I have been playing a lot of Beat Em Ups as research for RoHoEn Rumble. This has been an interesting journey of discovery that I will write about more about that later….HOWEVER I stumbled upon a fascinating subject in Cyberspace…..
That Tiger LCD Handheld emulation!!!!
Archive.org (bless us that this exists) has had several reproductions of Tiger LCD games uploaded in the form of ROMs and Archive.org hosts this on their website! A phenomenal public service. You can find their listing here:
https://archive.org/details/handheldhistory
I think what is remarkably fascinating about these is that the LCD ‘gAmE sYstEms’ were incredibly simplistic. At the time they were released they were dated as by 1989 the Nintendo GameBoy came out; Although it was simplistic it’s solution provided more fidelity than these small LCD Game Systems. The dilemma is that the GameBoy was exorbitantly more expensive than any of these and that for the small cost of $20 you could get ‘lil Jimmy’ his ersatz GameBoy
I feel like $89.99 was still affordable. That converts to $188.63 in 2020 USD….. that’s still kinda expensive
$18.99 and lil Jimmy will shut up for at least 20 minutes of that cross country drive.
These were just ‘Games’ in the loosest of terms. These LCDs had predefined animations on them that the Player would move the image around and have minimal, and I do mean MINIMAL, interaction with the screen.
Take the image below. It is from ‘Super Double Dragon’! It’s an LCD port of a game that was released on the Super NES, ‘Super Double Dragon (Return of Double Dragon)’. It is a laughable port but again for $18.99 ($34.99 in 2020 USD) you got a much more Affordable-Portable-Fun-Time-Galore.
Lo-Fidelity Brawling! From the most antiquated technology of 1993!!!
If you have a moment, boot up some of the LCD games on Archive.org, they won’t keep your interest long and they’re fascinating distractions. As a reminder, people would physically carry these machines around and occasionally turn them on to escape from their existential dread of Desert Storm and shitty Neo-Liberalism in the 90s; So too let them distract you from COVID and the horror of 2020.
As a child my brother and I personally shared the Sonic 2 Tiger LCD as we well as the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers Tiger BarcodZz!!!!
This Tiger Game System was the fucking shit!
and I mean dogshit. I absolutely LOVE Power Rangers but man, even in an LCD form it was not glorious. The novelty for this system though was that you had several cards (ooooh!) that came packaged with the game. You could use these cards at the start of the game to modify particular LCD animations of the system. The game was so LoFi that even though you ‘changed’ something with the BARCODZZ it didn’t really work or show up that.
Despite that! I still adore this LCD game, it was novel, in the sense of wonder that your little sibling has when you hand them a controller that is not plugged in.
With that I’ll leave you with a gif of Super Double Dragon. Also a collage made by @MrLucaGame
Look at how cash money this gameplay is IN 1993!!!!
Compliments of @MrLucaGames
https://imgur.com/gallery/WhkBK