This was a favorite of mine on the PS2 Genesis Collection when I was a kid, but I could never beat it. I'd even gotten good enough at it to get to the final boss without losing a single life, but I could just never beat that bugger. For this month's TR of returning to games you gave up on previously, I played this on my PS3 Genesis Collection and was finally able to put that lousy final boss in the ground (and on my first try, no less ^w^)! I already knew I could get to the end of the game with all the characters before, so that wasn't important to me (I used save states after levels to help me get to the final boss as stacked as possible X3). What I wanted to do was beat the final boss without save states, and that ended up being mission accomplished ^w^. It took me a couple hours to finish the game on my PS3.
Gain Ground takes place in the far flung future where humanity is so peaceful that the world government built a big simulation called Gain Ground to help people keep their fighting spirit. But one day, the super computer goes berserk and takes a bunch of citizens hostage, so it's up to three of humanity's bravest soldiers to go in and rescue everyone and shut down this rouge machine. I actually never really realized the game even had a story as a kid. The first time I learned about the story was when I was playing through the Gain Ground level in Project X Zone many years after the fact, and I had to look up the plot synopsis for this story bit here XD. That said, the plot isn't totally meaningless, as it leads into one of the most interesting bits of the game's design.
Gain Ground is a top-down action game with 50 screens (in a very old-school arcade style). No scrolling levels here. Just a mission you need to either get all your soldiers to the EXIT of or kill all the enemies within. The nature of it being a simulation lends to the game's fairly unconventional system of lives. You don't really have extra lives, but instead have different soldiers (20 different kinds in total, with several copies of each in the game too), and when they're dead, you can't use them anymore. Except that you can! You only start the game with 3 soldiers, but little captured soldiers appear in predesignated places in each level, and if you touch one you can drag it to the exit to have it playable in the next level. You can only drag one at a time though, so sometimes you will need to use several characters who can both get to the POW they gotta rescue AND to the exit, which can be tricky in some maps, since the level ends if you kill everything. You MUST get the POW to the exit to have them in the next stage, but that also goes for characters who "die". If a character takes a hit, they turn into a little POW token that can be rescued. Granted, if someone who is rescuing dies, the POW they were rescuing is erased and they become a POW to rescue. You don't have infinite chances, but it's very refreshingly forgiving for a game from 1990.
The characters themselves are all very different, albeit not balanced all that well. They all have a standard fire, which can shoot any direction and is often quite short range, but then everyone has their own special fire as well. Sometimes it can shoot in any direction, sometimes it gives you range across the entire screen, sometimes it can fire onto an upper level (a very very valuable skill, as many enemies hide on roofs safe from your normal bullets and most characters' special attacks), and sometimes they even take the form of a sort of shield of bullets. All the characters also have varying walk speeds and even different hands they hold their weapon in, meaning firing JUST around a corner with your default weapon may be easier with some characters than others depending on if they use their right or left hand. There's a lot of trial and error in figuring out exactly what each character can do and how good they are (but that's what save states are for XD), but it means that you need to constantly reassess how you're going to approach a stage if one of your MVPs gets taken down and has to be rescued. There are a couple characters who are like WAY better than most others (like the yellow bearded viking guy) as they have upwards-firing specials and area also very fast with good range, but well balanced or not, you'll need those soldiers if you wanna have a chance at seeing the end of the game.
The game's presentation is pretty underwhelming, as one might expect from an arcade conversion fairly early in the Genesis' life. There aren't many songs and those that are here are pretty forgettable background noise for the most part, but they aren't actively bad. The graphics are quite nice though, with the character portraits being nicely detailed, and the bullets and sprites always being very clear so there's very rarely any ambiguity for what killed you.
Verdict: Recommended. I'll admit a decent portion of it is nostalgia coupled with this being a sort of action game that fits my style very well, but this is one of my favorite Genesis games. It's not terribly long (and it's quite an expensive game if you're hunting down the physical cart), but it's really good fun. The gameplay won't be for everyone, but it's well worth a try if you have one of the many Genesis collections its found its way onto over the years.
Gain Ground takes place in the far flung future where humanity is so peaceful that the world government built a big simulation called Gain Ground to help people keep their fighting spirit. But one day, the super computer goes berserk and takes a bunch of citizens hostage, so it's up to three of humanity's bravest soldiers to go in and rescue everyone and shut down this rouge machine. I actually never really realized the game even had a story as a kid. The first time I learned about the story was when I was playing through the Gain Ground level in Project X Zone many years after the fact, and I had to look up the plot synopsis for this story bit here XD. That said, the plot isn't totally meaningless, as it leads into one of the most interesting bits of the game's design.
Gain Ground is a top-down action game with 50 screens (in a very old-school arcade style). No scrolling levels here. Just a mission you need to either get all your soldiers to the EXIT of or kill all the enemies within. The nature of it being a simulation lends to the game's fairly unconventional system of lives. You don't really have extra lives, but instead have different soldiers (20 different kinds in total, with several copies of each in the game too), and when they're dead, you can't use them anymore. Except that you can! You only start the game with 3 soldiers, but little captured soldiers appear in predesignated places in each level, and if you touch one you can drag it to the exit to have it playable in the next level. You can only drag one at a time though, so sometimes you will need to use several characters who can both get to the POW they gotta rescue AND to the exit, which can be tricky in some maps, since the level ends if you kill everything. You MUST get the POW to the exit to have them in the next stage, but that also goes for characters who "die". If a character takes a hit, they turn into a little POW token that can be rescued. Granted, if someone who is rescuing dies, the POW they were rescuing is erased and they become a POW to rescue. You don't have infinite chances, but it's very refreshingly forgiving for a game from 1990.
The characters themselves are all very different, albeit not balanced all that well. They all have a standard fire, which can shoot any direction and is often quite short range, but then everyone has their own special fire as well. Sometimes it can shoot in any direction, sometimes it gives you range across the entire screen, sometimes it can fire onto an upper level (a very very valuable skill, as many enemies hide on roofs safe from your normal bullets and most characters' special attacks), and sometimes they even take the form of a sort of shield of bullets. All the characters also have varying walk speeds and even different hands they hold their weapon in, meaning firing JUST around a corner with your default weapon may be easier with some characters than others depending on if they use their right or left hand. There's a lot of trial and error in figuring out exactly what each character can do and how good they are (but that's what save states are for XD), but it means that you need to constantly reassess how you're going to approach a stage if one of your MVPs gets taken down and has to be rescued. There are a couple characters who are like WAY better than most others (like the yellow bearded viking guy) as they have upwards-firing specials and area also very fast with good range, but well balanced or not, you'll need those soldiers if you wanna have a chance at seeing the end of the game.
The game's presentation is pretty underwhelming, as one might expect from an arcade conversion fairly early in the Genesis' life. There aren't many songs and those that are here are pretty forgettable background noise for the most part, but they aren't actively bad. The graphics are quite nice though, with the character portraits being nicely detailed, and the bullets and sprites always being very clear so there's very rarely any ambiguity for what killed you.
Verdict: Recommended. I'll admit a decent portion of it is nostalgia coupled with this being a sort of action game that fits my style very well, but this is one of my favorite Genesis games. It's not terribly long (and it's quite an expensive game if you're hunting down the physical cart), but it's really good fun. The gameplay won't be for everyone, but it's well worth a try if you have one of the many Genesis collections its found its way onto over the years.