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.

Curosities Vol. 10 - Playable Politicians

There's plenty of games starring real people, most of them being atheletes, with some musicians and actors and even the occasional comedian. Less common, though still more than you'd expect are games starring politicians, a few of which I'll be looking at today. There are actually quite a few omissions from this post, like Bill Clinton's appearance in NBA Jam, and pretty much the entire cast of the old Spitting Image fighting game, but I've tried to stick to games that are relatively obscure, and also to games where the politician in question is clearly the protagonist and/or main character.

So the first game is probably the most well-known of the ones appearing in this list, though at the same time, its star is the politician with the least fame outside his own country. SEGA's 1985 arcade game I'm Sorry is a single-screen maze game that sees Kakuei Tanaka (Prime Minister of Japan between 1972 and 1974) walking the streets of Japan collecting gold bars and avoiding sex scandals. It's got a nice risk/reward mechanic, whereby you don't get any points for the gold bars until you take them back to your mansion, but the amount of points increases greatly with each bar collected before returning home. Still, it's more interesting as a historical curiosity than as an actual good game, and even without knowledge of Tanaka's career, seeing tiny little 80s sprites engaging in BDSM and such is mildly amusing the first few times.

Next up is a politician who is, pretty prolific, as far as videogame appearances go. As well as having two otherwise unrelated games of his own, he also makes an appearance in Street Fighter II. Of course I'm talking about the final General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev! I can only assume that Japanese game developers saw him in the news and thought he was cute or funny-looking or something?

Anyway, the two games were released within months of each other in 1991, with Gorby no Pipline Daisakusen landing first, in April for the MSX. It's a combination of two better-known puzzle games, those being Tetris and Pipemania. There's a Tetris-style pit, lines with open pipes at each side. Blocks with pipe shapes in them fall from above, and the aim is to link the pipes on the right with the pipes on the left. There's a quota on each stage that has to be fulfilled before the pit completely fills up with pipe-bits. It's a surprisingly difficult game, and though it's fun and can hold your attention for a short time, it's unfortunately less than the sum of its parts, with both Tetris and Pipemania both being much better games than it.

Two months later, Ganbare Gorby! reached the Game Gear, and this time, it's a top down action game. In it, you play as Gorbachev, now working in some kind of distribution centre, ensuring people get the bread, medicine and Game Gears that they need, by stepping on switches to make conveyor belts point in the right direction. Obviously, there are some complications: the conveyor belts also have upon them less desirable items, like mouldy bread, poison and gears. (The gears are the unwanted item on the stage with the Game Gear as the wanted item, a joke I've only noticed now that I'm typing it out.) There's also thieves and, for some reason, armed guards wandering about the place, stealing items and beating up Mikhail, to interfere with his work. It's not a bad game, and it's also got a decent difficulty curve, with the stages gradually getting more complex, with more labyrinthine layouts of belts, and multiple different sets of switches, and so on. A de-Gorbied version was also released in the west a bit later, renamed Factory Panic.

Our last politician is a bit of a renaissance man, having also been a conspiracy theorist/TV personality, an actor, and, most impotantly, a wrestler. Of course, it's Jesse "The Body" Ventura, Governer of Minnesota from 1999 to 2003! The game that bears his name, Jesse "The Body" Ventura Wrestling Superstars, a localisation of the Mega Drive game Thunder Pro Wrestling Retsuden, was never actually released, and the ROM was only found and leaked publicly in 2016. Since Thunder Pro was itself a spin-off of the excellent Fire Pro Wrestling series, it's mechanically sound, and definitely a big step up from other wrestling games of the time. The only real problem it has is that the single-player game is far too easy: I managed to get to the final stage on my first play. Still, it's a fun little game, and other than Ventura himself, takes the usual Japanese wrestling game route of having oddly-named copyright-friendly clones of real wrestlers. You should at least give it a go, if only because it's a recently unearthed lost treasure.

Godzilla - Kaiju Daishingeki (Game Gear)

The first time I played this game, a long time ago (so long ago that I was emulating it on the original GP32, which puts it in the early-mid 00s), I was so let down by the fact that a Godzilla game could be a boring-looking strategy game, which I totally wasn't in the mood for, that I switched it off, and then didn't play it again for years. A year or two ago, I decided to give it another try, no longer being the impatient teenager I was back then. I'm glad I did!

Videogames based on tokusatsu and kaiju properties have a bit of a poor reputation, the blame for which I place at the feet of the 1991 Ultraman arcade game and its ports to home consoles. It was a not-very-good fighting game, and by the time the home ports had come out, Street Fighter II had come out and pretty much changed the very meaning of the term "fighting game", making Ultraman look even worse. But there's actually a fair few decent toku games: the super sentai games on Playstation, the Power Rangers fighting game on SNES, and most of Godzilla's own games are at least playable, even if they aren't classics, even the critically-panned Dreamcast game Godzilla Generations is pretty decent, if you're in the mood for a kind of stress relief game about destroying cities and nothing else.

Godzilla Kaiju Daishingeki (translates to something like "The Great Kaiju Offensive", I think) is definitely playable, but not a classic. It's also pretty unique, as it's a turn-based strategy/side-scrolling action hybrid. When you start playing, you select a side (Godzilla and his monster allies, or the human G-force, and sometimes their monster allies. There's also unplayable space monsters, like Gigan and Space Godzilla) and a stage. Then, you move your units around in the time-honoured turn-based strategy manner, and when two opposing units are next to each other, they can enter combat. Combat comes in the form of little 2D side-view fight segments with very short time limits. Monsters and unique human units (like Super X or Mechagodzilla) have lots of HP, while conventional weapons (tanks and jets and the like) go down in a single hit, but come in "squadrons", which are kind of like lives in practice.

There's four stages, which can be played in any order, based on Godzilla vs. Gigan (1972), Godzilla vs. King Ghidorah (1991), Godzilla vs Mechagodzilla II (1993), and Godzilla Vs. Space Godzilla (1994), as well as a secret stage based on the original 1954 Godzilla movie, though unlocking it means completing all the others in a single sitting, and since each stage takes twenty to thirty minutes, that's going to take some saintlike patience (or save states) to accomplish. Anyway, this gives you a good mix of playable units on both sides, and most of the battles are balanced pretty well, too (the exception being the Space Godzilla battle, as ol' spacey takes barely any damage, and can heal half his max HP every round. I guess there's some solution I haven't worked out). Most importantly, it's actually pretty fun to play. Whether you're playing as the humans or Godzilla and friends, the combat is fun and satisfying, despite being very very simple. The only problem is that at the start of each battle, it takes a few turns to get the units from either side to actually get near each other and for the battle to really get exciting. But once it does, you'll be having a great time.

Godzilla Kaiju Daishingeki is a fun little game, and if you givie it a chance, you probably won't regret doing so. A great little game for Godzilla fans, and definitely in the upper tiers of the Game Gear library, too!

Pop Breaker (Game Gear)

Pop Breaker is an odd game. It feels a lot like an old computer game in a number of ways. The first and most obvious way is that the game's protagonist is the female driver of a futuristic tank, and that the game contains various (clean) pictures of her looking cute. (The pictures themselves are also fairly cute, being limited to the colour palette and very low resolution of the host hardware. The second computer-like trait might not sink in immediately while playing, but it is the most important and is the trait around which the entire game is built: the stages were clearly constructed using some kind of simple level editor program (which, unfortunately, has no in-game version).

 The game sees the player controlling their futuristic tank around various stages, with the aim of each stage being to destroy a stationary device, kind of like the Cores that appear in the Bangai-O games. The stages also contain various obstacles: breakable and unbreakable blocks, arrows that push the tank in the direction they point, triangular blocks that change the trajectory of enemy and player shots (interestingly, the player and enemies fire the same kinds of shots and all shots are treated equally when it comes to destroying blocks, enemies, and the player's tank), and several kinds of enemies who all have their own distinct patterns of behaviour.

Pop Breaker plays something like a hybrid of a shooting game and old-school tile-based action-puzzle games, Because of this play style, on first glance, movement and scrolling will seem jerky and awkward, but this is a necessary part of the design: everything in-game is measured in tiles, and a lot of the game is about being in the exact right position to shoot something or avoid shots or trick enemies into shooting each other. Most enemies are two by two tiles, the player's tank is three by three, while walls, shots and most other objects take up the space of a single tile.

The fact that the player's tank is three tiles wide ties into another odd quirk: before starting a new game, the player chooses whether shots will be fired from the middle, left or right tile. I strongly recommend against choosing the middle tile, though I don't see any specific advantage that left or right might have over each other.

Yeah, Pop Breaker is an interesting game. It's far from being essential, but it's one of a few slightly quirky Game Gear games from smaller developers, and it's definitely not a bad game.

As a little extra note, I've recently started a Patreon! If you pledge two American dollars a month, you get to see all new posts two days before they appear here, and I'd really appreciate the support!

Aa Harimanada (Game Gear)

Aa Harimanada is a sumo game, based on Kei Sadayasu's comiic of the same name. You've probably seen the Mega Drive game based on the comic, which, as was the fashion at the time, was more like a sumo-themed fighting game, with large, detailed sprites and special moves and the like. (As an aside, the UK's Sega Power magazine printed a review of the Mega Drive game, but were apparently too lazy or too cheap to get someone to translate the title for them, so they just referred to it as "SUMO".)

The Game Gear version is, as far as I can tell with my very limited understanding of sumo, a lot more realistic. Though there are special moves in the game, the only reason I know this is because I once

performed one by accident (ashoryuken-looking maneuver that I was unfortunately never able to recreate). The CPU opponents never performed any specials, no matter how far into the game I got. There is one particularly unrealistic-seeming touch left in however: the ability to jump stright up in the air about three or four metres. You can't attack or anything from up there, though, so it's as pointless as it is inappropriate. Winning is possible via the regular sumo methods of knocking your opponent down, or throwing them out of the ring, though there is also a health bar, presumably to avoid stalemates, and attacking an opponent with a fully depleted health bar will automatically knock them down or send them rolling out of the ring.

As you can see from the screenshots, the game's graphics are fairly nice looking, though they're far from the best the Game Gear has to offer, and as you play the game, you'll notice they commit a far graver sin: repetition to an almost absurd degree. There's only one arena in the game as far as I can tell, having played well over twenty stages in, and even worse, there's only on character sprite. It's true, although the many opponents you face in the game all have different names and portraits displayed before each bout, every one of them, including the player character, is one sprite used over and over with the only variations being in skin and mawashi colour. Making this even worse is the fact that the varying skin colours rarely match the colour of the character seen in the pre-match portraits.

Despite this, the presentation in general is pretty good. The one sprite the game has is of a decent size and also fairly well animated, and there's quite a bit of sampled speech, considering it's an early 90s handheld game. Each match also ends with a big, full-screen animation of the winniing move, which looks pretty cool and is only slightly hampered by the fact that again, all the animations feature generic characters, irrelevant of which characters are involved.

Unforunately, though there are a few good points speaking in this game's favour, they are vastly outweighed by the negatives. The aformentioned health bar is the game's real killer, even in light of the recoloured sprites problem, as it removes the need for any kind of skill in the game. It's entirely possible to coast through the game by simply pummeling opponents with palm thrusts and headbutts until they're knocked out, and it seems they never develop any kind of skill to counter such tactics. I've only seen the game over screen because I lost a fight on purpose, and I've never seen the game's ending simply because the boredom of fighting identical, inept opponents always becomes totaly unbearable after about twenty-ish matches.

Sega Game Pack 4 in 1 (Game Gear)

It might seem strange to review a compilation, but this isn't a compilation of previously released games, the games on here were made specifically for a compilation. Not this compilation, though. Three of the games were originally part of two Japan-only releases called Kuni-chan no Game Tengoku Volume 1 & 2. The other game, Penalty Shootout was made especially for this cartridge, which appears to have been released only in Europe, mainly as a pack-in with the console, but apparently there's also a very rare boxed release of it too.
You might say that a console pack-in might not be obscure enough to fit this blog's remit, but it's not like you see people posting about this game everywhere, is it? It seems to have been mostly forgotten, which is good enough for me.
So, on to the games!
First up is Flash Columns, which, as you might guess from the title, is a cut-down version of columns, featuring only the "Flash mode" from the full version. If you don't know, flash mode gives you a stage partially filled with jewels, some of which are flashing. Get rid of the flashing jewels and go on to the next stage. There are a couple of differences between this version and the version you might be used to, though. Firstly, although the jewels still fall in vertical columns of three, to make them disappear, they have to be arranged so that at least four of the same colour are touching, non diagonally, as opposed to the normal columns rule of putting three in a row, in any direction. The other difference is the scoring system, or rather, the lack of one. In this game, you get one point for every jewel you make vanish. No extra points for chains or disappearing large amounts at once, and also no time limit to get the falshing jewels in. This is the flaw that ruins the game, with no rewards for speed or skill, it feels like a tedious trudge.
The second game is the one made especially for europe, Penalty Shootout! Essentially, it's a guessing game. You choose which direction to make the guy kick the ball, and how high. Then you hope the goalie doesn't jump in the same direction. After five shots, you switch places. There's no way of knowing what the computer player is going to do, making the whole thing a pointless waste of time. Don't bother with it.
The third game, which is referred to by most of the internet as just "Rally", though I'm sure I remember it being called something like "Pan-American Grand Prix" in the manual, though I no longer have the manual, and of course there are no scans of it online (as far as I can tell), so wo knows? Anyway, this is definitely the best game of the four. It's an Outrun-clone, but with no branching paths. So I guess you could also call it a Hang-On clone, but in a car, if you wanted to. Whatever you want to call it, it's fast and fun and has nice graphics. The only downside is that it's really really short and easy. But that's not a massive downside, is it?
The last game, which is also the second best game on the cart is Tennis. It plays exactly like Nintendo's Tennis game on the Game Boy. Obviously this version is infinitely better though, for three reasons: it's made by SEGA, it's in glorious colour, and instead of Mario being the referee, Sonic is the referee. Other than those differences, I assume it's only the game's relative obscurity that stopped there being any kind of lawsuit, as it really does play exactly like Nintendo's game.

Arena (Game Gear)

This game is an isometric shooter, set in a dystopian future city. What's odd about this dystopia is that although the world is run by an evil TV station, the game isn't set in a deadly futuristic game show.
Arena came out fairly late in the Game Gear's life, and it shows in the graphics, which are of a much higher quality than you'd expect from the system. It's pretty fun, too. You run around the large stages, collecting keycards, killing enemies and trying to reach the exit. It actually feels a lot like an isometric version of one of the early first person shooters, like Wolfenstein 3D or Blake Stone.
The first few stages are set in and around a series of warehouses, and are fairly easy, though one strange thing is that the indoors areas are much bigger and more spacious than the outdoor ones. After you get through these, there's a stage set around a dirty polluted canal, and after this, more warehouses. Looking online, there does seem to be other settings for stages, but as the river stage takes a massive leap in difficulty, I always lose most of my lives there, and the remaining one or two a short way into the following stage. It's a shame, because until the game started sending enemies that took nearly 10 shots (with a powerful weapon, it would have been twice as many with the default gun) and can kill the player in two or three, I was really enjoying it.
So yeah, it starts off as a fun, nice looking game, but quickly gets killed by it's terrible difficulty curve.