Back in the 8 and 16 bit days, shooters were extremely common because the technology available at the time kind of limited the types of games that could possibly be presented on a home console. This worked out nicely for me because it was (and is) one of my favorite genres that exists in gaming, ever. Gaiares is a strange name (pronounced "Guy-are-us"as far as i know)
I have to admit: The fact that the reaper was featured on the back of the box was a pretty strong motivator for me to decide to purchase the game. It is necessary to keep in mind that back in those times (1990) there was no mass internet and most places did not let you try out the games before you bought them. You kind of just had to take a chance or wait for a magazine review to come out.
Innovative gameplay
Something Gaiares did that I don't think any other game did before is enable you to steal the weapons of your enemies. you would shoot your little shield out and it would attach to an enemy and give you a version of their attack. If you did this 3 (it might have been 4) times you had the full powered up version of said weapon. If you were good at dodging, this meant that you could quite easily obtain a fully powered-up weapon in a short amount of time (by the way you needed to be good at dodging to even play this game.)
Epic bosses (for the time period)
Bosses are a mainstay of any game, including shooters. Gaiares took this to the next level IMO because up until that point I dont' recall seeing such amazingly presented ones. The attacks were all quite different and honestly, you needed to repeat them multiple times to understand their attack patterns but i suppose this is normal.
If you died during a boss fight, you started off right at the boss again and then it would be necessary to steal their attack (using your attack stealing drone) before you could do any amount of realistic damage to them because as is the case in most shooters, you start after a death with the lowest powered weapon that the game has available. There are some fun videos out there of die-hard fans that complete the entire game without ever powering up, but that is a level of nerd-dom that I have never accomplished and likely never will.
Overall great music and graphics
Gaiares is one of the first games that I recall having a multi-tiered background to simulate a 3d environment. These graphics look dumb by today's standards but keep in mind that this was nearly 30 years ago. Many of the foreground items could be crashed into and while you couldn't interact with the background it was really wild to have things passing by at different speeds that created a more immersive environment.
The Genesis (Mega-Drive) is commonly made fun of for having a rather weak audio setup and for the most part that is true. One need only listen to the difference between games that were released on both Nintendo and Sega to understand this. However, the developers over at Telenet must have worked tirelessly to deal with the limitations of Sega's machine in order to create one of the best soundtracks that existed at the time.
A completely absurd advertising campaign
I mean, just look at that guy. Some of the game boxes actually had him on it instead of the game's art. People might be thinking "well that is what people looked like in the 1990's." I was in high school in 1990 and while there were a few people that looked like this for the most part, no.... no they did NOT look like him. Was it advertising genius to force people to remember it by having a very unlikely spokesperson? Perhaps. It was not the reason why I bought the game though.
Overall Analysis
Gaiares was just epic for the 90's and if you were to ask anyone that was a gamer at that time they would likely agree with me. It was extremely difficult and was one of the first games i remember playing that could truly be considered just for hardcore gamers. I think that between this and R-Type it is the most I remember needing to memorize the patterns of a game if you were to have any chance of success. Once you learned how it works though, it was easy and you felt like you accomplished something. Maybe this seems odd to anyone who is not a gamer, but there is a great deal of satisfaction that comes from mastering something that is this difficult.
on a scale of "bleh!" to "Wowsers!" this game gets a well-deserved