so I didn't want to cover it again.
I'm surprised (that) "BetterHelp" *_did_* get an inclusion in this episode... Do you not understand Sharopolis that they can make and have made some peoples' mental health *_worse_*?
yeah where's the 5 hour long metroidvania with password saving and about 20 power-ups with my boy tails ?
@@Sharopolis respond to Larry but ignore subscribers concerns about the sponsor. I'm thinking greedy rather than naive. Way to ruin the hard work you put in building this once great channel.. Sad now
I really surprised that you don't include so many games. For example Megami Tensei Gaiden: Last Bible Special. This game has one of the coolest and mind-blowing 3D Dungeon Engine for 8-bit system! Look almost good to be 16-bit!
Dodgy Sponsorships That Push The Limits of Subscriber
/ laughs in Sponsorblock
Sonic 2 was shit on the Game Gear.
There's an early boss fight that's obscenely difficult purely because of the lazy screen crunch. Why even bring it up in a world where Chaos and Triple Trouble exist?
But all was forgiven with the Aleste series and Gunstar coverage.
I agree, first Sonic game to give me the shits. I remember when I finally played the master system version. Zooming out fixed it 100% and it’s an amazing game totally broken on game gear. Chaos, the original sonic game and triple trouble didn’t have this issue and are totally fun.
This is why I suspect it was made for Master System first then ported, despite claims to the comtrary. Sonic 1 feels like it has a lot of wasted space in comparison on the Master System, making that one feel Game Gear original.
@@Idelacio It's not as extreme a difference, though, because the first game had smaller sprites on the Game Gear. Like it was properly developed to make the best of both machines' displays. Also the colours seem almost identical between the two versions, which makes me wonder if it was at least a co-development effort, if not originally on the SMS (whose architecture is after all a lot older and was an established machine) but quickly switched to a two-pronged process when the GG was announced and Sega was clearly in need of a pack-in with an identifiable mascot, perhaps one that had already recently appeared on the Megadrive...
(I wonder how many assets were backported from there / digitally resized instead of being redrawn, rather than being made all-new for the 8-bits? Probably needed some adjustment for aspect ratio if nothing else, but the SMS itself has a lower resolution in both dimensions vs the MD, besides the limits on number of sprites and tiles)
Basically, Sonic 1 on the GG feels almost like you're playing the SMS game through an adaptor (it'd be interesting to put that side-by-side with the real thing in fact), there's just a few tells in terms of colour gradient smoothness, consistency of the sprites when moving position on screen, and the stereo soundtrack with headphones on. Sonic 2 is more like playing the SMS game on a TV which you've masked off 3/8ths of the width and 1/4 of the height of for some mad reason. Kind of feels like it'd actually be a better game if you made up a custom cart which had the SMS ROM plus whatever minimal circuitry was in the MasterGear adaptor... (again, has anyone tried playing the SMS version on GG through the adaptor itself?)
Like, I totally agree with the impression that it's an extremely lazy port where all they did was adjust the screen coordinates. Not even sure it uses the GG palette or audio panning at all. The origins of the first game are open to question but it was definitely adapted to the GG and/or SMS much more carefully regardless. Thankfully the later games, especially the GG-only ones, split the difference somewhat in terms of having a larger Sonic sprite but accounting for the limited screen rez.
Sonic 1 on Game Gear was a lot better, they actually changed Sonic's sprite to fit the smaller screen, along with other changes to make it more balance on Game Gear, Sonic Chaos also had some cool parallax scrolling in Aqua Planet Zone.
@@tahrey FYI, there is no circuitry in the Master Gear Converter. It really is just a passive form factor adapter, sending the cartridge pins to the right place in the machine. You could basically achieve the exact same results by running a bunch of wires from the cartridge to the GG slot.
I'm surprised Aladdin isn't on this list, it had the craziest effect with the 3D buildings as you run by! Same way as Toy Story on the 16 bit consoled had the 3D furniture in the first level
Maybe that was covered in the Master System video? I'm sure I remember at least one of that run of Disney games showing up. These all seem to be more GG exclusives, but for the odd inclusion of Sonic 2.
Interesting as always! Man, an M2 port of The Cliffhanger: Edward Randy to Game Gear woulda really been something.
oof Better Help sponsorship in 2024
Whats better help?
@@AndroidFerretthey claim to provide therapy services but have been fined for leaking patient data to outside sources, providing unqualified therapists and providing substandard services. It’s a huge red flag when a video is sponsored by them, and I’ve already unsubbed from several channels for supporting them.
This is why you cannot take a youtuber seriously about anything. They would sell their children's souls for clicks and money.
This makes me sad, I thought Sharopolis would at least check the sponsor before shilling for them.
@@AcornElectron it frustrates me because I’d expect a little due diligence around this. And I’d expect if they were going to sign with an agency to provide contracts like some others claim there would be a reputation clause and a rundown of sponsors involved prior to signing any contract.
That being said if you buy something you saw on a sponsored ad you’re kind of already asking to be ripped off there’s a reason sponsorblock exists and TH-cam are currently trialling similar tech too.
ummmm dude? Have you done any research on better help? If you(hopefully) haven't, I urge you to do so pronto.
Not sure if this is the case here, but some TH-camrs sign up for contracts with sponsorship agencies. Once you're locked into a contract, then you either have to promote anything they tell you to, or forfeit your entire subscription fee and revenues for the whole contract period.
@@gwishart if this is the case then that’s f***** up. He’s probably raging as we comment
@@gwishart those agencies usually tell you who you’re working with before signing the contract and have reputation protection clauses, a tiny bit of due diligence before contracting would’ve shown all that.
@@gwishart That sounds maybe like the most reasonable possibility, where you just have to resolve to grit your teeth and plough through it and hope your audience is savvy enough to basically ignore the spot (almost certainly the case with all the Apex Battle Legends and similar clearly-exploitative gatcha game promos out there) and the next one they give you is less toxic. Though, really, most things that have to aggressively advertise make me wonder why they need to when there's usually a rival that does just fine by word of mouth...
The optimistic take I'm holding out for is that Shar's personal endorsement of having used them is actually genuine and not part of the script, which would make it a little more excusable on the basis of having had a positive experience with the service, so not feeling like there's a need to go diving for dirt on them, and having missed the furore over BH (which as far as my own YT timeline is concerned was kinda blink-and-you'll-miss-it, I saw maybe a couple of thumbs about it and by the time I had chance to pay attention they'd already vanished, and it was completely absent through other social/online or trad media channels).
Edit: Also I just noticed he's actually addressed the issue (perhaps after the fact) in the video description, including a link to another vid discussing it... that's also not guaranteed to be unbiased at all but may be worth a look. Probably few people have seen that because no bugger ever checks the description, even I didn't actually look until just now because this is one of those videos which is fairly self explanatory and doesn't really need any meta text, and that goes double if it's been edited in after posting.
@@tahreyjust saw that, the problem is the thing he linked has some issues.
Better help refused to admit wrongdoing when it agreed to pay the fine it received, which is a huge red flag.
And it still does not have proper vetting processes, and people are still reporting harm.
The entire post reads like something written by BetterHelps lawyers, and I’d treat it with a grain of salt.
A lot of the argument treats it like it’s the only platform out there, which it isn’t, and gives a real “trust me bro” attitude to the whole thing, it reads like they want the money more than they care about the ethics of the situation.
The fact that they’ve shared this to the video description as if it’s a magic Band-Aid has just locked in my decision to unsub and go.
Not Better Help! Please tell me you just haven’t done due diligence this time.
Deleting comments you don't like now?
For shame
I hope the bag was worth it¬_¬
The NES can have overlapping parallax scrolling...but it's very messy, and you'd need a mapper that can send IRQs mid scanline, and even then you have the issue of the timing potentially varying by at least 3 pixels (1 pixel per CPU cycle) as well as graphical artifacts if you don't use the right mirror address of certain PPU registers.
You really don't want overlapping parallax scrolling by doing scrolling mid-scanline. You can get much better results more cheaply by using sprites to fake multiple layers.
@@Dwedit This is not the PC Engine that you can get away with it. You can only have 8 sprites per line and you can't multiplex them mid scanline like on the Amiga.
The sprites can still be used to cover up the 3n glitchy pixels when mid scanline IRQ is used. You can also pretty much forget vertical scrolling, as even per scanline vertical scrolling on the NES is already quite hacky as you can only officially scroll vertically per frame.
Timed IRQ's woldn't be a problem computation time wise, but more timing wise and potentially also bring out some hardware PPU bugs.
I know about all the sprite limitations, but if you design your parallax layers so there are thin vertical elements sticking up into the next layer, that wouldn't take up too many sprites.
Interrupts have a large variation of when they actually trigger, because they start when the current instruction finishes. Because it could be interrupting any instruction, there's a wide range of CPU cycles that could elapse between the interrupt triggering and the code going to the handler. It would take a whole lot of planning to ensure that the interrupts happen at very precise times and on very precise gaps between instructions, where you would know exactly which cycle it will happen at.
@@Dwedit That's literally what I mentioned. There's a timing variation with the interrupts in the order of 3 pixels per cycle. That can be covered with sprites.
There are many mappers with CPU and I believe PPU cycle counting.
For the love of god pls dont sponsor better help
taking that sponsorship is selling out vulnerable members of your audience to a service made to exploit them. theres no excuse for that.
BetterHelp? More like *WorseHelp*
No Ristar or Dynamite Headdy? I'm calling the police.
Neat video but oooooohhhh BetterHelp 😬😬oooooohhhh😬😬😬
5:33 not really! you're usually pretty spot on with the tech stuff but this warrants a proper correction - while the game boy and game gear did both have 3 channels for tones and a noise channel, the game gear features a stereo variant of the master system's SN76489 chip, which can only output square waves (the lowest pitch available corresponding to about A2 on a piano) and white noise (with some quirks - the full range of noise is only available when one of the square wave channels is disabled, but using the periodic cycle mode turns the noise channel into a passably tonal thin pulse wave). the game boy on the other hand uses a custom stereo sound chip designed by hip tanaka which offers considerably more options out of the box. 2 of its tone channels are used to output pulse waves in 3 different widths, much like the NES, but the third tone channel is a 4-bit wavetable that can read and play back any sort of repeating waveform or sample the composer feels like using. the game boy's noise channel also has a wider set of textures available for *noise* but very limited tonal capability. quite different overall!
It was amazing for its time, way better looking then the gameboy games!
I wish I had this as a kid. I saw another kid at school had one and I could barely understand what I was looking at, but I knew it was cool, and much more powerful compared to my Gameboy.
[24:13] What's also interesting about the walker mech in _Gunstar Heroes_ is that this mech didn't exist in the Mega Drive original.
I grew up with the master system and I remember when I saw the game gear I wanted it so bad plus the tv adapter was so cool back then I asked my parents to get me one but never got one but they did make up for it by three master system games Instead of just one which I was more than happy with as I kind of knew we weren’t rich.
Wow M2 I agree GG Aleste 3 is amazing incredible blew me away i would love this M2 team to make a new mega drive game if they did anything I would back it or buy it straight away 👍 great video
The problem with advertisers in a ancap marketplace is that the ones that pay the most are scams.
I’ve noticed a lot of UK TH-camrs shilling BH lately. Maybe this is an attempt to pivot for them. In any case - drop them, dude; it’s a bad look.
Road Rash for sure, though I guess you covered it on SMS
better help my ass..
How can you possibly be endorsing better health? Does your audience mean ANYTHING to you?
You watch adverts? what's wrong with you?
@@JohnnyWednesday seriously go look them up. They're an awful company and people who get sponsored by them are either greedy or naive.
Up to the ad writing this but I have a few vintage multicarts for GG and they have all the sms mark 3 my card games on it and they work great. Some stuff is easier than others I guess to do it.
They're very small ROMs, so it makes sense that you could easily pack the entirely library in there. It might not even consume an entire megabyte, certainly wouldn't think more than 2 to 4MB.
I had a feeling you would bring up GG Aleste 3. I just watched a retrospective about Compile's shooters the other day.
86 the better help sponsorship
if you're really sponsoring better help then you need to get better help as in you need to not trust that terrible and scummy company
Having just got another Game Gear after nearly a ten year hiatus since my last one, this will be a good refresher.
I miss my Master System player
Better Help? Please don't make me unsuscribe...
Why what is wrong? Therapy is beneficial.
@@virtuafighter3 Therapy can indeed be beneficial, however... en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BetterHelp#Criticism
Before this I didn't know the Game Gear VDP has the same CRAM dot bug that the Mega Drive VDP does. Updating Color RAM while the screen is drawing causes anomalous screen output. No doubt a side effect of CRAM using sngle ported Memory in both systems.
Please man, no betterhelp. I like your channel but will have to unsub if I see it again.
I think he'd be happy not to have a 'fan' that threatens him and tries to manipulate him.
Or just skip it like the rest of us. He’s not a big TH-camr that gets thousands per video.
Dude, you literally forgot to mention the Madou Monogatari games on the Game Gear, also no, it wouldn't matter if you used gameplay of the fan-translation.
I realise taking sponsorships is an integral part of the TH-cam experience these days but you really need to do your research before you choose to accept a sponsorship from a company because promoting Better Help is not a good look. As soon as I saw it I stopped watching the video and will I not watch any video which chooses to promote it.
Well done. Same. They used (don't know if anymore; thing was kind of made public by Philly D several years ago) that they were providing services without properly trained workers; in more recent years, it's been known they sell their customers' data. An absolutely shady and disgusting company. I'd rather take money from Raid Shadow Legends than from Betterhelp.
Shar deserves the extra money, but you're right, he should be careful. Even that MKBD guy or whatever his name is is risking his whole reputation on things like that $50 wallpaper app. I hope he does take more paid things to get money for these videos. This niche genre of videos, looking at impressive and unique retro games, isn't going to turn him into the next Scott the Woz. Well probably not. So he should get the extra money where he can get it. I want to see many, many more videos along these lines for the rest of my life...
Getting it by potentially exploiting people with mental health issues by recommending Better Health isn’t a good look. Maybe stick to squarespace or less lucrative but also less harmful sponsorship?
@@AcornElectron I’ll forgive him this one. It must be exciting to get offered your first paid promotion, in the moment I’d feel crazy for turning the offer down. This is part of what he’s been working towards for years, to make a living off videos we love watching.
@@keaton718 I disagree. He already does patreon and loads the video up with ads from youtube. All to play a game and talk about it.
Like ALL youtubers, he would sell his children's immortal soul for a few bucks.
The zoom in out virtua fighter on gg is amazing like aof neo geo
"The soundchips these both have are even closer, pretty much the same capabilities"
Umm, yeah no, not even close lol
3 voices + Noise in pannable stereo is where the similarities begin and end, but there's a *Pretty Major* gulf in how said voices and noise actually work...
The gameboy also has a wavetable channel.
Eh, at a bare conceptual level they're at least related, and if you use a GB chip without any finesse it sounds just as basic and rubbish as the same approach would with the GG. They're both four channel devices with one of them being dedicated to noise. The GB squarewaves are more flexible, with duty cycle etc, and there's more automation available, but there's only two of them and the latter feature is more about reducing CPU load than improving what the sounds coming out of it are like. The PCM channel is pretty handy, but it's low quality with limited sample length, and if you want to play a three-note chord you either need to dedicate memory to storing a sample of that which will sound a touch scratchy on playback, or just play a squarewave sample through it matching the settings of the wave channels themselves.
Besides the finer points of how the noise channels differ, I kinda feel like anything you can make with the GB chip you could also do with the GG, just with a whole lot more CPU involvement to do manual sweeps / enveloping (the latter being the SN7's big failing vs the AY3, besides the limited white noise frequencies), and to do volume-banging sample playback on at least one, or maybe all three channels (which would let you emulate the duty cycle waves, at probably a relatively low effective sample rate).
It's maybe more important that the GB copied the NES in having an input line from the cartridge, so you could mix in the output of a secondary chip on the cartridge, even if only in mono (stereo not really being that useful a thing on either system if you weren't using headphones anyway). I think the GG also offered that but it was only enabled with the TV tuner add-on, so it could pipe the TV sound directly to the speaker amp.
Bit of a shame. IDK if many GB carts bothered to use that feature anyway (there's at least one or two? One of the versions of Nanoloop did that I think, though ironically just with an AY3?), but it would have been pretty cool if some GG carts could have made a radical improvement to the not-quite-as-good internal system by including the OPLL FM chip from the Japanese SMS, or just a second SN7 for extra channels, or a basic sample player, voice synth, etc. Would have put the cost up slightly, but maybe not by as much as you'd think for a really basic and mass produced IC whose main selling point is being cheap. Alternatively the option of a Game Genie style passthru adaptor (though, nowhere near as big) that had an OPLL and maybe single ADPCM channel in it that multiple compatible games (especially SMS conversions) could make use of...
But, oh well, getting into pipe dreams and ideas for homebrew modification projects there.
I thought the Sega Master System only outputs mono sound? In which case the similarities end before then lol
@@whatever999ization the master system is mono, yes, but the game gear has (very basic) stereo output. Can't recall the specifics but if the original chip outputs like the AY3 does (separate analogue line for each pulse channel plus the noise optionally mixed in on a per channel basis), or with four discrete lines (separate noise), then it's just a switch matrix that sends each of those to the left, right, or both channels. Or if the outputs are combined then it's a mildly customised design that has L and R outputs with an internal matrix.
Either way is better than the DIY method of getting it from the AY where you wire channel 1 to the left speaker, channel 3 to the right, and channel 2 to both through sufficient resistance to equalise the volume and attenuate crosstalk (...maybe diodes too seeing as the output is all positive biased rather than true AC?)...
@@tahrey I love your knowledgeable reply but I was replying to @Michirin9801 who said that stereo is a similarity both systems begin and end with. This isn't the case. With the SMS being mono, stereo is not a similarity the SMS shares with the GG!
GG with the sponsor, unsubbed
betterhelp bad
Great episode! So much information. incredible!
Funny how you talked about people in the comment section thinking it is important how to properly pronounce things. I really like the way you said that!
Lol, I agree with you
The fact this list started with a game that can do somewhat better on the og GB is very funny to me. Nearly full screen, that's impressive. Poor GameGear ^^
The sound chips are nothing alike. The GG has a really limited sound chip. Gameboy sound capabilities are well beyond it. The Gameboy also has some additional graphic features that the GG doesn't have.. like more sprites per scanline (10 vs 8).
Compared to the vast array of sound chips from the 80s through 90s? they're very close.
I wouldn't say "well beyond", but the particular NES-grade improvements it has over the basic PSG in the GG/SMS (different waveforms and duty cycles, rudimentary PCM) give it that little bit of extra flexibility that allows much more variation in tone and composition. Probably why there's at least three different software options for GB based trackers / music composers / instruments, but none I can think of for the GG. Though that may also be because the GB chip is somewhat unique, and in a device whose physical design works better for sitting on a DJ desk for performance purposes (even if you have to install an aftermarket backlight...), whilst you can get an SN7 in a lot of other machines already, including many with rather better displays and user interfaces.
If only they'd gone out on a limb and put the Japanese SMS FM chip in there. It is itself still kinda rudimentary, but it has a decent range of timbres available and a lot more polyphony, added on to what the SN7 can already do. Plenty examples out there of really amazing tunes that have been written for that combo (it's essentially a "lite" version of the MD).
Still, there were some good composers for the system. Really it seemed like Sega got more musicians who knew how to get the best out of limited hardware than Nintendo did. Until the internet came along and corrected me, I very much assumed the GG had a better soundchip in it than the NES and GB, just from the sounds that came out of each, and that the tables hadn't really turned until the SNES came along to fight back against the MD. Koshiro and his colleagues really made that little electronic doorbell sing its heart out, whilst a lot of Nintendo BGM just sounds... lazy and kinda overly shrill. Which clearly isn't an inherent limitation, but a factor of how it was used, given the also astonishingly good chiptune that's since been created using their 8-bit offerings.
6:26 First, this is terrible and barely qualifies as a game. But second, the gamegear has to move a lot more data than the GB for the same screen because of the higher bit depth. The GB screen requires 2 bits per pixil or 4 colors. The gamegear screen requires 5 bits per pixel to get to 32.
While both screens absolutely sucked, the GG screen was much worse.
[attempts to add a tiny edit to one early sentence about how MIDImaze had a definite kind of Laserquest thrill to it, and another about how the point of the video is pushing of inherent limits, not how incredibly restrictive those limits themselves are]
*TH-cam didn't like that*
OK I guess I'll put it here then
@@tahrey I am not impressed by 3d games on 8 bit systems. They look awful. They play bad. The frame rates are abysmal. Simply getting something to kind of run is not a big achievement.
@@tarstarkusz I think language and the meaning of words may not be your strong suit, but, in any case, maybe videos featuring retro games just aren't for you and you should look at other subject matter?
It's a huge achievement to make this run, and make it run at a vaguely playable speed, on hardware that is engineered pretty much opposite to what such a game requires (because the tile/sprite design greatly reduces how much VRAM the system needs vs having a full bitmap framebuffer, and so makes it cheaper). And ditto any 3D title on any 8-bit machine really.
Just because its aesthetics are not the best (in your opinion...) doesn't diminish that. The colour scheme on GG is poorly chosen, but, even if it was just plain greyscale... that makes it identical to the GB one, and its colour palette is as good as the Gameboy can ever do, for anything. What were you expecting?
As for playing ... have you tried it out yourself? I haven't tried FB itself, but sunk a lot of hours into MIDImaze back in the day, and that was a lot of fun. And without it, multiplayer FPSes may have taken somewhat longer to spread as an idea.
@@tahrey I've been retro gaming since the GG was a current system (buying retro games at flea markets in the mid 90s). My first video game was a dedicated pong machine. My first console was an Atari 2600. Don't lecture me about retrogaming.
No, it's not. They don't PLAY WELL. If you use up all your cpu cycles and RAM getting "3d" stuff to run at all, you lose the gameplay element. I don't like 3d games from any era other than the occasional racing game. I don't own a console newer than the PS2. What use it gets is playing 2d games on it.
So what? It can display more colors than the GB. Was this in dispute or something? Was there sum guy saying otherwise? WOW! He proved whatever already knew.
I wish it hadn't and nobody ever heard of 3d games. Even modern high end 3d games don't have hand drawn art. It's all generated. It has no soul. For me, one of the cool parts of retrogaming is seeing brand new art on extremely limited 16 or 32 color systems like the C64 or NES.
@@tarstarkusz So, we get to the crux of the matter. You just hate 3D games. Fair enough. That's your personal preference, you're entitled to that.
But don't strut around acting like it's absolute truth and that everyone else naturally believes or should believe it. Or that it's anything to do with the actual systems, the games themselves, how well they actually objectively play, or the skill and effort that went into creating them.
It's probably not too hard to realise that you're in the distinct minority here, and world plus dog has been quite enamoured of 3D stuff ever since it was first demonstrated as possible with 3D Monster Maze and similar things, or Star Wars Arcade, Battlezone, the illusion created by Night Driver in the mid 70s arcades, early flight sims, etc. It's a minority that has a right to exist, but, it's a minority.
Yeah, they're rudimentary as heck, but the mind fills in the gaps for most of us. Maybe if you have aphantasia or something it loses all of its charm, idk. I'd have to do some very designer drugs about it to find out. I'm kind of hypophantasic, so I don't really see any false details in what's in front of me, but I can appreciate the symbols and stand-ins for what they are, and the somewhat brutalist geometry, and find a fun playing experience within it, at 5fps and 120x80 pixels or whatever. A good game can transcend flashy graphics and so-on, as demonstrated by all the many Doom conversions, and MIDImaze remains one of those.
At least, it is from where I sit. You don't agree, ok, fine. But in turn don't come shouting at all of us saying it's shit and we're idiots for enjoying it either. I'm not out there knocking people's chessboards over and telling them to stop wasting time on an outdated wargame for pricks that can literally be represented on an 8x8 character grid within the limits of an unexpanded 1K ZX81.
I don’t blame the viewers for blaming this guy about why he include sponsorship on his video cuz tbh these spons are hit and miss
Great video! an idea for the future - how about games that pushed the limits of 3D in software before the rise of 3D accelerators? Unreal's software renderer is a nice example!
Mortal kombat 1 orr 2 look amazing, way better than the MS version, mk3 was awful though.
One game that I wish more people would cover is sylvan tale. That game has an incredible soundtrack
Perhaps not very important, but apparently it isn't pronounced either as Alest or Alesté, but Alesta. Go figure.
Japanese syllable pronunciation maybe? ... perhaps it was supposed to be "Arrester" and something got tangled along the way.
I was wondering if it might have even been Alé-st until you wrote this :D
My favourite handheld of all time.
Aladdin? Sylvan tale?
Sonic blast impressed me graphically...and I had that Shinobi game...so nostalgic.
Me and a friend had a cart of it that we swapped back and forth a few times ... I _think_ it was originally theirs, but not sure. It was just that good, but neither of us could afford buying a second copy of that or the other carts that were exchanged for it... (possibly sometimes two lesser games for one Shinobi, or another of its calibre).
Just as good as any similar Megaman-esque platformer we'd played on "proper" consoles or computers, in fact some parts of it really could have done with being backported.
And yeah the later GG Sonic games really need more love than they tend to get, I think 8-bit Sonic 2 really killed the idea of the series on the platform for a lot of people.
The big issue with the Game Gear(and Atari Lynx) was that battery life was so poor there were a lot of games that could only be beaten by having it plugged in at the wall, which defeated the entire point of a portable.
Random idea: How about checking the various 8-bit versions of International Karate+? I know vaguely how the C64 version, the background has a big blank area in the middle, and the fighters will never leave this area, with player 1 and 2 being made up using 18 sprites(3 sprites wide and 3 sprites tall*2) with the game using the C64's ability to use a NES-style name table for scrolling as a double buffer, using one side of the name table for what's currently being displayed and the other side as a buffer where it draws player 3 onto the background and "scrolls" a full screen per frame to animate the 3rd player. It also uses the remaining 46 per screen sprites to draw various background animations like birds flying past and rippling in the water, with everything carefully placed so that it never exceeds the 8 per line limit and avoids slowdown, which is the C64's reaction to too many sprites, rather than disappearing things, it draws it all but delays the next frame. I imagine the Game Boy Colour version will probably be mostly the same, but would be a quite interesting thing to see.
In reverse order - IK Plus thing, sounds like a great idea, though I think it'd also be contextualising to compare against the 16-bits even if only briefly. I didn't even know there were that many 8-bit versions, only the C64 and some proposed (extant??) remake for the GBC, so it would be pretty interesting.
Battery Life - Kinda disagree. "Portable" doesn't necessarily imply you're playing it out in the wilderness all the time. We got plenty of use out of the 9V adaptor for our Gamegear, whenever we ended up somewhere with it on a trip that we were able and allowed to plug it in, and moreover actually allowed to play it... even taking it to a piano exam and plugging it in whilst waiting for what felt like hours in the hallway outside the examination room, got through the entire course on 4-in-1 Rally then got a high score on Columns and messed about with Tennis for a while before being called in...
The Gameboy had an AC adaptor of its own after all and nobody seems to slate it for having that same dual power ability. Also these were basically the cheapest option out there (besides a Watara Supervision or one of those Grandstand things with the LCD cartridges) for a kid to have their "own" games machine that wouldn't interfere with other people's use of the family's only TV set and/or computer (...which may itself have to use the TV, even for "serious" work), so got a lot of use just within the household. These were the days when even a basic 14" colour TV still cost £150 or more after all, and nobody really wanted to try gaming on a black and white set. Car cigarette lighter adaptors were available for playing whilst taking a trip. Etc, etc. The batteries were as much a backup for the AC power, as the other way around.
Plus its lifespan was only truly bad if you used crap batteries. Zinc-carbons, or really cheap / worn out rechargeables, with which even the GB wouldn't last more than a couple of hours. And any game that could outlast a fresh set of alkalines or high quality rechargeables (the latter of which were of course the preferred choice to avoid going bankrupt) had a save system, especially RPGs and puzzlers (plus the longer platformers), because it's unreasonable to expect someone to sit down for two or three hours every time they want to make some progress beyond the first half of a console game. If you put modern alkaline / lithium single-use or decent NiMH rechargeables in a Gamegear it'll run for ages.
If you were really out of luck on both fronts, you could get an extended battery pack to clip onto it, which... you guessed it... was also a popular accessory for the Gameboy - and particularly essentially if you wanted to play the thing in the dark, given that you then needed a clip-on frontlight as well, many of which tapped off the DC input rather than having their own power. Not having to deal with that nonsense and being able to play Sonic under the bed covers at 8pm during the school Christmas holidays was worth the extra cost, and extra pair of AA's or trailing cable alone.
@@tahrey I was sure there was a GBC version of IK+, pretty sure I seen it in Currys way back. A quick Google seems to say it doesn't exist, but oh well. I don't see what's stopping them from doing it for GBC, after all, it has hardware limits to the C64. I suppose there's the Spectrum and Amstrad versions, but yeah, we know how those're done already, since neither of those systems have any hardware acceleration.
As for the battery thing, I can't disagree more, had a Game Gear myself and it was barely used. If I(or anyone else in the house) wanted to play a game in the house, we'd play on a TV and not have to suffer the tiny screen.
@@fattomandeibu welp, different experiences i guess. Ours got a lot of use. Maybe we had better batteries and went to more places with accessible plugs 🤷
Certainly life was a bit easier with the GB pocket we got later, that ran forever on a couple of AAA's, but it was also far more genuinely portable than either of the older machines so really needed that. Shame the much better screen was still black and white and unlit, but Nintendo seems to like forcing you to not be able to have everything. Even the SP and Micro had to have some dumb incompatibilities...
@@fattomandeibu welp, different experiences i guess. Ours got a lot of use. Maybe we had better batteries and went to more places with accessible plugs 🤷
Certainly life was a bit easier with the GB pocket we got later, that ran forever on a couple of AAA's, but it was also far more genuinely portable than either of the older machines so really needed that. Shame the much better screen was still black and white and unlit, but Nintendo seems to like forcing you to not be able to have everything. Even the SP and Micro had to have some dumb incompatibilities...
@@fattomandeibu as for GBC IK plus (I'm on phone now and it's glitching a bit, good job i accidentally hit post prematurely there as this is now my third attempt writing this), i remember seeing news about it being in development yeeeeeaaaaars ago (maybe a very early kickstarter even?) and being quite pleased to see it, especially as it looked like a really good conversion in the previews, but... Don't know if it was ever completed or published. If not then hopefully the source code and prototype builds are still out there somewhere and maybe a hobbyist can eventually bring it to life.
But if they manage that then I'll be after them to make a GB or GG version of Stunt Car Racer as well, or at least explain the secrets of turning the internal track data (as its Amiga source has been released) into actual 3D coordinates so that the layouts can be properly recreated in newer games...
i get getting that bag but please for the love of god get a better sponsor
At 24:46 you said about the Master System did better in the UK than anywhere else, but what about Brazil? It's still just as popular there and getting support thanks to Tec Toy.
I think you can still buy a MasterSystem in Brazil to this day.
@@mrmerlin6287 You can.
11:50 Actually, I successfully pulled off this effect on the NES, for the homebrew game "Witch N Wiz" in 2022 for animated 8-direcitonal water tiles, it was unfortunately replaced with a totally different effect, in the final game.
Edit: I had apparently used it for animated fire too, I totally forgot about that one...
What? Game Gear and GameBoy sound hardware almost the same? Not really. GameBoy sound was generated by the CPU (or rather, the APU) as far as I know. Meanwhile the Game Gear(/Master System) used some kind of variant of a Texas Instruments sound generator, with only three square channels (having just one square wavelength that I know of, while GameBoy has multiple) and a noise channel. Music on the GameBoy tends to sound better, overall, with a flexible wavetable for one channel.
The Game Gear was the first system I ever purchased with my own money. I bought it second-hand off of my cousin for $40. Sonic 2 was certainly the highlight for me along with James Pond: Robocod, Shinobi 2, and Castle of Illusion Starring Mickey Mouse. Sadly, I didn't show it much appreciation after getting a GBA for Christmas a few years later, but it still gave me some of my fondest gaming memories.
I really wish they could have matched the resolution on these things. The DS should have had at least the same 256x224 resolution as the SNES. (Yeah I keep forgetting their are DUAL screens when I say that but still, one of the screens on a 2004 system should match the common mode of their 1991 system.)
Technically impressive, but god damn I hated Sonic 2 Game Gear. It was so hard for me, I don't think I ever made it past the second world. I don't know if this is confirmed, but I saw somewhere once that the levels were put in the game out of order of how they were originally designed, so it ended up with some of later/harder levels coming at the front of the game, which would help explain my troubles with the game. The small screen size did it no favors either. It could also just be that I sucked at the game 😅
"For some reason a lot of games have GG in the name."
It's the same as GBA games having Advance in the name or NDS games having DS 😅.
I'm disappointed (as, clearly, are many others in here) that "BetterHelp" got an inclusion in this episode... Do you not understand Sharopolis that they can make and have made some peoples' mental health *worse*?
RIP all my AA batteries
Funny thing is, the Gameboy still only got a few hours on cheap batteries of the time, rather than lasting for days. The difference between them was maybe 2:1, almost entirely ascribable to the GG's backlight (probably the rest of its hardware was more efficient than the GB, even).
If you used decent alkalines or high capacity rechargeables with it, you could finish most games without save / password systems. With modern batteries it'll go longer than you can really be bothered to invest in a single play session. And of course ages with an LED backlight conversion, but that's cheating a little, because you can add that to a GB as well and it's only practical because of the better battery tech.
And nobody seems to remember that you could get high-capacity battery pack accessories for both consoles...
@@tahrey The Gameboy lasted weeks, almost a month with the 4 AA batteries (no alkaline). The Gamegear requiered 6 AA alkaline batteries to work, and they lasted about 6 hours of continuos use. If you used normal, non-alkaline batteries with your Gamegear the Gamegear would drain all their souls in less than a second. 😆
@@jsr734 Weeks/month? I don't know what Gameboy you were using that did that. Certainly not the white brick model that my brother now has an example of and maybe lasts a week of on-and-off use with four modern alkalines. Perhaps you weren't really using it as much each day as it felt like you were when you were a kid?
Zinc Carbons are so rubbish for tech applications that you'd be far better off using even cheap rechargeables with a bad charger. Same was true then as it is now. I don't think we ever used anything other than NiCads and occasionally some precious single-use off-brand alkalines as an emergency. Dry cells just weren't worth bothering with other than maybe for remote controls and doorbells.
You absolutely aren't getting a good runtime from your GB on those, a few hours at best. If the GG even started up that'd be kind of impressive.
Though, six hours from a set of alkalines in the 90s was pretty good going for the system, I'll give you that...
I am leaving this channel as a fellow psychologist due to the betterhelp sponsorship
Taking a better help sponsor makes me think less of you tbh.
No hard feelings just don't do it again
it surprise me the Gunstar heroes on Gamegear, man Sega did a great job with that system.
I had the game gear but used it mostly as a master system because the master system games where dirt cheap at the time unlike the game gear games
Just got my old game gear recapped :) looking into getting more games for it
It really should be on Nintendo Switch online?
Betterhelp ad starts at 2:51, and ends at 4:32. No need to thank me.
Awesome video. The gamegear does not get enough attention
A better help sponsorship seriously that makes you seem like a person without any morals
Wot no Fatal Fury 2?
I memba a great golf game.
Should research who you do sponsorships with before you agree to do them. You’re gonna lose subscribers (like me) over this if you stick with better help.
A lower resolution Master System with ghosting screen, that ate batteries like sweet sweet candy, but it was nice.
i hear yo dog
Solitaire push Game Gear to its limits
STOP TAKING BETTER HEALTH SPONSORSHIPS!!!
I'm unsubscribed until you're done with them.
wow.. taking it a bit too personal.
@@ThunderThouin - an attempt at manipulation - and these people think they're better than some crappy company.
In my opinion this has the worst library among the big three,most titles were unambitious or just badly ported sega master system games.
I think the appearance depended heavily on which games you actually tried. There were some utter stinkers (I _still_ want my pocket money back for Tazmania, all these years later, and an apology from the magazine reviewer who gave it a high score), but also moments of brilliance as well. And the reality was that a lot of us just didn't have that many cartridges, because they were expensive, and we had kid attention spans so could replay the same thing many times without being too bored by it. Modern download-based game library systems and emulators that have hundreds of titles in them have perhaps twisted our perceptions a bit.
Me and my brother started out with a Game Gear, then added a GB Pocket to it some years later (I think largely because he wanted to play Pokemon), and ended up with about as many carts for each, and I'd say the overall quality, if you were smart and selective, would be about the same. Maybe more highlights on Nintendo because of their exclusivity contracts and attracting/retaining certain key talents - I can't think of a GG equivalent to Link's Awakening, for example, but then there isn't really a GB equivalent to Sonic either - but not enough to skew the impression one way or another.
Like in the other direction, Micro Machines on the Game Gear is magnificent, and has the genius advantage of allowing two players on one console due to the way the buttons are laid out (it may have one fewer than the GB, but they're better positioned to allow left/right/brake on both sides... they didn't go with left/right/gas for some mad reason). But Worms on the Gameboy is dismally bad and one has to really question who thought it was even a good idea to try.
The GB has a particular advantage in terms of just how ludicrously long a lifespan it had, with new compatible titles being made into the 2000s (probably only the NES and SMS clones can claim a longer run with novel software being made for them), but if you were to compare between during the period both were being produced and sold, it was more closely fought. Certainly I wouldn't write the GG off so blithely.
BTW, "big three"? Are you including the Lynx in that, or something else? Because that didn't really cover itself in glory, though there were again a few good standouts.
You need to look more carefully in its library to get the better games, also it didn´t help that some of the Gamegears best games were never released outside of Japan.
@@jsr734 Strange, the ones we enjoyed just came from the high street shops, or swapping with friends who had done similar. There were pretty crap titles on both systems too, though I guess it was a _little_ harder to get the dubiously valid Nintendo Seal Of Quality than to just dump a barely functional Sega game on the market, so you had a higher chance of being unlucky every time.
The only things I've played in emulators that seem to be japan-specific seem to be particularly text heavy stuff and therefore pretty impenetrable... are there any more accessible examples you can give?
Sonic 2 was a shit game. It was just a slightly cropped shitty game on the GG. Sonic 1 had some charm and looked even better imho. But 2 was BAAAD.
If you go play it on the Master System it's actually quite good, it's the same game but because of the higher resolution you get a bigger field of view and most of the horrible deaths you can't avoid suddenly become avoidable because you can actually see them coming. Good game ruined by a shoddy conversion.
@@fattomandeibu i played it on the master system lol. Never had a GG
@@barryschalkwijk9388 Well, you're entitled to your opinion I guess. I played the GG one first and thought it was pretty bad. Retried out of idle curiosity on the SMS later, as it came in the pile of carts with one I picked up second hand, and... well, it's still kinda mediocre overall, but it's way better for having the larger field of view. Didn't take me like fifteen tries to get past the first boss any more, though it was still tougher than it really should have been.
Don't get why they didn't do the same thing as with the first 8-bit Sonic and scale it down (not sure if it was actually smaller graphics or just using the built-in SMS-mode decimation?). It would have looked perfectly fine for a GG game and actually have been playable. The later GG Sonics at least were designed with the screen resolution in mind even if the sprites weren't made smaller, and did a bit more with the hardware overall too... those may have been a better choice here?
Also it's interesting to consider where the opposite effect happens... like, the GG has the better 8-bit conversion somehow. A particular example of that is Streets of Rage, for me. It's an extremely sparse game on the Master System, like you only get maybe two enemies on screen at once. Maybe it was rushed, maybe they couldn't figure out a way around the sprite limits with the larger characters, or it's _because_ of the larger field of view. The Game Gear version is reasonably packed and frenetic, feels fluid to play and fairly challenging to beat, plus the 2-player link mode is brilliant, having your own character centred all the time in the scrolling sections makes team-up attacks easier somehow. SMS version is ... kinda dull, and way too easy, because you're never really having to pick your targets whilst avoiding other threats, and there's lots of space in which to dodge. And I'm not even sure if 2-player is simultaneous or turn-taking... something's telling me it's the latter, though the former would be even more boring because you'd be able to just split up and pummel one enemy apiece with button mashing over and over, then spam special attacks at the boss to soften them up considerably before comboing them.
@@tahrey I totally agree that the GG exclusive sonics were something i envied as a MS owner :p
A day later, still not pulled it down yet? I’ll assume you’ve missed a lot of this weekends comments up to now and give you the benefit of another 24hrs before I do the unsub.
GG sucks. It has no good games. I traded my GameBoy for a GG and it was a decision I still regret to this day.
How many did you try? It's got loads of great titles. Even the Sonic 1 and 4-in-1 cart pack-ins have a lot of replayability. Certainly Sonic works a lot better with the colour screen than the blurry, ant-sized-sprites Gameboy Mario ever did. What it was kind of lacking was anything like the number of RPGs the GB had (those have rather more static screens a lot of the time after all), though Defenders of Oasis was pretty decent and certainly a unique vibe ... including most of all any humongous world-devouring phenomenon like Pokemon (which is pretty much what sealed the fate of Sega handhelds). I wonder how things would have been if that had been developed for the Gamegear instead? And had therefore been up at or beyond GBC level from day one?
Played ours basically to death... like the characteristic death of the GG, the backlight cutting out (the equivalent of the contrast pot / LCD push-contacts giving up on the GB). Still mean to repair it one day, but, well, emulators exist for scratching that occasional itch.
I understand you. I would have happily exchanged my Gamegear for a Gameboy (the original "brick model") with Zelda Link´s Awakening.
@@jsr734 We had that later on as well... the good games we encountered on the greyscale wonder didn't make us forget the good games we'd already played on the black brick.
Well we all know about zooming in it's called the Super Nintendo😂❤ Better help is a bunch of BS🤣 should be called better payout LOL
Great video!
Y'all are so frail.
I almost fell for it and started to think the Game Gear was kinda manly and cool with some impressive games, but . . .
Unfortunately, a bunch of Sega trolls have convinced me any system and game with a resolution less than 320 pixels wide as standard is simply and objectively terrible, so I can't even see any of these Game Gear games as anything other than terrible because of that self-evident truth. Similarly, I hate the roughly 200 Genesis games that run in 256 mode, the vast majority of PC Engine games that are in that resolution, Symphony of the Night on PlayStation that has a horizontal resolution of 256 pixels, and every single other home console and handheld and arcade in history that is not running in at least 320 pixel wide resolution, including the SNES that I obviously hate most of all. I just have to live with that reality now and simply cannot appreciate the Game Gear due to its inherent design flaw there.
I saw that Game Gear Sonic game and was immediately like, "What is this, a Sonic game for ants!"
Gunstar Heroes on Game Gear--impossible. The video is surely fake. You can't even do this game on SNES. The guys who made Gunstar Heroes for Genesis said the SNES literally could not handle such a game ever, and they know. So it simply cannot be done on Game Gear. Not falling for it.
Also, I dunno, is the Game Gear CPU slower than 7.68 MHz . . .
And that Vice Project Doom on NES, nah, I just can't even take it seriously, because it's on a console with a resolution lower than 320 pixels wide and a CPU that's less than 7.68 MHz. All the "cool" graphical tricks in the world mean nothing, nor the stellar game design or 60fps gameplay or whatever, not if the system isn't displaying the game at 320 pixels wide at least and being done with a CPU running at 7.68 MHz at least too.
Nah, I'm not having it. You ain't pulling the wool over my eyes, good sir. Nope siree ma jiminy bob.
PS. Good video. A wee thumbs up from me.
Show me on the screen where the pixels hurt you.
@@RobotacularRoBob It's just about here . . . I'm pointing with my finger.
@@inceptionalits ok, they can't hurt you. Just calm down, take a deep breath, and step away from the screen. You're going to be alright.
@@JaredConnell Breathing in slowly . . .
I don’t get why Japanese consoles like 256px so much. Sprites need more range to fly in and out of the screen. So you overflow anyway. But the mobile LCDs stay safe in 8bit land. Why was it so difficult to produce 320x200px LCDs for years? Passive matrix? With color the subpixels sit next to each other. The top and bottom half of the screen could have their own lines. Multiplexing over 100 lines should still give good contrast?
Why do so many of you know what Better Help is? I certainly do not.
It’s genuinely WILD to see a TH-camr shilling betterhelp in 2024. Are you trying to exploit your subscribers for money or have you just been living under a rock?
Depends if his personal endorsement of having used them is genuine or not, really. Maybe if you've used them and had a good experience, and somehow missed the news or were prepared to believe they've atoned and changed, it could be understandable.
Still, if they haven't, then it is a little problematic, because seeing that endorsement did make me wonder "huh, maybe they're actually OK again now?" and briefly consider looking at their rates, as I've kinda been in need of an affordable and accessable therapeutic option for some time now, and nearly gave them a try before... just as the scandal hit and put me off. And I'm not even normally that swayed by advertising.
I couldn't care less what sponsorships you take, im probably not going to watch them let alone buy anything from them anyways so go ahead and get paid my man. Besides, newrly everyone online knows about better help by now so its not like anyone watching this video is going to use them lol
Still not a good look for a community supported channel. Comments like this don’t help the people the sponsor hurts. Think before you post your next paragraph about not caring.
W.a.n.k.e.r
I don't think TH-cam censors your comments anymore lol