GG Aleste

Game Gear is dead hardware with no future? GG Aleste is living proof of the opposite - and in more than one wave, at that. Under this name hides one of the best shoot-'em-up series that ever arrived on Sega's handheld, and its story spans from 1991 all the way, surprisingly, to 2020.

The original GG Aleste is a vertical shmup from the studio Compile - Japanese masters of the genre who were behind the entire Aleste and Power Strike range. These people knew exactly how to unleash dense fire, a legible swarm of enemies and weapon upgrades on a small eight-bit screen without the game stuttering or losing clarity. The result is a brisk, addictive shooter that squeezed the maximum out of the handheld.

On the small Game Gear screen, shmups work unexpectedly well: the action is tight, the pace high, and every death is your own mistake. You collect upgrades, juggle with your type of fire and progress through levels that have both momentum and atmosphere. For fans of the genre it is one of the peaks of what handheld Sega offered.

The most amazing part, however, is the third installment. GG Aleste 3 was made in 2020 by the studio M2 as a brand-new game - for the long-defunct Game Gear hardware. It came about as part of the Aleste Collection and is a small miracle: a proper, full-fledged new title for a console the market had long written off. M2, famous for its meticulous retro ports and emulations, thereby proved that even a dead platform can get a top-tier new release.

It is a rare situation where past and present meet on a single cartridge slot. Whether you reach for the classic from Compile or the modern piece from M2, you get some of the best shmups that ever existed on the Game Gear.

Why play: Top-tier handheld shmups from the genre masters at Compile, crowned by the modern marvel GG Aleste 3 from M2 - the peak of shooting on the Game Gear.