Jeremy Parish

Game Boy Works Gaiden #08: Game Gear 1990, Pt. 1 of 4

Added 2020-08-26 13:00:00 +0000 UTC

Atari Lynx isn't the only handheld getting Gaiden love! Game Gear coverage has been in the cards since the beginning, and now we're near the end of 1990 for Game Boy, it's time to look at Game Gear and see how it fared. As with the Lynx episodes, these overviews will encompass three to five games per episode and will rarely go into tremendous depth (though of course there will be exceptions), and they won't appear nearly as often as Game Boy Works episodes for the simple fact that Game Gear didn't have as many releases as Game Boy.

This episode looks at the system's day-one lineup in Japan in Oct. 1990, and it's a tidy counterpart to the last Lynx episode in that it entirely centers on first-party arcade conversions. Handy way to contrast and compare? Get it? Handy? As in the Lynx's codena—ah, never mind.

Meanwhile, I don't think Game Boy had any first-party arcade ports until, what, Donkey Kong ’94? And then only barely. So already we're seeing a marked contrast between Nintendo and the competition in terms of basic priorities. Again: Handy.