Game Gear 1990 (1 of 3): Columns / Pengo / Super Monaco GP | Game Boy Works Gaiden #08
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- Опубликовано: 8 сен 2024
- As 1990 winds down for Game Boy Works, it's only proper to explore the major competitor that entered the Japanese market that fall: Sega's Game Gear. Where Atari's Lynx was too poorly supported and too region-specific to pose a serious threat to Nintendo's handheld dominance, Game Gear arrived just as Sega began its meteoric 16-bit ascent in the west. And this trio of Japanese launch titles-a set of arcade conversions running the gamut in terms of original vintage and play styles-demonstrates a canny understanding of what made the handheld gaming market tick. It's a strong debut showing for Sega as they positioned themselves to attack Nintendo's grip on the games industry on two fronts at once.
Special thanks to Stone Age Gamer for helping to make this series possible with their EverDrive-GG X7: stoneagegamer....
Video Works is funded via Patreon ( / gamespite ) - support the show and get access to every episode up to two weeks in advance of its RUclips debut! And be sure to check out the Retronauts podcast (www.retronauts.com), where I (and many others!) tackle a much wider array of classic gaming topics each week.
I had only two games for the Game Gear: Columns and Monaco GP. Wow. I adore Columns' songs.
the game gear columns 1 soundtrack is so soulful
Once again Jeremy, 0 fat in this episode. I am not familiar with most GG titles, none of my friends or school mates had a Gamegear. This is terribly informative as I was gameboy kid. PS I love Columns on the Genesis.
Columns also got enough love at Sega to be included in their Nintendo Switch iteration of Sega Ages, which seems to have come to an end (at least for now). The Genesis/Mega Drive version was even included as a bonus in Sega Ages Columns II release.
Thanks so much for covering the game gear. I spent two years convincing my parents to buy me one after I already had a game boy.
These have become a highlight of my work week. Thank you
Game Gear should have included the power supply as a pack-in, instead of a game.
I would agree, except SEGA would have sold significantly fewer rechargeable battery packs that way. I distinctly remember my parents taking me to Toys'R'Us to get an AC adapter for my Game Gear to stop the crazy battery consumption and seeing the AC adapter alone priced at $40 and the rechargeable battery which includes the exact same AC adapter for $50. Needless to say, we paid the extra $10.
Thrilled about this series. Much like the Game Boy I feel like the Game Gear has some gems that people don't think about much and there are lots of cheap games to pickup. I look forward to hearing about more titles that I might want to grab for my Analogue Pocket.
Seeing Pengo was freaky to me. I remember a neighbour had a copy on it for the Game Gear, but I was so baffled at it because 6-year old me didn't know what a Game Gear was; to me it was like looking at a lost but rare treasure. So whenever I think of Pengo I think of that strange mystery of learning about Sega's history, and seeing that gameplay again hit me with a wave of confusing nostalgia.
Anecdotes aside, great video as always, Jeremy~!! The handheld market never gets documented and explored enough, so seeing this series has been a real great thing!
2:09 Thats a bit naughty, using the Mega Drive/Genesis footage of Castle of Illusion and "playing" it as a Game Gear game. Misleading advertising!
Nothing gets past the Guru
Whoa, holy shit, I noticed that too but I didn't really acnowledge it in my head.
I actually didn't catch that at first. Good eye, Guru Larry!!
Honestly, I could see 90s Sega pulling that move by stretching the truth, under the guise of "Oh, we said it was for Game Gear and Genesis/Mega Drive, but we didn't have to specify which was which."
Very very common at the time, and even ~10 year old me could tell what they were doing. Bad Sega of America marketing team, bad.
Love this! Game Gear used to be my favourite portable console back in the 90s, though I used to own a Game Boy as well. Recently I've been checking out some GG Japanese exclusives, and some of them are quite interesting as well. It will be quite fun to see your perspective, especially compared to GameBoy Works.
As always great video. I always look forward to watching.
Of this initial batch I only owned the pack-in Columns, which I never quite liked but couldn't help feeling like I had to make an attempt at it every now and then.... only to get game over'ed fairly quickly.
Cool to learn the GG edition was the only one with such aesthetic variety!
Super Monaco GP I never owned, and racing games were never my thing, but I remember thinking it looked really cool and impressive graphically.
Huh, never knew Columns was that old.
I always thought it started on the Genesis. 😅
Columns was originally created by Jay Geertson, a Hewlett Packard employee and released on various PC platforms, starting with an HP proprietary version of Linux called HP-UX.
He later sold the rights to Sega, who ported it to arcades, then Genesis/Mega Drive, then Master System and Game Gear, and later a whole slew of platforms. Remember that Genesis/Mega Drive is actually older than Game Gear, nearly two years going by Japanese release dates!
@@hinodedl Interesting. I knew it was older than the Game Gear, but I didn't realize it wasn't developed by SEGA. It makes sense though. SEGA has a long history of creating ports of other developers' games for different platforms going back the Atari days. I love finding those old Atari carts with the SEGA logo molded into the plastic.
The game gear is a good handheld console and I like columns. 😀👍🎮
great video, I am impressed with Super Monaco GP on GG, never seen it running. I especially enjoy finding out details about the lengths you go to, in capturing footage that is both accurate and visually pristine. Cheers
Had no idea the Game Gear has a better color pallette than the Master System. It's nice that it got something to help make up for the crunched resolution.
The increased palette rarely mattered, because devs were usually targeting both the GG and the SMS with their games. So they wouldn't include many differences between the two versions, aside from adapting to different screen resolutions. Although you can occasionally see the improved palette in GG-exclusive titles like Defenders of Oasis.
@@jasonblalock4429 That's a common problem with cross-platform development.
If one system has notably better capabilities than another, but the developers can get away with using basically the same assets for both, then the better capabilities are almost certainly going to get ignored.
You even see this in PAL vs NTSC.
Not only do PAL conversions often not even bother fixing the timing, but a PAL system from the 8 and 16 bit era often had technical advantages that went completely unused. (these technical advantages were accidental, and a quirk of how PAL hardware was created from machines optimised for NTSC systems, but they were still there)
The end result was that even though functionally the PAL hardware is more capable of certain kinds of graphically intensive tasks, what tended to happen was that PAL releases got all the downsides of the PAL hardware, but none of the advantages.
(It's not a huge surprise. Most devs weren't in PAL territories. And those that were had to deal with the fact that a game heavily optimised for PAL hardware literally cannot run at all on an NTSC machine; an NTSC game running on PAL hardware without optimisation runs slower than it should, but does otherwise work. A game pushing the technical limits of what a PAL system can do typically cannot meaningfully be converted to run on NTSC at all. - I sometimes wonder if some of the European made PAL exclusives are exclusives not because they didn't think it'd sell in NTSC regions, but because it would be too difficult to convert)
So what you're saying is that we shouldn't bother with an Xbox Series X, just the Series S?
It's fairly significant, too, at 4096 colors, which is several times what the Genesis had available. Of course the direct output to screen meant that dithering wouldn't look as good so it's a frustrating (due to how it makes console backports difficult) if understandable change
@@THEmuteKi It's also probably one of the (technical) reasons why SEGA never made their version of a Super Game Boy to play Game Gear games on the Mega Drive/Genesis. At least that's my guess.
I can't wait until you get to Defenders of Oasis for the game gear. It is the only game gear game I have played but I was blown away by how good it was.
Wait, is the arcade theme for Pengo just Hot Butter by Popcorn?
Sounds like it. I didn't know before looking it up just now, but the song dates back to 1969 or so.
Yup. A weirdly large number of old arcade games used that song. I know Disco No.1 was one of them. Stood out to me because I remembered the song from DDR (where it's called "Raver's Choice Vol. 4").
As someone who grew up smack in the middle of the Nintendo vs Sega war, the idea of comparing the game gear favorably to ANYTHING in terms of size/portability and battery life is SO funny to me 😂 Stellar video as always, keep up the great work!
In Pengo, you get 10000 points if you align the three star blocks *without touching the sides of the playfield*. If one or more of the star blocks are touching the side of the playfield you only get 5000 points.
(In the arcade, at least. Though I'd be surprised if they didn't keep this rule on the GG version.)
The Game Gear version is the same. He shows one of each in the video with the corresponding bonus also shown.
Great video! The Game Gear was my first video game system and for several years was the only one I owned. I wish it got more love on your Retronauts podcast, but then again I also wish it had gotten more love from SEGA too especially in the mid-90s. I can't wait to see what else you cover for the system.
I really, really wanted a GameGear in the early 90s. I ultimately didn't get one until the early 2000s. Well, I say "one" but I actually got ten GameGears at a game store that was going out of buisness and the guy needed to clear the inventory. He sold me all ten for $100. I sold all but two of them over the years. I've been thinking of doing the modern LCD screen mod on one of them, but since it's 100% working and that's a complicated mod, I'm still on the fence about doing so.
I had Pengo on the Atari 5200. Loved that game. I would definitely picked it up for the Game Gear had it come out in the US.
Super Monaco on the Game Gear was odd, it's really just a rehash of World Grand Prix on the Master System, As least the SMS port of Super Monaco was split screen 2 player.
Was it a link up game on the game gear?
just googled the game, yep it does have two player but it's via the link cable.
I hope this opens the door for some genesis/mega drive works! That would be cool
What good timing! Since I was lucky to get an Analogue Pocket pre-order I just started buying Game Gear games in anticipation of its release. The Game Boy Works series has helped me curate my Game Boy collection and hopefully will do the same for the Game Gear.
Great episode!
I have a huge soft spot for the Game Gear. As a very young kid, I actually saved up allowance money, skipped out on buying toys and candy, and the Game Gear was the first ever game system I ever bought with my own money, I got the blue one that came with The Lion King. Of course, I mostly bought it for Sonic xD
It's a shame Pengo was Japan-only title. I probably would have ate that up as a kid
Appreciate your use of "urtext"
Game Gear seemed to show off its versatility in those first three games. Columns is fun, and probably led to Baku Baku. Pengo fits a portable system library well. Personally, Super Monaco seems too sparse to be a decent racing game, but this really is an initial release and at least it is based on a title that had plenty of notoriety. Not sure Action Fighter would have been a huge improvement. Great job, Jeremy.
I tend to agree about Super Monaco GP. These scaled down (or "de-superized") super-scaler ports tend to lose a lot of their appeal. OutRun for Game Gear at least kept some of its charm with the sound track.
Funny that Columns was a release title for Game Gear. Its definitely the one game on GG I put the most time into.
Wait... we missed out on Pengo in the west?! I loved the port of that for MS DOS, Pango... except it scared the crap out of me as a child... but I kept playing it
Well, Pengo showed up officially on other platforms. Just not on Sega's own handheld for some reason.
Interesting. I'd like to learn more about transistor powered video games.
I wonder if there any Tube amplified video games.
I have the game gear adapter for the analogue Pocket. But no GG games to stick in it.
So I'm using your videos as a guide. They can't be too expensive these little things
You'd be surprised how rare/expensive some U.S. Game Gear releases can be...
Columns is a game that I want to love, but I have to admit it's pretty shallow. I did play a lot of it on my PC Sega Smash Pack back in the day, though.
For all of Super Monaco GP’s limitations, you can’t deny they replicated Monaco’s verdant rolling fields to a T.
Holy smokes, if the Game Gear compares favourably to the Lynx, the Lynx must've been a savage monster on batteries.
There's an Atari 2600 game that plays like Pengo: Stone Age. I wonder which one came first or if there was an earlier one. edit: Wow, learned something new. That game was made in Brazil, in 1993, so yeah they had played or seen Pengo.
Pengo was actually released for the 2600. www.atarimania.com/game-atari-2600-vcs-pengo_11872.html
Yeah, Pengo has been around since 1982. I kinda wish SEGA had made Pengo their mascot back then. It probably would have helped their pre-Sonic marketing and image.
That ain't Atari' Pac-Man for the 2600 @0:48. That's a hack of Ms. Pac-Man to make a more faithful Pac-Man arcade experience.
i cant wait to hear about some hidden gems on game gear! i only have a few good ganes on mine. also is the sega master system adapter worth it?
SMS adapter is absolutely worth it if you modify your Game Gear with a modern screen. On the original screen, it just makes everything look even muddier.
YESSSSS, GAME GEAR!!! (for the sole hour you could play on six fresh batteries)
Where does Kickle Cubicle fit with Pengo?
Big ol’ knock off
Oh boy, soukoban!
No... es... cape...
"Game Gear's hardware was more friendly to batteries than the Lynx"
Alright that's just a bold faced lie. I owned both around the time they released and the Lynx had EXPONENTIALLY better battery life than the Game Gear. Like...I don't know how the Game Gear could even be considered a functional handheld as it went through batteries in about 15 minutes. Near as I can tell this may be a design flaw with the speaker. Years later I used some batteries that had a little thing on the side you could squeeze to see how much charge they had left and when my Game Gear ran out of batteries I checked them. Almost all of them still had a full charge...except one. The best I can assume is that having the volume cranked to max on the Game Gear somehow devoured that one battery.
I'm not kidding about that 15 minutes though. The Game Gear barely lasts long enough to do a stage or two of Crystal Warriors. I remember returning my original Game Gear because the battery life was so bad but never needed to return my Lynx. I seriously do not recall any battery issues with the Lynx at all. Yeah it was shorter than the Gameboy but still decent.
"thanks to gameboy pokey processor, it lacks the speed and immersion of smgp". Actually gameboy, game gear and mastersystem run on the same painfully slow z80 cpu (just as painfully slow as other 8 bit cpus of the time). They could have doubled the clock speed if they wanted. Not sure why nobody did that.
Because the Game Gear was based on the Master System hardware, most of the heavy lifting was handled by a 10MHz VDP chip-something the Game Boy definitely did not have.
@@JeremyParish The GG VDP still only deals with tiles, sprites and scanline interrupts. Similar to the PPU in the gameboy. It's not a coprocessor. Even if they made it 50mhz it wouldnt perform any different. In fact, since the GG Z80 cant access the VDP graphics ram directly (needs to push it through VDP) it's at a disadvantage.
The SMS and GG couldn't do sprite flipping which resulted in a quite a few games including pre-flipped sprites in the roms which took up more space. Where the GB had that built in to the PPU. outside of ability to draw in color there isn't a massive amount of raw performance differences between the two.
The GB had a faster CPU (4.2mhz vs 3.5mhz) but it also had less Vram, those less was needed due to the limited color. both had the same basic ram (though games could include more).
Not sure how much that really matters in the end though.
A gameboy color has a CPU that can run at double the speed of an original gameboy, but I haven't seen any real signs that GBC games were notably more complex as a result.
Beyond the extra colours, nothing much seemed to change...
@@KuraIthys since the gb doesn't 'hide' the vram you can use the extra cycles to modify the tileset for added effects or simplistic 3d. Most GB software isn't very ambitious especially Nintendo in house stuff. Similarly the new 3ds and dsi had much faster cpus that nobody seemed to use other than slightly faster loading.
The Game Gear is my favorite console of all time, but it took a bit to get the library going
I know that this is going to sound weird, but I didn't even know that the Game Gear even existed until 1996 when I was 13. I went to visit my mother for summer vacation and her boyfriend had one. Buy that point I had been playing GameBoy since I was nine years old. The Game Gear didn't leave that much of an impression on me because I spent the rest of that summer playing Super Nintendo: Super Mario All-Stars Plus Super Mario World, the SNES Jurassic Park port (I got Jurassic Park on VHS at the same time), and Lemmings. By the end of summer I had almost completely forgotten that the Game Gear existed even though I had access to one all summer. Five years later I bought a GameBoy Advance on launch day with money from my first job and the Game Gear was completely erased from my memory. One day I was at a friend's house who had one in a basket of various consoles the she kept in her living room and I was like "Oh yeah, that was a thing." I promptly grabbed the GameBoy Color that was in the basket and played a Simpsons game.
Game gear was a cool handheld I had one that came with Mk, sonic 2 , baseball and Batman returns
2:02 Tobey MacGuire?
Yep
Game Gear exclusives always make me sad, because they would have been so much better on my beloved Master System.
Jeremy, why use the mega sg to DAC then on to a framemeister? why not use just use the HDMI out and scaling from the Mega sg?
Did you not see the large CRT behind me last episode?
🕹🎮
GAME GEAR
I love your channel but I'm curious why you upload at 720/60 rather than 1080/60.
Because 720p is an even multiple of 240p.
@@JeremyParish Thank you for the clarification!
Isn't columns Greek themed not Egyptian
Uh, let's... call it Alexandrian and split the difference.
While I love all these videos, I feel I should warn you about piling on too many projects at once? It's very easy to get yourself into a state where you feel you have to do more and more, and end up burning yourself out. From someone who's experienced that before....
I have a very clear plan of attack for this project going forward from here, don’t worry.
Maybe it's just me, but Super Monaco GP looks almost like a 1-to-1 copy of Michael Andretti's World Grand Prix, which was developed by Human Entertainment BEFORE SM GP. The racing tracks and even their names seem identical from the footage here. Maybe the Game Gear game looks a bit more colorful and brighter and the UI is more cramped. But it seems to me as if Sega had just copied a different game.
Really, they're both essentially Pole Position clones. They use similar tracks because they are based on real-life tracks. But almost all of the 8-bit Formula One racing games back then were virtually identical.
There's really only so much you can do with the F1 genre before it ceases to be an F1 game, unfortunately. They're all hemmed in by the extreme specificity of the actual event.
Okay, these reasons make sense. Sorry for jumping to conclusions.
The inky blackness around the game while accurate sure is uninteresting. Makes you really appreciate the super gameboy.
It's a weird choice given the image could easily have been scaled and cropped in editing. Lets see. Screen resolution is 160x144...
So even if you want to avoid non-uniform scaling (which... what would be the point given youtube does everything from 144p to 8k if you upload at high enough resolution?), that actually gives an exact integer scaling factor of 5 to get it up to 720p.
With the resulting image being 800x720...
Though I'm not sure what the screen aspect ratio of a game gear is. (does it use square pixels?)
So, yeah, would scale quite nicely to fullscreen, though obviously you'd still have borders...
@@KuraIthys I just miss the Super GB enhanced artwork
@@CircsC It's definitely an interesting feature.
I have two Super Gameboys (one for a PAL console, one for a Super Famicom)
Actually the Super Gameboy has a lot of interesting features, but games almost completely ignore them for the most part.
Things the super gameboy can do:
- Custom borders (can use Super NES graphics)
- custom colour sets that can be changed by the gameboy software.
- Further customisation using Super NES hardware features and colour sets. (including applying fully custom palettes to screens) - quite slow though
- inclusion of Super Nintendo audio routines.
- multiplayer support on a single cartridge (can use both SNES controllers)
- loading of arbitrary SNES code. (only limitation is that whatever you load has to fit entirely in RAM - meaning it has to be 128 kilobytes or less. - most SNES games are 1 megabyte or more)
It's a very strange piece of hardware, all things considered...
So much more capable than it ever needed to be.
Wait a sec. The game gear had some of the worst battery life I've ever seen, and you're telling me it was actually better than the Lynx in that regard?
The Lynx could blast through 6 AAs in an hour if you played certain games.
I mean, yes?
Should that really be a surprise though, given what the Lynx hardware consisted of?
You do have to keep in mind that the Lynx II was vastly improved from the first version in most regards though.
I used a Lynx II at a retro game convention and it's battery seemed quite capable of lasting for a decent time.
Obviously the big culprit in these systems is the screen.
There are (very expensive) Lynx conversion kits that replace the screen with a modern replacement.
In spite of the fact that these conversion kits require an FPGA ( which are not known for power efficiency), this can increase the battery by something like a factor of 4...
With this in mind it seems reasonable to assume the problem with these 90's colour handhelds is ultimately the screen...
@@KuraIthys I don't know for sure, but I think the Lynx II is about on par with the Game Gear for battery life. The same guy who makes the modern screen conversion kits for Lynx also makes them for Game Gear. Both Game Gear and Lynx use CCFL tubes to light their screens which require high-voltage components that suck batteries dry. These kits require you to remove those components which improves battery life from roughly 3 hours to about 10 hours active play time on six standard AAs. That's still nowhere nearly as economical as any of the Gameboy systems, but it's a heck of a lot better than they were originally.
0:48 - That's a modern version of Pac-Man. Either Pac-Man 4K or Pac-Man 8K. The original is much, much worse.
Using less batteries than an Atari lynx still isn't much of an accomplishment.
It's like winning a drag race against a 5 year old on a bicycle using a golf cart.
Sure, you won, but is it really something to be proud of?
Yeah, the GG really only barely had better battery life anyway. However, one plus is that Sega had an official GG battery pack, which was this giant rather phallic looking thing with (iirc) six C-type rechargable NiCd batteries shoved into it. It was heavy and awkward, but would power the GG for a good 5 hours or so, which wasn't bad. Then the in-console batteries could just be used as backups if the big power pack died, making it much cheaper to use daily.
@@jasonblalock4429 The Atari Lynx launched with a similar battery pack. It's a bit of an awkward way to solve a problem though isn't it? XD
I routinely use rechargeable AA's for controllers and older handhelds though, so yeah, it does save a lot of money in that regard.
@@jasonblalock4429 They also had one that screwed onto the back of the Game Gear. It made the system about 50% thicker and a bit more awkward to hold, but in my opinion it was better than being tethered to the one you'e describing.
awwwe, we don't get to see your handsome face this time.