Burger Kitchen (Game Gear)

 

 This is the first game I've played from Habit Soft, who've physically released a bunch of newly developed games for a variety of old consoles! With the exceptiong of a URL on the title screen, it really looks, sounds and feels like it could have come from the Game Gear's actual heyday (in contrast to something like M2's GG Aleste 3 from 2020, that pushes the hardware to its absolute limit, making a game that would have seemed impossible on the home consoles of the early nineties, let alone the humble Game Gear). Even the cutified burger restaurant theming calls to mind the fascination Japanese pop culture had with McDonalds (and similar chains) for a couple of years, as seen in things like Project A-ko 3 and Space Fantasy Zone.

 

How it works is that you've got a playfield that's four spaces high and eight spaces tall. Into the field will fall horizontal pairs of burger layers, being the burgers themselves, the top or bottom halves of the breadcake, or slices of cheese, bacon, lettuce, tomato, bacon (that looks more like salami), and that weird egg slab that only exists in burger restaurants. You lose when all the pieces pile up to cover the top space of either of the two middle columns. If two identical pieces are placed atop each other, they disappear, but you score no points.

 

To actually score points, you've got to construct burgers according to various recipes. There's got to be bottom bread on the bottom, a certain collection of ingredients in the middle, and a top bread on top. Then the whole thing will disappear, and you'll score the "price" of that particular recipe, or half the price if the ingredients were right, but in the wrong order. You'll have a quota of certain specific recipes to make a few times to clear each stage, but you still get points for non-quota burgers you make.

 

There's two game modes, the first of which being mission, where, upon completing a stage's quota, you go onto the next stage with a shiny new empty playing field, and which ends after five stages. The other is endless, where filling a quota will immediately start the next one, but since you can make any burgers for points, you really just need to have remembered all of the recipes and make what you can, when you can. Endless mode never clears out your playing field, and once you get to its equivalent of stage five, the quota has an infinity symbol, and the game just continues until you get a game over.

 

The game's cute and it's decently fun, and I do keep going back to it. But there is a frustrating little problem. Every recipe has to have a bottom bread on the bottom to be valid, and it's pretty often the case that there'll be no bottom bread pieces in the first few pairs that drop. Now, you can hold one for later, like in most modern Tetris games, but it's still frustrating that you can't even start putting things together for the first few drops. I'm ot sure exactly how I'd fix this, except for maybe eliminating the bottom bread piece and having a permanent layer of them beneath the playing field? It's not a massive problem, but it does bother me a little, especially since it's there every time you play,pretty much.

 

Burger Kitchen is a game that's cute, but very flawed, but also one to which I keep returning despite those flaws. It's really difficult to decide whether or not it gets my recomendation! I guess I'll say: it's fine? Play it if you want?

Outrun (Game Gear)

 It's once again the time of year where I post about a game that's not obscure, and most years, It seems to be a SEGA or SNK game. This time, it's SEGA's turn, with an ambitious handheld port of their classic racing game. Something that the best Game Gear games do is that rather than desperately trying to squeeze a game down from more powerful hardware, they make a version of the game that plays to the Game Gear's strengths.

 

Those strengths being the bright colours, and the fact that it's a system that somehow seems to have really brought the best out of pixel artists who worked on it. So again: rather than just scaling down all the graphics, everything's completely redrawn from scratch, and as a result, it's an amazing-looking game. The backgrounds especially look great, though it feels like there are more stages featuring ancient ruins than in more standard versions of the game.

 

As for the game itself, it plays like Outrun! At its most basic level, at least. You drive against a time limit, there's branching paths, low and high gear, all the standard stuff. There are a few changes compared to earlier versions, though. There's one negative change, so I'll get that out of the way first: you only drive through four stages in the main mode, meaning that there are only ten stages in total, compared to the standard fifteen. There's two additions to kind of make up for it, though. First, you can choose between automatic and manual transmission, which I'm pretty sure you couldn't do in the original, and second, there's a whole new racing mode!

 

You can play against a CPU opponent, or a human opponent (has anyone reading this ever played a Game Gear game over link cable, by the way? Pretty much every one at least linked up for Pokemon on Game Boy, but I've never known of anyone linking two Game Gears together). The races are always duels against a couple driving a blue Ferrari, and they take place on your choice of the the game's ten stages. It's a shame that you can only do single races, and there's no option for a single player series or anything, but it's a nice little extra, and it's a surprise it took so long for it to exist, since there'd already been ports to Master System, PC Engin,e and a bunch of microcomputers, plus a Mega Drive port that came out the same day as this one, though that one definitely makes more of an attempt at being like the arcade original, with nothing much extra besides a new BGM track.

 

I think, in the modern day where Hamster Corp. are releasing a new perfect arcade port every week, and everyone has constant access to at least three devices that can emulate arcade games at all times, it's easy for people to write off old home/handheld ports of arcade games as being necessarily inferior, and unworthy of attention. But Game Gear Outrun stands as one of many examples that many of them are interesting and unique creations in their own right.

Royal Stone - Hirakareshi Toki no Tobira (Game Gear)

 Back when I was a teenager, one of my friends' bedrooms had no windows, and a bunch of us used to hang out in there, watching anime and playing videogames. The lack of windows is relevant because he had a Game Gear lying around, and we'd sometimes take turns playing through stages of a little turn-based strategy game named Crystal Warriors (which was called Ariel: Crystal Densetsu in Japan), and the Game Gear's screen was bright enough that if someone was playing it, it was possible for someone sat next to them to read comics by its light.

 

Anyway, Royal Stone is the sequel to Crystal Warriors, though it only ever got released in Japan, unfortunately. I can't remember anything about the plot of the first game, so I can't comment on that, but Royal Stone is a true sequel in every other aspect, replicating the original's concepts but in bigger, better, and more sophisticated ways. Crystal Warriors had crudely drawn characters wiggling weapons at each other, Royal Stone has detailed characters full of personality attacking each other in cool little psuedo-3D scenes. Crystal Warrior's towns were crude and all identical, being more like slightly glorified menus than actual places, while Royle Stone's towns are like those you'd see in most 8-bit RPGs. The element system carries over too: Water, Fire, and Wind all have a Rock-Paper-Scissors relationship, while Earth (usually reserved for important characters) is neither strong nor weak against any of the elements.

 

I assume that Ariel was a big hit in Japan, as its clear that this game was a lavish production. It looks better than some contemperanous 16-bit console RPGs, and I feel confident in saying it's the best-looking game of the Game Gear's original lifespan (and the Game Gear is a system with no shortage of great-looking pixel art), not being bettered until 2020's GG Aleste 3. It even has a seperate copyright credit for the character designer (Kugatsuhime, of Monster Maker fame) before the title screen appears, which was pretty rare in general back then, and even moreso for a handheld game. The plot has also had a lot of effort put into it, not just in the writing, but also the presentation. There's various twists that occur, a bunch of different factions warring against each other, a protagonist with a tragic backstory and more. Like I keep saying, it's all so much more than you'd expect from a handheld game in 1995.

 

And as for the presentation of the story, it's mostly pretty standard for this kind of game, with you going around towns and talking to people, and also your enemies taunting you or declaring their intentions at the start of battles. But there's other things too: there's flashbacks that are shown in the game's graphics but with a sepia toned pallete. One particularly impressive example uses the game's battle engine to tell the story of the protagonist's dad getting betrayed and falling in battle. Furthermore, when your party members fall in battle, they're just dead and gone, and they all have a unique line of dialogue to act as their last words. One character uses this to declare his love for the protagonist, something that he never mentions at any other point!

 

Royal Stone is an excellent game, and has impressed me in so many ways the whole time I've been playing it. There was an instance somewhat early on, the first time I lost a couple of characters in battle, where I was ready to give up on the game, thinking my diminshed force might make the game unplayable. But I persevered, and with some slightly better strategy to compensate, I still got through the next few battles and gradually recruited a few new friends. I think that's probably one of the best compliments you can pay a strategy game, isn't it? That you can make up for having a weaker force by just thinking about what you're doing a bit better? Unfortunately, SEGA exhibited some of their trademark wisdom, and decided no-one outside of Japan would be interested in playing what was probably the best handheld strategy/RPG at that time, and so the only way to play it in English is via a fantranslated ROM. But we are lucky enough, at least, to have that available to play, and you definitely should.

Moldorian: The Sisters of Light and Darkness (Game Gear)

 Long before this game had an English translation patch, I was curious about it. The boxart looks interesting, and there's something about the title that made it sound like it might be a little more interesting than most 8-bit RPGs. Like, "Moldorian: The Sisters of Light and Darkness" sounds like it has a more specific vision in mind for its story than more vague titles like Final Fantasy, Phantasy Star, and Dragon Quest, right? Unfortunately, in most aspects, it's as generic as can be, and as soon as I stop typing this review, I'll probably immediately forget everything I know about it.

 

The game starts with a bit of ludonarrative dissonance, as everyone seems eager to tell you what a useless milksop you are, and how you'd be long dead if your childhood friend wasn't always looking out for you. But then you and said friend go out into the nearby forest on some minor fetch quest, and she's significantly weaker than you in every respect. Then, when it comes to entering the deeper forest where the first boss is, she gets scared and waits outside. This turns out to be a bad idea, since it's durig this time that she gets kidnapped by a flying monster. And so, your actual quest starts: to save the weak and defenceless damsel who's also you big sister figure who always has to protect you.

 

I think I've played about six to eight hours, and the story doesn't get any more interesting or original in that time. There's a part where you have to take a secret exit tunnel out of a palace that's gone into lockdown, part where you have to get a rare fruit to make special medicine, and so on. The one interesting plot element that turned up is that a werepanther rescues your party at one point, before running away again. I suspect that this werepanther might be your dad, who went missing after going to rescue your friend slightly before you did. But this dangling thread isn't enough to keep me playing the game, so I guess I'll never know.

 

There's something in the game's mechanics that's kind of unique, but unfortunately, it's not in a positive way. Instead of picking your commands from menus in battles, you instead press a combination of a direction and a button to do each possible thing you might want to: right and button one to attack, up and button two for you're mage's fire spell, and so on. The problem is that you've got to memorise all of these things (though in the time I've played, I've only just got a character who can use magic, and she's basically just a healer, since her attack magic is so much weaker than the other party members' normal attacks, which don't use MP), and you only get about a second to remember and input the command you want, or the game just skips your turn and goes onto the next character (which is probably an enemy). I can see what they tried to do here, and it's just a shame that they didn't dump it after realising it was no fun.

 

This isn't a game that's completely without merit: it looks okay, and I think, in 1994, an RPG that's somewhat on par with the console RPGs of five or so years earlier with a running time to match definitely had a worthwhile place in a handheld's library, even if it is a bit generic. Unfortunately, it's not 1994 now, and I think every Game Gear RPG is available (officially or otherwise) in English, and I'm pretty sure that the only that isn't better than Molodorian is Defenders of Oasis. And even that game has the advantage of having a more interesting setting than this one.

Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers (Game Gear)

 When it comes to Mighty Morphin Power Rangers videogames, I think most people's first thoughts will either be the single plane beat em ups on Mega Drive, or the awkwardly entitled Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers Fighting Edition on SNES, which is mainly remembered for the legacy it spawned in the form of Gundam Wing: Endless Duel and the Gundam Battle Assault series. But, as I found Dangerous Road while looking up a list of every game developed by SIMS, I noticed this on the list. I looked it up, saw some of that beautiful pixel art that the Game Gear has as its trademark, and needed to know more. So this isn't a super-obscure game, but it's one I think a lot of people will have automatically written off as shovelware and never tried out.

 

Interestingly, it's actually pretty similar in structure to the Gaoranger and Hurricanger games on Playstation: each stage has you picking a ranger, then playing through the action scenes of an episode. You fight some putties, the human-sized version of the weekly monster, and sometimes goldar will show up, too, and once you're done with that, everything gets bigger, and you control the Megazord against the giant version of the weekly monster (and again, Goldar sometimes shows up here). 

 

The game keeps things focused entirely on the first season of the TV show, and actually makes great use of the license. There are seven stages, the third and fourth of which are dedicated to that season's most iconic storyline: Green With Evil. Stage three has you fighting the brainwashed green ranger Tommy in human- and giant-sized forms, while the second has you fighting the Dragonzord, followed by a final battle to free Tommy's mind. Of course, the best thing about this is that for the final three stages, you can play as Tommy in the human-sized parts, and for the giant-sized parts, you get to pick between the Megazord, the vanilla Dragonzord, and best of all, Dragonzord battle mode. I think this might be the only game where that particular robot is playable, even!

 

The rangers all have their own movesets, and Tommy happens to have the most effective and cool-looking moves, and while the three mecha are pretty equal in power, they do still all play pretty differently to each other, and it's cool to have the choice of three really great-looking designs. The Game Gear, like the Game Boy, has more decent fighting games than you might think, especially the ports of Neo Geo games like Samurai Shodown and Fatal Fury Special. But those are ports, and even though SNK are renowned for the great storylines and characters in their games, they are still designed around the idea that they'll be played against human opponents. 

 

Power Rangers has the advantage of being made specifically for the Game Gear, and so it's also designed around being a single player story experience. So you have five (six later on) characters all with their own movesets, but no matter who you pick, you'll be playing through the same storyline with the same opponents. The game doesn't need to come up with reasons for allied characters to be fighting each other, plus considering this is a cartridge-based game for a handheld in 1994, being able to save space by re-using Goldar and evil Tommy as opponents was surely a big help to the developers.

 

This is a pretty great game! It's definitely better than the Mega Drive Power Rangers games, and I'd say it's an equal-but-different altenative to Fighting Edition, too. All of the MMPR seemed to get univerally slated on release, but if you ever feel the need to play an of-the-time Power Rangers game, you'll have a better time with this one than you'd have with most of the others. And if you finish it, the Game Gear's Power Rangers The Movie game is pretty much exactly the same as this one, but with monsters from both the movie and the second season of the TV show.

Ninku 2 - Tenkuuryuu e no Michi (Game Gear)

 Ninku was an anime that ran for little over a year in the mid-1990s, but even though it's pretty much completely unknown in English-speaking parts of the world, in that short time it was somehow popular enough in Japan to have spawned seven tie-in games! This one's a fighting game, with a slight emphasis on single player, which makes sense, given how impractical it was setting up multiplayer on handhelds in those days (though it does have a versus link up mode, too).

 

There's two main modes of play: story mode, which has you playing as the three protagonists (an ugly little boy, a generic young man, and a guy in just his underpants) as you go through the story, watching lavishly pixel-illustrated cutscenes and fighting opponents (including one instance of that annoying little quirk of fighting game story modes: the unwinnable battle). It reminded me a lot of the Game Gear's most famous fighting game, Virtua Fighter The Animation, though it's actually a lot more fun than that, as the more traditional superpowered fighting game style of Ninku 2 fits the GG better than trying to squeeze the realistic martial arts of Virtua Fighter into a tiny 8-bit game. Then there's 1P battle, which is a standard arcade mode, allowing you to play as any of the eight characters in the game, and fighting the others in random order.

 

The cutscenes aren't the only thing that reminded me of VFTA, either, as the game has a quite impressive faux-zoom thing going on in the fights, too, as if the two characters get far enough apart, the camera zooms out to show everything much smaller at a distance. I'm pretty sure the only way they could have done this is making two complete sets of sprites for each character: one large and one small, as well as a large and small version of every stage. That seems like a lot of work for what is essentially a pointless visual gimmick, but I'm glad they did it, it really makes the game stand out! And it's not the only standout feature, as for an 8-bit fighting game, it's surprisingly complex! There's forwards and backwards dashes, power meters, multiple special moves for each character (and yes, you can do every move as the tiny zoomed-out sprite too!) and so on!

 

The power meter is something I have to take issue with, unfortunately, though. There's no super moves in the game (as far as I can tell, at least), and the meter instead limits your use of special moves. This alone wouldn't be an issue, but coupled with how meter is built, it becomes one. There's two ways of building meter in this game: charging it by holding punch and kick together, or getting hit. Hitting your opponent doesn't build meter. So all this comes together to de-incentivise using specials, and punishing players for trying to combo their opponents, or wear them down with specials. I can see why they might have done this, to disable "spamming" of specials and also to serve as a primitive comeback mechanic, but it just makes the fights a little less exciting, in my opinion.

 

Despite that one rather large flaw, Ninku 2 is a game I think is worth playing. It's a lot of fun, and most of the characters look cool! I think if a copy of this game had somehow come into the possession of my nine-year-old self, even though I'd never have seen the show, and wouldn't be able to read even the character names, let alone any of the story text, I think the visuals and the accessible fighting action would have been enough to capture my interest. And then I probably would have spent decades frustrated at how I couldn't get my hands on any English-language Ninku stuff.

Dunk Kid's (Game Gear)

The strangeness with Dunk Kid's doesn't actually start with the superfluous apostrophe on the title screen: before you even get to there, there's a splash screen featuring the logo of ASBA, the All-Japan Street Basketball Association. What's strange about ASBA? Well, not only do they seem to not exist anymore, but the only reference I can find to them online is in relation to this game, which makes me wonder if they ever existed at all. None of the teams in the game have names besides their home city/country/state/continent, either, which makes ASBA's existence all the more questionable.

But let's not allow possibly-fictional governing bodies skew our opinions of this game, that simply wouldn't be fair, would it? Especially since it's a pretty good game, after all. Like Jammit, it's a basketball game in which both sides are trying to score in the same basket. Unlike Jammit, it doesn't make many embarassing pretensions towards being "tough", nor does it have a buffet of weird variant rules.

In Dunk Kid's, there's a time limit, and whichever team has the most points at the end of it is the winner, and that's that. Baskets score one point when they're put in close to the basket, and two points from far away. If you get one in from directly beneath the basket, this sometimes triggers one of a few special dunk animations, which look cool, but still only score one point.

It's a pretty fun, simple sports game that doesn't make a quixotic attempt at squeezing a psuedo-realistic "simulation" out of an 8-bit console. But what it does squeeze out is some surprisingly great presentation! Each team has their own slightly stereotypical stage, for example, and while you might expect an 8-bit sports game to have one player sprite that's cloned and recoloured many times for every player on every team, there's actually four player sprites that are copied over the game's eight teams! Not only that, but the devs have even got a nice little bit of diversity out of those four sprites: there's a bunch of different skin colours spread across the teams, and one of the sprites (or, if you like, two of the teams) is a girl! Even in 2020, there's not many games where you can play as a black girl, but this little-known Japan-only handheld sports title is one of them!

There's really only one big problem Dunk Kid's has, and to be honest, it's not even that big a problem. I'm sure you remember how in Cyber Dodge, the teams' stats were based on the order in which you face them in the single player campaign. Well, the same is done here, so if you play a single match (or if you somehow get two Game Gears, a link cable and two copies of the game to play versus mode), the only viable teams to pick are Russia, China, and Hawaii. In campaign mode, only the teams representing Japanese cities are playable, making this a Japanese game where all the Japanese player options are the weakest. How odd!

Anyway, yes, Dunk Kid's is a very fun game that I definitely recommend to people who aren't the types to turn their noses up at ancient sports games. It's just a shame it's on a system that requires such faff to set up a two-player game.

Streets of Rage II (Game Gear)

So, for this year's April fools non-obscure game, I've gone with a game that's really only a port of a well-known game. Obviously, everyone knows the original Mega Drive version of Streets of Rage 2, it's one of the most beloved classics of the entire 16-bit era. But I saw some screenshots of the Game Gear port, and the cute little sprites made me want to give it a go. I did, and it turns out that though it is missing a few elements of the MD version, it's got enough of its own stuff to be considered its own game, rather than a poor man's cut down port.

For a start, it controls differently to the original, which is to be expected, as the Game Gear has one fewer button than a standard Mega Drive controller, but you'll be surprised to learn that they actually added a few things in this department! The attacks that were mapped to the A button are now performed by pressing up-down-one, and they don't reduce your health when they hit. The A+forward attacks are now 1+2+forward, and you now have a limited-use super attack, performed by holding down button 1 for a few seconds and releasing. This is functonally the same as summoning the police artillery in the first game, but now it's a screen-filling special move your character performs, which is a bit less awkward, thematically.

The stages are different, too. There's no baseball field or bridge stages, for example, and the theme park is split into two stages: the pirate ship full of ninjas comes first, and then there's a partially-new stage that combines elements of the alien hive area and the missing bridge stage. This stage even has an all-new exclusive boss! Even better, that boss takes on the SEGA tradition of ripping off characters from pop-culture, as it's blatantly just a Predator, complete with stealth camoflage and triangular aiming reticle.

Now, for the omissions. A minor one is that you now only have one kind of jumping attack for each character instead of three. There's also only three playble characters instead of four, and while Axel and Blaze were obviously not going to be cut, for some reason they got rid of Max instead of Skates. Skates is the worst! There's only two weapon types, though cleverly, one of them is depicted as just a straight line of white pixels, which you can easily interpret as a baseball bat, lead pipe or katana, depending on the situation. There's fewer enemy types, of course, and as already mentioned, some stages have been omitted or merged together. I've also already mentioned how much I love the graphics, but I'll also say that they've done a great job of bringing over the original's legendary soundtrack, too, and this version sounds as good as any 8-bit non-CD console game probably ever could.

Game Gear Streets of Rage 2, then. It's definitely worth playing, even if (or especially if) you've played the Mega Drive version to death. On last thing that might entice you into giving it a go: one of the biggest criticism of the Mga Drive version is that it's too easy. Even with the addition of the supermoves, and the Game Gear's inability to handle crowds of enemies as large as the Mega Drive can, this version is a lot harder, without feeling like it's unfair or unbalanced.

Ryu Kyu (Game Gear)

So, this is a port of an arcade game that was also ported to the PC Engine. I'm reviewing this version, though, because it's slightly different to the others, and because it's been a long time since the Game Gear was featured here. Also, this port of Ryu Kyu was released in the west under the title Solitaire Poker, but I didn't find that out until after I'd already played the Japanese version for a few hours, and also that title is so boring I almost fell asleep typing it in this sentence.

Anyway, Ryu Kyu is a poker-themed puzzle game. Each stage gives you a score quota and a pit containing a five-by-five grid. A deck of cards is shuffled into four piles, you can only see the top card of each pile. Your task is to pick one of the four visible cards, and drop it into the pit, then do that twenty-four more times until every space is full. While doing this, you're trying to make poker hands in rows, columns and diagonals. Every hand is worth a different amount of points, and you've got to meet the stage's quota before all the spaces are full. This is the basic premise of the game, which is the same in both the Arcade and Game Gear versions.

The Game Gear version differs in a few ways, though. Firstly, before you start playing, you pick a difficulty level. Easy is a lot easier than the arcade version, and hard is slightly harder, though the only difference between the two is that the score quotae are higher in hard mode. The second, much bigger, difference is that in the arcade version, every couple of stages, you got to open a random box, which would reduce the next stage's quota by a few hundred or a few thousand points. The Game Gear has its own system for reducing quotae, which is both better and worse than the arcade version's.

Now, when you clear a stage, any points you scored over the current stage's quota are subtracted from the next stage's quota. This means that you're rewarded for playing well, which I do prefer to the arcade's randomly assigned bonuses, but at the same time, it does make the game a lot easier. I've had playthroughs where my quota was zero points for two or three stages in a row! Though, obviously, it's still a game where you're heavily reliant on what cards you draw. I'd say it's about half-and-half with regards to skill versus luck, though. And though I'd normally admonish a game for having such a strong element of luck, I think in this case it's not so big a problem.

Ryu Kyu is just a simple little puzzle game on a handheld, something to pass a short amount of time, while still being addictive enough to have you coming back to it. It succeeds at that goal pretty well, and I actually like this version better than the arcade. My only big complaint is that you don't get an overall score, your points only correspond to the quota system. But otherwise, I recommend giving this game a try!

Griffin (Game Gear)

Griffin has a few odd similarities to a game I reviewed a while ago, Pop Breaker: they're both Game Gear games about tanks, that are decorated (the games, not the tanks) with inconsequential pixel art of anime girls. Seperating them, however, is a much bigger difference: while Pop Breaker was a bit of a shooting/puzzle hybrid thing, Griffin is a pure shooter.

Some commendation should actually be offered to Griffin's devs, even, as they've clearly made a pretty valiant attempt at recreating the essence of contemporary arcade shooting games in 1991 on the humble Game Gear hardware. There's power-ups, screen-clearing bombs, and even a second, significantly more difficult loop that starts right after you finish the game. Between each stage, there's also some fullscreen art of your tank's female pilot after the first three stages, with the fourth and final stage being followed by the text telling you that the next loop is about to start. Frustratingly, I got right up to the final boss of the second loop before dying, so I can't tell you if there's an ending there or another loop. Sorry.

Anyway, it's a tank-based vertically scrolling shooting game. You roll up the screen, shooting enemies, avoiding bullets, and so on. Nothing really innovative on show, except for the aforementioned courage in making a game with the same design principles as then-current arcade games specifically for low-powered handheld hardware. There is one neat little graphical trick on show regarding the bosses, though. The parts of the boss you actually fight are very small, like the arms of a giant robots, or the cannons of a battleship. These aprts would be sprites, while the main, non-interactive "body" of the boss was part of the background. This meant the game could have you (appearing to) fight huge enemies, albeit huge enemies that are almost totally static. There's also one stage that only appears in the first loop where you pilot a squat, unaerodynamic-looking plane instead of a tank. This stage is the worst part of the game, having a repetitive, ugly background and incredibly boring enemy patterns. I assume the developers realised this and decided to leave it out of the second loop (but I guess they needed it to pad out the first?)

Griffin's a pretty good game. I won't say it's the best shooter on the Game Gear, as I know there's a port of Galaga 88, as well as two specially-made Aleste games, which are all probably better than it (though I haven't played any of them yet), but it is a pretty good one and definitely worth a look.