While certainly not the worst thing with the initials GG that the games industry has ever seen, Sega's Game Gear was this: massively overshadowed by the Game Boy. Nintendo's handheld had the benefit of a head start, a load momentum, and "Tetty" (Tetris). 

Sega, however, was pretty confident that it could win the handheld war, by releasing a full colour machine. Now get a load of this controversial opinion: in many respects, the Game Gear was the better hardware. At least you could play it in low light situations, and it never gave anybody the clap (legal disclaimer: neither did the Game Boy, probably).

Admittedly, it wasn't quite as pocket-friendly as the Game Boy, and it chewed through batteries like a dog with an advent calendar, but it was essentially a hold-in-your-hand version of Sega's Master System, and that's a pretty remarkable thing. Heck, with the TV tuner add-on you could even watch Going For Gold and Fort Boyard on it.

Unfortunately, where the Game Gear stumbled was its game library - lots of Master System ports, basically - which simply wasn't as diverse or strong as the Game Boy's. And yet... there were some surprising gems in there which bucked the trend.

​Here are 10 Game Gear games which might just make you think again.

The gulf between really great retro game cover art and really bad retro game cover art never ceases to stagger me. I get that it was a different time, and that any arse who got a ZX Spectrum for Christmas could program and release a game, but man... it was pretty clear that possessing basic programming skills rarely went hand-in-hand with even rudimental graphic design ability. 

Because it's always fun, here's a quick trawl through some more of the Spectrum's most graphic atrocities.

Four years late, I've finally read Blake Harris's book Console Wars. Why so long? Well, I mostly read books on my Kindle, and I'd foolishly bought a physical copy of Console Wars which doesn't even light up or anything, and thus it sat unread on a shelf, emitting the occasional whine of lament.

The book covers the Sega VS Nintendo battle of the early-90s, and ends at the point Sony enter the market with the PlayStation. It's a period in the games industry that is of obvious interest to me, because that was when I was first douching my duffel as a games journalist.

As I've written elsewhere, I never wanted to become a games journalist - or, indeed, any sort of journalist. My thing had always been drawing pictures - that's how I thought my career would continue - and I ended up with Mr Biffo and Digitiser quite by accident.

Obviously, it was The Best Job, and I went from being somebody who played games for fun, to somebody who played them for a money, like a "brass" - and found myself having to cultivate relationships with the people who made them.

Digitiser always had a volatile love/hate thing with Sega. We were hard on them in a way we never were on Nintendo, and in return they seemed to deal with us with a sense of heavy resignation and/or unhinged rage. 

One of their PR guys hated us and wouldn't give us the time of day - most memorably,  on one occasion we arrived for a pre-arranged meeting, only to have him storm into the reception of Sega Europe HQ - red-faced and fuming as if we'd turned up unexpectedly and done a poo on his cat - to tell us that we'd dragged him away from a meeting with the guys from Mean Machines, just so that he could tell us that the Mean Machines guys were more important and we were plankton and that we shouldn't have pooed on his cat.

"We didn't poo on your cat though..."

"I HATE YOU!!!!"

His replacement was a lovely bloke, who despaired when we refused to pull our punches, or when we drew penises in the notebook on his desk, and he did his best to get us on side. We slightly loved him... the company he worked for not so much.

Nintendo, on the other hand, we had very little to do with. We'd always receive review copies on time. We'd get invited to their press events. But in terms of anything more personal... their PR team was always remote and unknowable. Indeed, I found it interesting how my own experience of Sega and Nintendo are reflected in Console Wars.

This isn't a review. Well, it sort of is, a bit. But also... not really. Actually, maybe. I DON'T KNOW.

​Red Dead Redemption 2 is enormous. Like, two discs enormous in an age when games no longer come on multiple discs. I'm barely over 25% of the way through the main story - not even accounting for the side missions and activities I could spend time with - and seen but a fraction of the world... but I'm itching to talk about it.

So... let's talk. 

I loved Red Dead Redemption. I might've loved it more than Grand Theft Auto V in fact. I loved the Wild West setting, the writing, the characters, the depth. Red Dead Redemption 2 is a literal return to that world - or, rather, a first visit, as it's a direct prequel featuring many of the same characters and locations - but with more of everything. Wads more.

It's also very much a Rockstar game. It shares its DNA with the GTA series - the controls are familiar, the writing and humour offers the same giddy swerves from maturity to broad satire... and the visuals make it feel like part of the same lineage. And - with some serious caveats - I like that it's part of that family. 

As with everything Rockstar does, it's a deliciously epic game, and though I might have grown tired of open world adventures featuring forests and mountains, and the character models might not be the best, there's something alluringly grounded about RDR2's look. What it lacks in flash it more than makes up for in grittiness and scope.

Why am I talking about RDR2's graphics first? Because I want to get it out of the way before I launch into an impassioned tirade about everything that drives me mental about this game.

Somebody pass me a bib; it's time to start foaming at the mouth!