Game Gear

'''NOTE: This console is actually good. This only focuses on what caused it to flop.''' The Game Gear (ゲームギア Gēmu Gia) is an 8-bit handheld game console released by Sega on October 6th, 1990, in Japan, 1991 in North America and Europe, and Australia in 1992.

The Game Gear's main selling point was its full-colored backlit screen, compared to the Game Boy's grayscale unlit screen.

Bad Qualities

 * 1) This console's biggest flaw is the terrible battery life. The Game Gear requires six AA batteries and drains them in around 3-5 hours because of the colored screen and backlight (which uses CCFL, which consumes more power than LED), which can't be turned off, increasing power consumption. In comparison, the Game Boy only requires 4 AAs and drains them in around 10-12 hours.
 * 2) It was very expensive for a handheld at 19,800 yen / $150 USD when it was launched. This was because the colored screen again made them more expensive to manufacture.
 * 3) Combine this with the aforementioned battery issue, and you have a console that really breaks the bank.
 * 4) It is oversized for a handheld console, about the size of an iPad Mini, making it difficult to carry around.
 * 5) It only has 3 buttons, which was a pain for developers making games with multiple inputs.
 * 6) Many ports of Master System games suffer from screen crunch, making it hard to see where you're going.
 * 7) The screen is somewhat dark, blurry, having poor color reproduction and worsens over time.
 * 8) Many units were manufactured with faulty parts, which worsen over times (such as capacitors on the board), causing them to have poor video quality or no sound, or led to console stops working. This can be fixed by replacing the broken pieces and replacing capacitors though.
 * 9) Overheating problems.
 * 10) It lacked a "killer app" game like Game Boy's Tetris and other games to encourage gamers to purchase it.
 * 11) Limited third-party support, giving it a weaker game library than the Game Boy's. Most of its games were made by Sega.
 * 12) Sega focused the Sonic the Hedgehog more on the Game Gear rather than the more successful Sega Genesis/Mega Drive (The Genesis had ten (nine when Sonic the Hedgehog 3 and Sonic & Knuckles are both counted as one game) while the Game Gear had twelve) and a lot of the exclusive Sonic Game Gear games were mediocre to terrible, the most notorious being the isometric puzzle-platformer Sonic Labyrinth and the pre-rendered side scrolling 2D platformer Sonic Blast.
 * 13) The remake of this system, Sega Game Gear Micro, is too small and only features four different games exclusive to one of four color variations. To add insult to injury, it costs 4,980 yen (US$50) for only 4 games, in which the 3DS offers these games for a much lower price in the eShop.

Good Qualities
Although it flopped, the console is decent, so it qualifies for an article on Awesome Games Wiki.

Reception
While the Game Gear sold a respectable 11 million units, it paled in comparison to the Game Boy's 118 million. The release of Pokémon in Japan crushed any hopes the Game Gear had of competing, forcing Sega to discontinue it. The Game Gear's main selling point, the colored screen, ironically caused its demise, as gamers couldn't forgive the terrible battery life, something that was crucial for a handheld system at the time. Because of this, Sega never released a successor to the Game Gear, the closest it had was the Sega Nomad which also flopped.

The Game Gear commercials are most infamous for featuring a dead squirrel.

In France, the Game Gear commercials infamously pronounced the "g" of "Gear" with a soft "j" sound, which has misled many French kids into pronouncing it this way, most notably the Joueur du Grenier, a fact he mentions in his review of the NES version of Metal Gear (and insisting into pronouncing the "Gear" part of the name as "djeer" as well).

Videos
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