Streets of Rage (Game Gear) Playthrough - NintendoComplete
220A playthrough of Sega's 1992 beat 'em up for the Sega Game Gear, Streets of Rage.
Played through as Blaze on the hard difficulty level.
The long-awaited sequel to Streets of Rage is finally here today, and I figured I'd welcome it with a throwback to the first time the series showed up in portable form.
Streets of Rage for the Game Gear, along with its direct sequel, represent a bit of an unusual case for Sega's 8-bit systems. The game was ported to both the Game Gear and the Master System (which, given the similarities in hardware, was a common practice), but what makes them stand out is that they are entirely different ports of the same game.
If you'd like to compare the different versions, here are the others:
Genesis: https://youtu.be/UrVMYd7MUzM
Master System: https://youtu.be/azQ_963DFB4
Both 8-bit versions were developed by Ancient, but I wonder what led them to invest the resources to build two unique conversions of the same game for virtually identical hardware platforms. The same goes for why the Game Gear version's 256K ROM is half the size of the one used for the Master System game.
But anyway, if you wanted Streets of Rage on the go in 1992, this was the way to play it. You get your choice between Axel and Blaze (sorry Adam), and if you have a friend with another system and a second copy of the game, you can play 2-player mode via the system link cable. The game has five stages, all styled after the levels in the Genesis game, but it's roughly the same length as it's 16-bit brother.
As a kid, I really liked this version of the game. It played better than the few similar titles you could find on Game Boy at the time, and it looked and sounded pretty good. Sure, it was super-pixelated, it was difficult to see your characters against certain colors, several moves were stripped out, and the controls were a bit too quick and slippery, but in 1992, this felt like a quality handheld title. Those were the sort of compromises you generally expected in playing a conversion of this sort - sorta like drinking a Tab instead of a Coke. But, you know, hopefully with less cancer.
I couldn't believe the difference when I played the Master System version years later, though. That one featured all of the original levels, characters, and moves that were cut for the Game Gear, and it felt far more like the Genesis game to play.
Comparisons and hind-sight aside, though, I always had fun with the Game Gear's Streets of Rage. The music was pretty good, the graphics were bright and busy, and though the gameplay was a bit crudely over-simplified, it still works fine for what it is. I remember being pretty impressed by the screenshots of it in magazine adverts (remember the ones that had rows of screenshots with games like Shinobi, Mickey, and Ninja Gaiden, all next to a conspicuous photo of World Class Leaderboard Golf?), and I was still impressed when I saw it in real life.
It obviously doesn't appeal the same way now as it did twenty years ago, but it's still worthwhile if you can take it for what it is rather than for what it's not. I enjoyed playing it again.
*Recorded using Retroarch shaders to simulate the look of the original hardware.
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No cheats were used during the recording of this video.
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