A friend of mine through circumstance ended up being gifted a box of old gaming bits including some Megadrive controllers and a broken Sega Master System. With a bit of research online he managed to repair it fixing the cracked motherboard to get the TV picture back. This led him onto then being asked to repair a neighbours Gamegear. After tinkering with that and becoming interested he then ended up buying a broken one for pennies from an online seller to repair for his own use. He's very handy like that.
Why am I telling you this? Because before Christmas I went to stay with him for a week and for the first time in my life, play a Gamegear. First I tried the original Gamegear he repaired for his neighbour with the original backlit screen. Playing Sonic on it I was pretty unimpressed to be honest. The poor lighting made seeing details or enemies difficult and the small screen coming from playing my Steamdeck made going back to it hard. Playing his own Gamegear though where he had modified it adding a modern LCD screen was literally like night and day. I could see the light, literally. Playing the same Sonic game I could see the detail, colours and animations. Sonic actually seemed...pretty good? This led me to take an invested interest in what actually is available on the Gamegear. Something I'd never so much as glanced at, which has led me to try GG Aleste.
Initially I thought GG Aleste was just a Gamegear port of the original Aleste from the MSX but upon starting realised I was quite quickly wrong. You play as the daughter of the original protagonist from the MSX game in an alternative timeline, Ellinor Waizen. There isn't much other story to be had here except the opening scene if you leave the title screen running of her taking off in the Galvanic Gunner fighter craft, and an end scene upon beating the game.
The game plays over 7 vertical scrolling stages or rounds as the game calls them which mostly end in boss fights. Most of the enemies are pretty much the same for every stage without too much variation. Some of the boss designs are pretty decent though with the final couple being especially cool like a mixture of H.R Giger and Cyberpunk fused. In between these there are a couple of bonus stages to collect power ups and boost your score. Killing every enemy will give you a huge bonus point score but as you can only see your score between levels rather than during it, it comes together as earning points feeling pointless? (ba dum tss)
Speaking of power ups, the Galvanic Gunner Fighter has two ways of increasing how it attacks. Firstly is just power chips that drop from certain enemies increasing your base attack power, there are also 8 different weapon types that can be collected like homing, wide shot, laser etc. These level as you collect multiples of them for more shots, spread or damage. There is no bomb, special or charge shot though you do explode when you die. Dying is actually fairly un-punishing letting you keep your current weapon type just dropping the power level as consequence for your play error.
And that's pretty much all there is to it, the game doesn't have any extras or much to encourage re-playability. What you get here in totality is an extremely simple shoot 'em up but it isn't bad. It's pretty easy without flourishes but it is running on a Gamegear and except for a couple of moments of slowdown is a pretty fast paced game for an 8 bit system. It has some varied level locations, ok music and stunning front cover art. If you're interested in games of yesteryear or gaming history you can do far worse then play this little title.
+ Simple, easy and short.
+ Looks and runs pretty well.
+ Cover art is gorgeous.
- Kind of forgettable experience overall.
- Lack of enemy variety or reasons to replay.
Why am I telling you this? Because before Christmas I went to stay with him for a week and for the first time in my life, play a Gamegear. First I tried the original Gamegear he repaired for his neighbour with the original backlit screen. Playing Sonic on it I was pretty unimpressed to be honest. The poor lighting made seeing details or enemies difficult and the small screen coming from playing my Steamdeck made going back to it hard. Playing his own Gamegear though where he had modified it adding a modern LCD screen was literally like night and day. I could see the light, literally. Playing the same Sonic game I could see the detail, colours and animations. Sonic actually seemed...pretty good? This led me to take an invested interest in what actually is available on the Gamegear. Something I'd never so much as glanced at, which has led me to try GG Aleste.
Initially I thought GG Aleste was just a Gamegear port of the original Aleste from the MSX but upon starting realised I was quite quickly wrong. You play as the daughter of the original protagonist from the MSX game in an alternative timeline, Ellinor Waizen. There isn't much other story to be had here except the opening scene if you leave the title screen running of her taking off in the Galvanic Gunner fighter craft, and an end scene upon beating the game.
The game plays over 7 vertical scrolling stages or rounds as the game calls them which mostly end in boss fights. Most of the enemies are pretty much the same for every stage without too much variation. Some of the boss designs are pretty decent though with the final couple being especially cool like a mixture of H.R Giger and Cyberpunk fused. In between these there are a couple of bonus stages to collect power ups and boost your score. Killing every enemy will give you a huge bonus point score but as you can only see your score between levels rather than during it, it comes together as earning points feeling pointless? (ba dum tss)
Speaking of power ups, the Galvanic Gunner Fighter has two ways of increasing how it attacks. Firstly is just power chips that drop from certain enemies increasing your base attack power, there are also 8 different weapon types that can be collected like homing, wide shot, laser etc. These level as you collect multiples of them for more shots, spread or damage. There is no bomb, special or charge shot though you do explode when you die. Dying is actually fairly un-punishing letting you keep your current weapon type just dropping the power level as consequence for your play error.
And that's pretty much all there is to it, the game doesn't have any extras or much to encourage re-playability. What you get here in totality is an extremely simple shoot 'em up but it isn't bad. It's pretty easy without flourishes but it is running on a Gamegear and except for a couple of moments of slowdown is a pretty fast paced game for an 8 bit system. It has some varied level locations, ok music and stunning front cover art. If you're interested in games of yesteryear or gaming history you can do far worse then play this little title.
+ Simple, easy and short.
+ Looks and runs pretty well.
+ Cover art is gorgeous.
- Kind of forgettable experience overall.
- Lack of enemy variety or reasons to replay.
2 Comments
@Dreamboat - I will!, I have it (Power Strike II) ready to go in the old backlog. I want to play all the Aleste games eventually. Currently I've only played this, M.U.S.H.A. Looking forward to the others, especially Robo Aleste on the Sega CD.
Dreamboat
3 months ago