GameGear Micros Review

Anyone who has an interest in handhelds will remember the Sega GameGear, Sega’s attempt to rival the GameBoy which wasn’t the success they were hoping for mainly due to it absolutely eating batteries!

Now, to mark 60 years of Sega they’ve released a set of five GameGear Micros, unfortunately in Japan only, fortunately though I managed to obtain the set of all five and I absolutely love them although they’re not without their issues.  Firstly they are really cute but ridiculously small, so much so that they come supplied with the ‘Sega Big Window’ a screen magnifier which clips over the machine, this does improve things slightly and is kind of essential otherwise it is very difficult to see the screen.  

They come in five colours - black, red, yellow, blue and white, each machine has four games installed, however being a Japan only release not all of these games such as the Shining Force series are accessible to a Western audience unless you can read Japanese, however there are enough games on the different machines that are Western friendly including : Sonic the Hedgehog, Outrun, Puyo Puyo 2, Sonic Chaos, Columns, Baku Baku Animal and Gunstar Heroes.

By far the best of the five machines is the white unit which has four GameGear and Master System Aleste shoot-em-up titles installed : Aleste, Aleste II, the brand new Aleste 3 and PowerStrike II, being shoot-em-ups they are highly enjoyable and playable for a Western market and if you’re going to get any of the GG Micros I’d recommend the white one although it’s worth noting that except for the occasional sale on eBay the white machine is usually bundled as part of the PS4 or Switch Aleste Collection.

To sum up these are a very cool idea despite their issues and highly collectible for retrogaming fans, I’m very glad to have managed to get hold of the full set although would have like to have seen a slightly bigger machine with many more classic Western GameGear titles installed, one day perhaps…….TRJ Rating : 4/5