Another batch of Game Gear classics available at the Nintendo 3DS eShop.
Vampire: Master of Darkness
Let me take you back to the year 1992. Are you a SEGA fan? Great! Me too. I was like 12 then, and those of you just being born at the time are now graduating college, which is crazy, but look: what’s important is that if you had a SEGA system, you could play a lot of great stuff, but, and this is important, you could not play Castlevania. Castlevania was a very excellent game where a man very much wanted to kill Dracula, and eventually he did, hooray! But not on SEGA systems – on the Master System and the Genesis/Mega Drive and the Game Gear, Dracula remained painfully not-dead, or if you will, un-dead.
To fix this problem, SEGA crafted a game called “Vampire: Master of Darkness”, because killing big-name monsters who are also public domain is just something that happens in video games and movies. Of course, none of this would matter too much now, except that Vampire: Master of Darkness has some great things going for it: Some really exquisitely crafted graphics (seriously, these are like 8-bit graphics reading at a 16-bit level) with very tight controls and a high degree of difficulty to give you something to do with those tight controls.
If you want a creative, challenging, and fun-to-control game where you also happen to kill Dracula, then I very much recommend this game.
G-LOC: Air Battle
Based on the air combat arcade game developed by legendary developer SEGA AM2, G-LOC: Air Battle showed up on nearly every system SEGA was making at the time. But – and again, this is the charm of many of the games that showed up in different iterations at the Arcade or at Home – each version had its own unique take on the fly jet planes / shoot jet planes / no points for second best model of aircraft awesomeness.
The Game Gear version, it so happens, features my favourite variety of game mode: the ability to spend points to upgrade your fighter jet! My memory of the 90s is pretty fuzzy but I think this was the actual model used by the U.S. military at the time, with pilots regularly upgrading for things like unlimited missiles or extra lives.
Sonic Drift 2
Speaking of things that have been en vogue, such as the “drift racing” those crazy kids get up to these days with their racing karts and whatnot: here’s Sonic Drift 2! Sonic Drift 1 is a thing that existed only in Japan, and then it was conjectured that it was not only Tokyo who loved to race tiny little cars piloted by Sonic and Sonic’s many friends, and so Sonic Drift 2 was sent racing around the world.
Sonic Drift 2 includes the ability to race as Sonic, Amy, Knuckles, Tails, Fang the Sniper (!), and Metal Sonic – there is also a neat structure to the races, as you race to collect Chaos Emeralds. Depending on who you race as and who collects the Emeralds, you can challenge Sonic or Eggman in the final race around the Death Egg!
