This page is currently a work in progress, It'll be finished soon I swear.
When I was a kid, one of my favourite games was Sonic Gems Collection for the PS2. Me and my brother would play Sonic the Fighters and Sonic R over and over until he got sick of getting hammered. When he had enough I would then spend the rest of the evening playing Sonic CD and all the Game Gear games included in that collection. I would never get far though as those GG games were hard as nails and I didn't understand save states. In hindsight Gems Collection was a bit on the thin side and could have sorely used one or two more big titles like Knuckles Chaotix or SegaSonic the Hedgehog or included a few comics for players to read in full but at the time I was very happy with the game selection which lead me to having a fascination with SEGA, Sonic and the Game Gear. I always thought that the Game Gear looked awsome, being this giant brick of a console it was like if the Gameboy made zero compromises and I kinda respected that. Recently, I decided to buy myself a Game Gear and physical copies of all those games so that I could beat them for real and put them to rest.
When doing research on what Game Gear hardware I should buy, I learned the unfortunate truth that Game Gear's have aged like milk. They are filled with capacitors that are 100% guarenteed to leak all over the circuit board and need to be replaced, the screens give out and provided you fix all that you still need a comical number of batteries just to power the thing. I had very little confidence that any given Game Gear I buy would even work or that I would be able to repair it. So I took the cowardly option and bought a Game Gear that was pre-modded. All new capacitors, modern LCD screen, rechargable lithium batteries and a USB-C charging port. It's not exactly genuine but I have to say I was very happy with my purchase.
Now the only thing I was missing was a few games to go with it. As I browsed around the sad reality of living in a small country started to set in. There are essentially zero GG games for sale anywhere in Ireland. Cex, The R.A.G.E., Retromania, wherever I looked I found nothing. So I had to resort to buying games on Ebay and importing them from other countries. Since Brexit I have all but stopped buying anything from the UK as there is always some arse or elbow with import taxes and packages getting held up or costing a fortune to deliver so I had to get almost all of them from mainland Europe. Luckily almost all PAL GG games are in English so I wasn't going to have to make do with my games being in French or German. Still most sellers charge like 12-17 euro to ship to Ireland so I was still going to be paying essentially double for my games.
Sonic the Hedgehog
Sonic the Hedgehog 2
Sonic Triple Trouble
Sonic Chaos
Sonic Spinball
Tails Adventure
Tails Skypatrol
Dr. Robotnik's Mean Bean Machine
Castle of Illusion
Land of Illusion
Asterix and the Secret Mission
Shinobi