Handheld Hotspot: Pinball and arcade mini haul

 

It's the middle of my "short" week, and it happens I have a backlog of retro gaming junk. A week ago, I put in an order for two items that definitely run the gamut from old to new, one of which I unpacked and tested while watching Starship Troopers 3. One's a reproduction of the earliest "handheld" based on an arcade game, the other is an example of a new trend I've been actively avoiding. First up, here's a reproduction handheld pinball game.

Our item this time is a Schylling pinball game, of a design I previously sighted in the wild. I doubt very much if the artwork dates earlier than the 2006 copyright date (it seems more like a tribute to the manufacturer's "vintage" tin toys), but everything else is spot-on for games first made in the 1950s. The back is metal, which I confirmed with a magnet, while the front, the "targets" and the channels for the balls are all 1 piece of clear plastic. The goal and only action is to launch the balls one at a time for the highest score, then turn the game upside down to roll the balls back in. There's a tiny plastic plug sort of thing to hold the balls up during reloading, which should also stop them from rolling around during storage or travel. It looks like you could tilt the thing for a better score, but the balls really move too fast and the thing's just too big to make much difference. Here's the outcome of a typical game.

What you'll notice if you look closely is that the highest score is 600 while the lowest is 10 and the next is 200. That makes it difficult to get a good score if more than 1 ball lands in any of the four 10-point spots. The spring mechanism is also unpredictable, which has left me wondering how it really compares to vintage specimens; if other toys are anything to judge by (see the Marx Japanese soldiers), they would have launched the ball with enough force to kill small animals.  For some reason, the feed tends to get stuck with the last ball half in and half out. There's an extra wonky factor in that red robot, which grimaces like a Terminator and has a peg seemingly protruding from its forehead. Finally, I have certain suspicions about the little guy on the right, who looks a lot like a certain droid. Here's a pic with the Truckstop Queen and the Gas Station Duchess (aka Connie) plus the Tomy Centipede knockoff. I said this thing is big...

"You can play with my plunger any time you want..."

Next in line is a Galaxian mini arcade machine, the smallest of at least 2 out there. I could probably have gotten a bigger one for just a little more, but the alternate design I ran across was one of the ones that try to combine a joystick and a D-pad, which just looks clumsy and unintuitive to me. The manufacturer seems to have tried to make up for their good sense by trying to make it a key chain, which just means an awkward and very load clasp bang on the back. Here's the unboxing pics.

For the background, Galaxian is a 1979 arcade game that was followed by its now better-known sequel Galaga. I had played both for NES (or emulators thereof) and personally prefer Galaxian. It's simpler, yet with a fair amount of strategy, particularly since it has the Space Invaders handicap where you can only have one shot on the screen at a time. It turns out the "mini" has the original arcade version, which I admit is quite a bit harder even with the tiny screen and controls factored in. It's particularly difficult to hit the "boss" Galaxians (I'm sure based on the ships from George Pal's 1953 War of the Worlds), which go back and forth along with the escorting ships and then disappear after one or two passes. Initially, my biggest problem was that the screen would flicker or reset randomly, a problem which disappeared entirely when I took a pair of pliers to the ludicrous key chain. Here's a pic of it turned on; note the marquee lights up along with the screen.

The unavoidable fact of this little thing is that it is a model or prop far more than a functioning game. Even as an action figure accessory, it's a little small and definitely oddly proportioned. Here it is with Sidekick Carl to show what I mean.

Then it occurred to me, it was about right for Husky, who's a bit shorter and a lot stouter. Jackpot! And man, he looks terrible.

With that, I'm wrapping this up. These have both been interesting acquisitions, though if it came to it, I'd rather keep the pinball game. The lesson is that nothing is quite the same as holding the real thing, but that's not always reason to keep it. That's all for now, more to come!

Handheld hotspot: No-bit gaming!

 

It's my day off, and I decided it was time to return to handheld games. As it happens, I had just found something that I had in mind when I thought of this feature. Nowadays, it's fashionable to make fun of 1980s LCD games, which I covered last time.  What has long since been forgotten is that those games were the successors and potential competitors to a much older class of handheld mechanical games. I speak of the handheld pinball game, and if Tiger games were the cave man's videogame, these were what you would find in a Paleocene lemur's grip at the bottom of Lake Messel, and I was playing with them well into the age of Game Boy. Here's a pic of the game with the full load racked.

The real backstory here is that in the 1800s and 1900s, the first mechanical pinball machines were developed, based on the game of bagatelle. These rudimentary machines had little in common with later pinball games, as there were no flippers. Around the late 1950s, the lineage split in several directions. In American arcades, they became the modern pinball we know. In Japan, they were upgraded with electronics into the pachinko machine. But in the meantime, the original concept was scaled down into handheld games for children. Here's a pic I found of example I've sighted in the wild previously. There's nothing for scale in this or any other pic I could find, but I can attest it's quite large, with a metal back that gives it extra robustness.

Of course, these things stayed in production long after kids knew anything about the pinball name. I just thought of them as ball-bearing games. Many of them lacked the launcher, which made them closer to "dexterity" puzzles I've covered elsewhere. The one I have the earliest and clearest recollection of is a baseball-themed game, with the baseball part just consisting of a picture of a baseball player. The present specimen must have been picked up later. In fact, when I looked it up, I found out it was made at the mindbogglingly late date of 1987 by Tomy, previously featured for their windup bots. Here's the back of the game, which is just a little smaller than a paperback.

In addition to their windups, Tomy was a prolific producer of pinball games, including the Waterful line. With this game, the main gimmick is that there's a magnet to catch the balls as they launch until they form a line. I found certain other variations, apparently dating back to the late '70s. notably including one made to look like a helicopter rescue. This game desperately updated it into a knockoff of the already venerable arcade game Centipede. The problem is that after about the fourth or fifth ball, the magnet gimmick starts wearing off. Then the balls either bounce off or stick to the ones higher up in one big knot. Here's a typical outcome.

You might think this was the end of the line for Tomy mechanical games. In fact, Tomy was already making LCD games. They also continued to make wind-up handheld games that approximated the tech of electromechanical arcade games, which had survived long enough to be featured in Dawn of the Dead (see video here). Early examples had imitated arcade classics like pace Invaders, while later examples included licensed Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles tie-ins. This led to the even more incomprehensible experiment known as Game Buddy. My own recollection from this strange dead end is that I saw a few mechanical handheld games at a discount mall in the mid- to late 1990s, complete with the scrolling background. I had no idea what they were at the time, and I still cannot find any record of who might have made them (I'm sure they were way below Tomy's standards). Now, I regret not buying one just to have an example, but having seen footage of other examples, I can't call it a loss.

That ends this trip down memory lane. For this particular game, I can at least say it's still mildly entertaining, if only to see the carnage when it doesn't work. If there's a lesson, it's that even the "bad" people remember usually isn't the worst. That's all for now, more to come!

Handheld Hotspot: Good LCD Games???

 

I'm just coming out of a rough week with franchise movies without anything new in mind that won't be a followup to my movie reviews. For the moment, I'm doing something different (except for the last time I did it), which happens to be what every blogger and Y*utuber has been doing forever: Looking at "retro" video games. But I'll be dealing not with Atari or NES, but with what are now commonly held to be the worst of the worst, handheld LCD games (and possibly some even more archaic and eccentric tech), starting with a lineup of entries from the most famous or notorious manufacturers. So were they "that" bad? Well, let's see, starting with the first item in our lineup.

Right off the bat, a major "myth" to correct is that Tiger Electronics wasn't the only player on the field, nor was it immediately clear that they were or would be the leading producer people remember them as. From my own recollections, many if most of the specimens I ever had at home were from Radio Shack, actually supplied by their parent company Tandy. Even for the 1980s, these were cheap and generic-looking. However, they were possibly the best in terms of reliable functionality: The controls were responsive and intuitive, the graphics were comprehensible, and it was usually easy to figure out what to do. This one is typical of their "'keep it simple" approach. You control a cyclist at the bottom of the screen, moving left and right Space Invaders style. Other bikers come down from the top, with a relatively sophisticated 3D perspective that was surprisingly common in these games. It wasn't a favorite, but I played it long and often enough to max out the high score, typically the only way to "beat" these games. The one flaw of the game is that it doesn't have an on/ off switch, so it simply ran until its one tiny battery ran out. I could change the battery with a screwdriver, but never cared enough to do it. Moving on, here's a game really from Tiger, and by consensus the good one.

Tiger has of course been ground zero for controversy and criticism, drawing the wrath of none less than the Angry Video Game Nerd. Having seen the onslaught of venting, my feelings have been mixed. Make no mistake, the critics aren't wrong, but they aren't giving the whole picture. The chief causes of Tiger's infamy are, first, that the company kept making LCD games long after they were "supposed" to be obsolete, and second, that they went completely overboard on licensing. What really happened was that the company went from making a relatively modest catalog of functional and sometimes entertaining games to a vast catalog of hastily churned-out titles that would have been as interchangeable as paper dolls if not for their idiosyncratic flaws in design and play controls. What's hard to assess is just how early this slide started and how long it took. They got on the tie-in gravy train very early, notably with a series of King Kong games in the early to middling 1980s (see Electronic Plastic and Handheld Museum for two comparatively intriguing examples). On the other hand, it didn't go into overdrive until as late as the 1990s, when they jumped on properties like Batman and Jurassic Park. To my best recollection, I got this one at the same time as the Jurassic Park game, and the difference is night and day.

What should have been a warning sign for that pair is that the Pinball game is dated 1987, at least six years before JP.  It was a simple, attractively designed game that must have sold well enough to stay in production for many years. The long-lost Jurassic Park game was by comparison quite possibly the worst LCD game I ever played, with a clunky layout (prominently featuring the pseudo-3D gimmick), overcomplicated graphics and gameplay, and stiff controls that were literally painful to work with. In further hindsight, the Pinball game had more than enough of its own problems, including unrealistic and oddly predictable ball mechanics. But compared to the 1990s onslaught of junk, it was a gem to be thankful for. Here's some pics I tried to take of the game in action.

That brings us to the final piece, easily the best LCD game I played. This was part of a series of LCD games from Konami, or so the labels say. Certain accounts say that they were really made by Tiger and released under the Konami name, but I have yet to see this substantiated. Konami's entries mostly stood out for their weird, oversized shells. Fortunately, this was more than made up for by their ergonomic shape, standardized controls and functional-to-good game play. The present item is noteworthy because it was the only Garfield video game I ever saw on sale as a kid. (I now know there was an NES/ Famicom game released only in foreign markets.) I begged for it and got it for Christmas, and it was... okay. But again, a handheld game had a really, really low bar to clear, especially if if had Garfield. Here it is in full glory.

One more forgotten virtue of LCD games that this one presents front and center is that the cell-animation sprites really looked like what they were supposed to be. Even on NES, the Ninja Turtles and Darkwing Duck suggested rather than represented the characters, but Garfield looked like he came straight out of the comics. What made it all the more appealing was that they built the game around one of the longest-running gags on the strip, Garfield's unwanted song-and-dance performances and the incoming barrages of the unseen neighbors. Of course, they still overcomplicated things by having you rescue Odie from the moon, which you can only do by collecting enough lasagna from John. The most unusual feature is that you actually have a health/ energy bar, which makes the game possibly too easy. Add in 6 stages, plentiful powerups and a score that maxes out at 10,000, and you have a game where you can blow through any milestones very quickly. Still, it's fun with enough challenge to set your own goals and still have an interesting time. Getting through in one life is a decent benchmark; in many ways, it works best to aim for a lower score like golf. I tried to take some pics, but alas, either the batteries are low or the screen is finally giving out. If you look really hard, you might see Odie.

So, are these games any good? The real question is, what kind of expectations you bring to it. If you're used to getting days and weeks of gameplay out of a title, then these will disappoint very quickly. If you want 10 or 20 minutes of entertainment at a time, and you happened to have one of the games that was functional and entertaining, then there were worse things to make do with, especially if you didn't have a console or TV. The bottom line is, even if you grew up with these things, you're not going to get much out of them in the era of smart phones, and you probably didn't really get much further even then. What the old games deserve is a little respect for trying to do something new and different, because without that spirit, we certainly wouldn't have gotten any further.