{"id":37,"date":"2012-03-16T06:28:17","date_gmt":"2012-03-16T06:28:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blackfalcongames.net\/?p=37"},"modified":"2026-06-18T02:36:59","modified_gmt":"2026-06-18T06:36:59","slug":"tempo-jr-game-gear-review","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blackfalcongames.net\/?p=37","title":{"rendered":"Tempo Jr. (Game Gear) Review"},"content":{"rendered":"<div id='gallery-1' class='gallery galleryid-37 gallery-columns-3 gallery-size-thumbnail'><dl class='gallery-item'>\n\t\t\t<dt class='gallery-icon portrait'>\n\t\t\t\t<a href='https:\/\/blackfalcongames.net\/?attachment_id=39'><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"150\" height=\"150\" src=\"https:\/\/blackfalcongames.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/03\/586843_89335_front-150x150.jpg\" class=\"attachment-thumbnail size-thumbnail\" alt=\"\" aria-describedby=\"gallery-1-39\" \/><\/a>\n\t\t\t<\/dt>\n\t\t\t\t<dd class='wp-caption-text gallery-caption' id='gallery-1-39'>\n\t\t\t\tUS box\n\t\t\t\t<\/dd><\/dl><dl class='gallery-item'>\n\t\t\t<dt class='gallery-icon portrait'>\n\t\t\t\t<a href='https:\/\/blackfalcongames.net\/?attachment_id=38'><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"150\" height=\"150\" src=\"https:\/\/blackfalcongames.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/03\/586843_2283_front-150x150.jpg\" class=\"attachment-thumbnail size-thumbnail\" alt=\"\" aria-describedby=\"gallery-1-38\" \/><\/a>\n\t\t\t<\/dt>\n\t\t\t\t<dd class='wp-caption-text gallery-caption' id='gallery-1-38'>\n\t\t\t\tJapanese box\n\t\t\t\t<\/dd><\/dl><dl class='gallery-item'>\n\t\t\t<dt class='gallery-icon landscape'>\n\t\t\t\t<a href='https:\/\/blackfalcongames.net\/?attachment_id=40'><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"150\" height=\"150\" src=\"https:\/\/blackfalcongames.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/03\/gfs_89335_1_4_mid-150x150.jpg\" class=\"attachment-thumbnail size-thumbnail\" alt=\"\" aria-describedby=\"gallery-1-40\" \/><\/a>\n\t\t\t<\/dt>\n\t\t\t\t<dd class='wp-caption-text gallery-caption' id='gallery-1-40'>\n\t\t\t\tTitle Screen\n\t\t\t\t<\/dd><\/dl><br style=\"clear: both\" \/><dl class='gallery-item'>\n\t\t\t<dt class='gallery-icon landscape'>\n\t\t\t\t<a href='https:\/\/blackfalcongames.net\/?attachment_id=42'><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"150\" height=\"150\" src=\"https:\/\/blackfalcongames.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/03\/gfs_89335_2_3_mid-150x150.jpg\" class=\"attachment-thumbnail size-thumbnail\" alt=\"\" aria-describedby=\"gallery-1-42\" \/><\/a>\n\t\t\t<\/dt>\n\t\t\t\t<dd class='wp-caption-text gallery-caption' id='gallery-1-42'>\n\t\t\t\tIngame, first level\n\t\t\t\t<\/dd><\/dl><dl class='gallery-item'>\n\t\t\t<dt class='gallery-icon landscape'>\n\t\t\t\t<a href='https:\/\/blackfalcongames.net\/?attachment_id=41'><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"150\" height=\"150\" src=\"https:\/\/blackfalcongames.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/03\/gfs_89335_1_5_mid-150x150.jpg\" class=\"attachment-thumbnail size-thumbnail\" alt=\"\" aria-describedby=\"gallery-1-41\" \/><\/a>\n\t\t\t<\/dt>\n\t\t\t\t<dd class='wp-caption-text gallery-caption' id='gallery-1-41'>\n\t\t\t\tLevel select screen.  It looks like the 32X version&#8217;s, but here the level order is preset &#8212; no level selection.\n\t\t\t\t<\/dd><\/dl><dl class='gallery-item'>\n\t\t\t<dt class='gallery-icon landscape'>\n\t\t\t\t<a href='https:\/\/blackfalcongames.net\/?attachment_id=43'><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"150\" height=\"150\" src=\"https:\/\/blackfalcongames.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/03\/gfs_89335_2_4_mid-150x150.jpg\" class=\"attachment-thumbnail size-thumbnail\" alt=\"\" aria-describedby=\"gallery-1-43\" \/><\/a>\n\t\t\t<\/dt>\n\t\t\t\t<dd class='wp-caption-text gallery-caption' id='gallery-1-43'>\n\t\t\t\tSad Tempo&#8230;\n\t\t\t\t<\/dd><\/dl><br style=\"clear: both\" \/><dl class='gallery-item'>\n\t\t\t<dt class='gallery-icon landscape'>\n\t\t\t\t<a href='https:\/\/blackfalcongames.net\/?attachment_id=44'><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"150\" height=\"150\" src=\"https:\/\/blackfalcongames.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/03\/gfs_89335_2_5_mid-150x150.jpg\" class=\"attachment-thumbnail size-thumbnail\" alt=\"\" aria-describedby=\"gallery-1-44\" \/><\/a>\n\t\t\t<\/dt>\n\t\t\t\t<dd class='wp-caption-text gallery-caption' id='gallery-1-44'>\n\t\t\t\tHappy Tempo!\n\t\t\t\t<\/dd><\/dl>\n\t\t\t<br style='clear: both' \/>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\n<ul>\n<li>Title: Tempo Jr.<\/li>\n<li>Developer and Publisher: Sega<\/li>\n<li>Released: 1995 in the US, Europe, and Japan<\/li>\n<li>Platform: Sega Game Gear<\/li>\n<li>Sega Club title<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Tempo Jr. is a platformer by Sega for the Game Gear released in 1995.\u00a0 It&#8217;s one of the Sega Club titles. The Sega Club was a line of games for the Genesis, Sega CD, and Game Gear aimed at a young audience, and all Sega Club titles are both easy and short.\u00a0 Tempo Jr. is no exception; this game&#8217;s extremely easy and it&#8217;s not very long either.\u00a0 Unless you&#8217;re a young child, expect to beat it without dying, and in not much time either (over an hour at most).\u00a0 The other Sega Club games, like Kids on Site for Sega CD, or Bonkers or Ecco Jr. for the Genesis, are similarly extremely easy and content-light.<\/p>\n<p>The Game Gear&#8217;s kind of funny, it has some pretty difficult games, like Sonic 2, but also some of the shortest and easiest games I have ever played, like Tom and Jerry: The Movie or The Lost World: Jurassic Park. This game is in the latter category, though it is a lot more fun than either of those games.\u00a0 The difficulty&#8230; I&#8217;ve described, but at least it&#8217;s longer than a few GG games, though compared to games as insultingly short as those are, that is admittedly not saying much.\u00a0 Seriously, The Lost World ends almost as soon as it begins&#8230; and that was a 1997 release too, Sega&#8217;s last GG game!\u00a0 You&#8217;d think they&#8217;d have tried.\u00a0 Oh well..<\/p>\n<p>However, despite that, Tempo Jr. isn&#8217;t without worth, and even though I spent $7 for the cartridge and beat it in less than a couple hours of total playtime without dying a single time (and no, there are no difficulty level settings), I had fun enough that I don&#8217;t feel like I wasted my money.<\/p>\n<p>Tempo Jr. is the second of the three games in the Tempo series, and it&#8217;s the last one that got a US release.\u00a0 The first game is Tempo the 32X, and was designed by the guy behind Bonk&#8217;s Adventure if I remember right.\u00a0 It&#8217;s a good game.\u00a0 Not a great game, but a good game.\u00a0 It&#8217;s a bit slow paced, and I wish it had on-cart saving instead of passwords and made more use of the 32X (it really only uses it for the animating, colorful backgrounds and nothing else just about), but it&#8217;s fun.\u00a0 The last game is Super Tempo, 2d platformer for the Saturn released in 1998 only in Japan.\u00a0 It&#8217;s maybe the best Tempo game, but it&#8217;s also quite expensive.<\/p>\n<p>Tempo is, as the image above shows, an animate green bug of sorts with headphones on.\u00a0 He&#8217;s supposed to be cool and into music.\u00a0 Yeah, he&#8217;s a product of &#8217;90s character art design for sure, almost painfully so.\u00a0 But still, his design is certainly dated, but eh, it works okay enough, and I do like the color (green).\u00a0 In the original game, Tempo has a girlfriend, Katy (naturally, she wears a pink dress&#8230; of course.).\u00a0 She is in this game, but all she does is dances with Tempo after you beat levels, unlike the original game where she can actually help you (flying around or following him or something at times, I forget the exact details).\u00a0 Oh well.<\/p>\n<p>Controls &#8211; The game controls well.\u00a0 Tempo can jump, roll, kick, shoot music notes, and dance.\u00a0 Tempo can also hover by pressing the jump button again in the air; he&#8217;ll then very slowly descend, and there&#8217;s no flight timer or something, only your slowly descending height.\u00a0 Music notes will stun enemies, at which time you can jump on or kick them.\u00a0\u00a0 Your normal dance is mostly just for fun, but if you collect the right powerups and your healthbar starts flashing, pressing A+B together will activate a special dance that drains half of Tempo&#8217;s health, but destroys all enemies on screen.\u00a0 It&#8217;s not too useful given how easy the game is, but it&#8217;s fun to do once in a while anyway.\u00a0 At the parts where Tempo&#8217;s looking depressed and moving slowly, kick the thing and he&#8217;ll get happy again.\u00a0 This might be a checkpoint?\u00a0 I&#8217;m not sure, it&#8217;s so hard to die I never found out.<\/p>\n<p>Gameplay &#8211; It&#8217;s a platformer.\u00a0 Kill the enemies, explore stages to find the items, the usual.\u00a0 There are no pits of death here &#8212; that&#8217;d be too tough for this game&#8217;s very young audience apparently.\u00a0 Instead, pits and spikes just do damage, and not much of it.\u00a0 Most enemies drop health when killed, so running out of health is not easy.\u00a0 The levels are solidly designed and sized about right.\u00a0 The game is made up of four of five worlds, each with two levels and then a boss, with a minigame after that if you got any coins to use in it.\u00a0 As I said, the levels are quite easy.\u00a0 They&#8217;re decent length, to the point where I found myself getting bored after a couple of levels, so I didn&#8217;t beat this game all at once; instead, I left it on for some time and came back later (yes, I use my GG on AC power, not with batteries.).\u00a0 There are passwords, but you have to get a game over to be given one, so unless you intentionally get a game over, you won&#8217;t be seeing them.\u00a0 I did get a game over once, after beating the game, to make sure that the passwords are indeed there; they are, accessible from the game over screen.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Given the slow pace and minimal difficulty, they&#8217;re even almost useful&#8230; you may not want to play it all at once.\u00a0 As for the bosses, they&#8217;re simple, but fun.\u00a0 Most bosses have very easily exploitable patterns, so don&#8217;t expect anything too hard, but they are a bit tricker than the stages are, at least until you figure them out.\u00a0 Like the rest of the game&#8217;s visual design, the bosses have good, clear designs.\u00a0 I like the bosses, from the frog to the penguin to the toy soldier guy.\u00a0 It&#8217;s kind of boring when all you usually have to do is stand still, or walk back and forth, while kicking&#8230; but oh well, at least the designs are good.\u00a0\u00a0 As for the minigames, they&#8217;re fun as I said.\u00a0 Levels 1 and 3 have a Simon-inspired minigame, levels 2 and 4 a game of chance and strength, pretty much.\u00a0 They&#8217;re fun diversions.\u00a0 I&#8217;m absolutely terrible at the Simon game&#8230; it&#8217;s got eight different buttons that light up (named after the eight music notes, naturally; remember the musical theme), and I always mess up quickly.\u00a0 I didn&#8217;t get past a +500 bonus.\u00a0 The other game is a bit easier, but more random.\u00a0 After beating the main worlds, there&#8217;s a short boss rush.\u00a0 You don&#8217;t refight all of the bosses, you see; instead, you only fight two of them, and then the final boss.\u00a0 The final boss is a lot like the first boss, but with a few more moves.\u00a0 After that it&#8217;s an ending screen, some credits, and then it&#8217;s over.\u00a0 Yeah, you don&#8217;t play this game for its great ending either.<\/p>\n<p>Graphics &#8211; Obviously, they couldn&#8217;t recreate the graphics of the 32X on the Game Gear, but Tempo Jr. is a pretty nice looking game for the system.\u00a0 It&#8217;s got good, clear graphics, with nice large sprites, colorful environments, and easy-to-see enemies and pickups.\u00a0 For a Game Gear game, this is definitely a top-level effort visually.\u00a0 The graphics have some detail to them, and some colorful art design too &#8212; just look at that main menu screen! There is slowdown when there are more than one or two enemies on screen, but that&#8217;s rare, so it&#8217;s not too bad.\u00a0 As for the audio, it&#8217;s decent GG audio, but like the Master System that it&#8217;s based on, the GG&#8217;s audio is no match for the NES or Game Boy.\u00a0 The advantage was visual, not aural.\u00a0 Also, the music doesn&#8217;t sound much like what you&#8217;d imagine Tempo would be listening to, obviously, but that&#8217;s just a limitation of the platform (and I don&#8217;t mind at least, I prefer cart music over that&#8230;).<\/p>\n<p>Overall, Tempo Jr. is a fun game that I enjoyed playing.\u00a0 It&#8217;s ridiculously short and is one of the easier games I&#8217;ve played, but it&#8217;s fun while it lasts anyway, so it was worth playing even so.\u00a0 I wish that they&#8217;d made a full handheld Tempo title, instead of this Sega Club game, but at least it&#8217;s better than nothing.\u00a0 Despite the more popular platform, probably because it&#8217;s a Sega Club title, this game is perhaps even less common than the 32X game.\u00a0 It probably should remain that way &#8212; it&#8217;s far too short and easy for me to give a strong recommendation for it &#8212; but anyone who likes Tempo, or Sega platformers, should check it out at least.\u00a0 If you can find it for a couple of bucks and know about the caveats, consider picking it up.\u00a0<strong>Score: C-<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Title: Tempo Jr. Developer and Publisher: Sega Released: 1995 in the US, Europe, and Japan Platform: Sega Game Gear Sega Club title Tempo Jr. is a platformer by Sega for the Game Gear released in 1995.\u00a0 It&#8217;s one of the &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/blackfalcongames.net\/?p=37\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,117,34,8],"tags":[39,40,13,35],"class_list":["post-37","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-classicgames","category-full-reviews","category-game-gear","category-reviews","tag-classic-game","tag-gg","tag-review","tag-tempo"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blackfalcongames.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blackfalcongames.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blackfalcongames.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blackfalcongames.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blackfalcongames.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=37"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blackfalcongames.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blackfalcongames.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=37"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blackfalcongames.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=37"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blackfalcongames.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=37"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}