What Game Gear games would you guys recommend?
I'll preface this by saying I think this platform kinda sucks.
The 3 Madou Monogatari games are cool and have translations, plus MM Doki Doki Vacation is kinda neat.
Similarly translated Megami Tensei Gaiden: Last Bible is best played on GG and translated, and there's a translation for Phantasy Star Gaiden.
You probably know about the Shining Force Gaiden games, the first 2 of which are playable in Shining Force CD. But the 3rd game "Shining Force Gaiden: Final Conflict" is only playable on GG.
The ports of Dynamite Headdy, Gunstar Heroes, and Ristar are neat too.
Comes up a lot if you go looking for games but Coca-Cola Kid is well made for what it is:
Maybe it's fast enough for disc drive games?
As I understand it the MC bus is still slower than DVD loading. Which can a problem ranging from annoying (slow load times, FMV skipping) to game breaking (timing issue when loading).
For me the real appeal is being able to softmod without doing all this nonsense of messing with boot disks and USB drives all the time, or going through the trouble of a hardware mod.
It does not do anything special in that regard. For PS2 you could use FreeMcBoot for like almost 20 years now to softmod and there's no boot disks needed.
If you REALLY want to play PSX games on your PS2, you could try using MechaPWN assuming your console is the right version. This basically allows you to run burned PSX CDs on your PS2.
This is absolutely the way to do PS1 games on a PS2. MechaPwn is great.
Personally I would rather use Duckstation as I like all of the bells and whistles that come with that emulator (RetroAchievements being the major one nowadays along with CRT filters).
Personally I really like using a real CRT for PS1 games, so if I'm not using a real disc I tend to use a PSPgo attached to a CRT with real 240p output, compatibility is near perfect after years of people researching how to improve the PSP pops and there are a lot of pre-made eboots out there. It's a costly setup to get going these days but there are some very neat PSP consolizer / docking solutions which are scaling up in production and may be a better solution in the end:
https://www.retromodworks.com/
It solves a major problem the PSPgo has of only supporting PS3 controllers.