[This post is part of a collaborative Sonic retrospective based around the games on Sonic Mega Collection Plus. To read more, please head over to the central post!]
Thanks to the Game Gear’s own Sonic the Hedgehog, Dr. Robotnik’s Mean Bean Machine is not the only Game Gear game on Sonic Mega Collection Plus to share a name with a Mega Drive one. It is, however, the one which is most obviously a direct port of the same game on the Mega Drive. That makes it arguably the collection’s most pointless inclusion, but also one of the Game Gear’s most straightforwardly strong moments.
It is the same simple Puyo Puyo-derived game of taking pairs of falling blobs and matching four blobs of the same colour. For the Game Gear, the beans get baked down to a more basic form: much less animated and a single block colour each. The music is similarly affected, though I slightly prefer the jagged title screen music for how much it ends up sounding like Hot Chip. None of Robotnik’s chosen opponents for you get their intro animations, making do with big vivid static artwork instead. Ultimately though, all of the really important functionality is present and correct.
That means that the zoning out quality that the focused, repetitive action can provide still works very well, and that it can be easily picked up and put down. Like Tetris before it, this made portability a wonderful fit for it. Being able to take that experience everywhere, or least everywhere you could carry your chunky, battery-eating Game Gear, easily outweighed the minor changes by offering so many more potential uses for it. It’s the same thing you can see playing out today in the existence of the not-dissimilar-looking portable Steam Deck.
More than that, though, Dr. Robotnik’s Mean Bean Machine on Game Gear offered one of the most straightforward illustrations for how Sega’s handheld was better than its rival’s. Sure, you could play Dr. Mario on your Game Boy and take your blob-matching action around with you. But you were matching different shades of green. The thing wouldn’t get colo(u)r until 1998! It was almost five years away when these bright and colourful mean beans came out.
If that had been enough for the Game Gear, things would have gone very differently and we most likely wouldn’t all be here reviewing this collection, because Sega wouldn’t have been trading on retro collections of when they were more successful. Colour wasn’t sufficient to make the other differences line up and disappear. There’s still a pretty good argument for this being the better version of the game. Just not when tied down to a PS2.