Tag Archives: jolly

Phantasy Star Gaiden, Game Gear

Phantasy Star Gaiden is a handheld RPG, released only in Japan for the Game Gear in 1992. The game was developed by Japan System Supply and is a short, non-linear spin-off from the main Phantasy Star series. A fan translation patch makes the game playable to non Japanese-speakers.

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The Addams Family, Game Gear

The Sega Game Gear got a version of the movie-licensed platform game, The Addams Family, in 1993. This one was programmed by Arc Developments, and not by Ocean Software (who had done most of the other versions). It was published in North America and Europe by Flying Edge, and by Acclaim in Japan.

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The Addams Family, TurboGrafx CD

The Addams Family for TurboGrafx-CD was developed by ICOM Simulations, Inc. and first published by NEC Technologies in 1991. It does not follow the template of all the Ocean ports of this game. It instead does its own thing entirely and takes advantage of the audio streaming from the CD by adding lots more sound and speech. Which gives it a distinctive “talkie” feel.

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The Addams Family, Megadrive/Genesis

The Megadrive version of Ocean Software‘s The Addams Family is excellent – definitely on-par with the SNES version; arguably even better because it has a nice little intro animation that the SNES version doesn’t have.

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The Addams Family, Amstrad CPC

The 1992 Amstrad CPC version of Ocean‘s ubiquitous The Addams Family is probably the ugliest out of all the versions. The chunky pixels and small play window certainly don’t make for much to look at.

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The Addams Family, Sega Master System

The Sega Master System version of The Addams Family is very good. It features an interesting player character in Gomez, in this one wearing a blue suit, who can jump and climb through a complex set of levels in order to rescue his other family members.

All the while holding his hand, distinctively, in his jacket pocket…

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Pengo, Game Gear

Sega‘s classic ice-pushing arcade maze game, Pengo, is well-represented on the Game Gear, with this jolly conversion by Coreland Technology (the original developer of Pengo arcade). It was first released in 1990 in Japan, and 1991 in Europe. It doesn’t look like it had a North American release.

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Ms. Pac-Man, Game Gear

Developed by Namco Hometek, Inc. and published by Namco in 1993, the Game Gear version of Ms. Pac-Man is arguably the best handheld version of the classic arcade game. Maybe even the best home version entirely.

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Wee Ninja, Atari 8-bit

Wee Ninja is a homebrew scrolling platform game for Atari 8-bit home computers (with 32K of RAM). It was written by Paul Lay and first released by Playsoft in June 2025, to rapturous applause.

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