Game.com, oh come on. There were two systems?

[towmater]

I thought the mint-in-box Game.com with a baker's dozen of cartridges would pretty much wind up my collection of this system, but then I saw this in the box. Now I have to hunt down a completely different model. I wonder if the mini version has an actually readable screen? Even in mint condition with no visible issues, the motion-blur on this thing is agonizing.

 

 

[Flojomojo]

Now I have to hunt down a completely different model.

You don't have to if you don't want to. A reasonable person would let sleeping turds lie.

[Video]

It's not really different (no new functionality)

 

And there are actually three consoles, if you don't go for the colored variants. The original, the pocket (which is smaller, used 2AA instead of four, and axed a cart port) I believe the pocket came with various translucent colored accents. Then the pocket pro, which was the same as the pocket, came in black/silver only, I think, and had a backlight for playing in the dark.

 

Honestly, while the pocket has a slightly better, though smaller screen, I prefer the original. The pocket pro has that better screen, but offsets it with that nasty green backlight LOL. I don't know how many colors the pocket came in, but I know at least three were available.

 

I need to get a replacement sometime. Love duke nukem 3d and resident evil.

Edited April 28, 2018 by Video

[keepdreamin]

Even in mint condition with no visible issues, the motion-blur on this thing is agonizing.

 

 

 

This has been common knowledge for 20 years. Why did you buy it?

[Jess Ragan]

I just thought of something delightfully sick and twisted. What if you removed all the guts of a game.com and replaced them with a Raspberry Pi or something like that? When you play it in public, people will think you've lost your mind, but no, you're actually playing good games!

[pacman000]

It's not really different (no new functionality)

 

And there are actually three consoles, if you don't go for the colored variants. The original, the pocket (which is smaller, used 2AA instead of four, and axed a cart port) I believe the pocket came with various translucent colored accents. Then the pocket pro, which was the same as the pocket, came in black/silver only, I think, and had a backlight for playing in the dark.

 

Honestly, while the pocket has a slightly better, though smaller screen, I prefer the original. The pocket pro has that better screen, but offsets it with that nasty green backlight LOL. I don't know how many colors the pocket came in, but I know at least three were available.

 

I need to get a replacement sometime. Love duke nukem 3d and resident evil.

Color versions?

[pacman000]

I just thought of something delightfully sick and twisted. What if you removed all the guts of a game.com and replaced them with a Raspberry Pi or something like that? When you play it in public, people will think you've lost your mind, but no, you're actually playing good games!

Na... Most folks wouldn't recognize it. The others wouldn't care; they probably already have/want a Game.com, or a 32x, or a Jaguar, or a Telestar Arcade, some other obscure system in their collection.

[Flojomojo]

Color versions?

Color shell, same screen. Per the Wikipedia article:

"A subsequent re-release, dubbed as the Game.com Pocket, omitted the front light and came in four translucent colors: green, blue, pink, and purple."

[omegadot]

I'd like to be able to reach back in time and peek at the engineering teams that had to work on the game.com revisions. I wonder if they were enthusiastic or like "we have to...update that thing?".

[godslabrat]

I'd like to be able to reach back in time and peek at the engineering teams that had to work on the game.com revisions. I wonder if they were enthusiastic or like "we have to...update that thing?".

I'd have liked to have been in the marketing sessions where someone said "We'll make it worse than the six-year-old GameBoy in every way, but we'll add a touch screen! That'll show the world!"

[Jess Ragan]

That system was entirely about marketing. Make the rubes THINK that they're getting a superior handheld experience when it's not much more than a toy. The commercials were "extreme" and the games included ports of cutting edge console titles like Fighter's Megamix and Duke Nukem. The game.com got a lot of early coverage in game magazines, too, so you know some poor schmucks wound up buying one instead of waiting for the Game Boy Color or Neo-Geo Pocket.

[towmater]

 

This has been common knowledge for 20 years. Why did you buy it?

 

I am attempting to win the Internet. Though seriously, it is a part of my job so I have to learn from the good, bad, and ugly.

 

"Common knowledge." That's hilarious.

[MotoRacer]

There's a clear purple one on ebay right now brand new in a plastic clamshell.

 

Somehow, I can't think of a more fitting type of packaging for such a crappy product...

 

 

 

Btw, it's 199 dollars plus shipping. If you buy this, you're the biggest sucker in the world, and have officially overpaid for a game.com about 199 times too much.

[towmater]

 

 

Btw, it's 199 dollars plus shipping. If you buy this, you're the biggest sucker in the world, and have officially overpaid for a game.com about 199 times too much.

 

I paid $15 for the items in the OP. It was worth that to hear Duke Nukem babbling on about his sunglasses.

[MotoRacer]

I paid $15 for the items in the OP. It was worth that to hear Duke Nukem babbling on about his sunglasses.

15 is most certainly the limit . Maybe even past it. Maybe I'd rather have In and Out for two...

[Video]

Yeah, I should have specified, the console was color, not the screen. The op pic shows the pocket pro, the black hand hold area is translucent colored plastic.

 

If you want one of everything, the game.com is pretty easy, if you want all the packaging varients, it's not so easy. All the systems came in boxes, or blister packs. I think most, or all the games came in both packaging methods too.

 

The game.com suffered two big issues. The screen, which was outdated tech in the 80's, and tiger themselves. Combined this was an insurmountable obstacle. Spec wise, it's a decent system. I'd love to see what a homebrewer could do with it, but there seems to be no interest. Considering some of the crap that people make stuff for, that's kind of a pitty.

 

That's another thing. The system gets three versions, for such a short lived system with such a small library (what, 22 titles of something like that?) That's just puzzling. I mean, if it was going somewhere, I could see that, but outside the first few months, I don't think it did well.

 

Anyhow, it shows what hype can do for you, and that the average Joe may not be as much a dumbass as companies might hope. I enjoyed mine, and still do, but I went in with the expectation of something less than gameboy, and the knowledge that, hey, this is single function handheld tiger we're talking about, so my expectations were quite a bit lower than many peoples.

[Dr Manhattan]

I actually like this system. I own two models, the original and the back-lit model and an almost complete collection of games. Op is right about the motion blur. It makes most games unplayable, but there are still a few gems in the bunch, including Lights Out and Resident Evil. The Game.com also proved the viability of touch screen gaming long before the Nintendo DS hit the market. The system was even planed to have it's own touch screen virtual pet game, similar to Nintendogs, but it never saw the light of day.

 

I'm still in the market for a colored shell version of the system, and any games I might not already have in my collection.

[keepdreamin]

 

 

"Common knowledge." That's hilarious.

 

Basic product research is hilarious?

 

The game.com's screen was covered in period reviews at the time. Some simple light reading on the internet today would have told you. There's even youtube reviews.

 

I assume you don't blindly make other electronics purchases, right? You look up reviews and ratings.

[Tanooki]

You don't have to if you don't want to. A reasonable person would let sleeping turds lie.

Lying around they still stink, you flush them to clear the air and remove the evidence.

 

Seriously though motion blur aside for what is there the system had some decent games and more planned that dried up due to failure. It mostly gets crapped on pretty fairly but it does get a bit too much discredit too. For Tiger it's an interesting footnote of what they could have done right but failed on with the blur screen. Even if it blurred no worse than the old Gameboy at least that would have been tolerable. I won't consider ever buying one on ebay, but I've always known if I bumped into one in the wild, if it was priced very cheaply I'd like to try it out again as last I held one was one some display in the day. The shape is an odd one, has good promise never met. And that one point, it would be cool to see it hollowed out as a pi box as it has some nice buttons already there to do some interesting stuff.

[towmater]

 

Basic product research is hilarious?

 

The game.com's screen was covered in period reviews at the time. Some simple light reading on the internet today would have told you. There's even youtube reviews.

 

I assume you don't blindly make other electronics purchases, right? You look up reviews and ratings.

 

All righty, if an answer you seek...

 

I will phrase my response in the manner of Victor Buono's evil character "Mr. Schubert" from The Man From Atlantis (1977-1978) which as an average educated person randomly chosen from a among the public (which see definition of "common knowledge") would know of as an example with the extrinsic obscurity of a Game.com screen's quality.

 

"In the original post, my dear boy, there was nowhere elaborated the notion that the poster was not keenly aware of the quality if Game.com screen technology, merely a simple inquiry as to the opinions of those who might already own one, the relative quality of the game.com mini's screen in comparison. And now, with the help of my assistant as portrayed by Michael Dunn (of whom the average member of the public will be knowledgeable), I will now destroy the land-world that has caused our deep-sea denizens to suffer long enough, with their broad generalizations and emu-ic like behavior that without knowledge of the past technologies must inevitably condemn to repeat them."

 

"Mu hah ha."

Edited April 29, 2018 by towmater

[CatPix]

Basic product research is hilarious?

 

The game.com's screen was covered in period reviews at the time. Some simple light reading on the internet today would have told you. There's even youtube reviews.

 

I assume you don't blindly make other electronics purchases, right? You look up reviews and ratings.

Honestly, maybe my eyes are bionic, or people are too picky, but I own an original GAme Boy, 2 models of Watara Supervision and 2 BitCorp Gamate.

All of those systems are described has having poor screens, with the Gamate being described as barebly playable by most "youtubers" and Internet reviews..

 

Well IMO, while the screen is far from perfect, it's not the dreadful experience people describe.

Sure the ghosting is quite nasty, but even of fast paced games and games with lots of stuff on screen (such as Tasac 2100 on Supervision, a quite decent shoot-them-up) you are not in difficulty because of a poor screen.

So no, unless I've seen it with my own eye, I won't trust the whiny Internet drama queens that expect a 4k TrueColor© >5ms screen on a 1990 console.

Edited April 30, 2018 by CatPix

[Tanooki]

Same here. I've still got original Gameboy systems here (original and pocket variant) and while both blur and one is blurry and kinda greenish the blur isn't so bad unless you get into a busy screen with 4-8 pixel size bullets in a shooter alone it's hard to get your butt shot off and not accept responsibility for it. It mostly is a mix of nose turning drama queens or people who just refuse to adapt even 30 years later. I've seen captured video of the gamate and others and they're not that far off from the old 1989 Gameboy so I don't buy into the story it is all that horrible. The Game.com seems to reliably sit in that realm of those asian knockoff systems so unless the game by design was done so poorly to obscure the visuals with the blur, I think it's very well overblown - real but overblown.

[Flojomojo]

Poor contrast, slow refresh, common knowledge for 20 years sounds about right to me.

 

If it was aimed at "older audiences," they'd be much better served with a Palm Pilot, which got a bazillion fun games and was way more functional. There were cheap Palm units and decent clones soon after.

 

Meanwhile, 1997 gamers could do so much better.

 

Miyamoto was still designing GameBoy games.

 

Sega Saturn was hitting the discount bins (the only proper place to play Fighters Megamix)

I had forgotten about the Sega/Bandai deal. Sega would eventually merge with Sammy, and Bandai partnered with Namco.

 

As someone who was hungry for games in 1997, especially handhelds and internet capable devices, the fact that I left the Game.Com on the shelf is pretty telling. If you found one in the dump or something, yes, it's more amusing than a moldy can of soup I suppose, but that's about it. BTW I like the Racketboy profile of the system.

 

I'm so glad we have come as far as we have with technology. That decade was full of painful, "exciting" developments, a nice story here describes some of the challenges, and this subreddit has just enough info for a laugh. As someone who was into the "Pocket PC" scene, I'm happy the journey is mostly over and we have landed on functional smartphones.

 

This advertisement for Game.Com was something special, and was typical of the time.

 

 

 

 

 

[Flojomojo]

I thought the mint-in-box Game.com with a baker's dozen of cartridges would pretty much wind up my collection of this system, but then I saw this in the box. Now I have to hunt down a completely different model. I wonder if the mini version has an actually readable screen? Even in mint condition with no visible issues, the motion-blur on this thing is agonizing.

BTW this writeup makes it sound like there were THREE: original Gamecom, Gamecom Pocket Pro, and non-backlit later Gamecom Pocket Pro. I'm telling you this as a friend, you do not have to buy them all.

 

VARIATIONS

• The original Game.com featured two cartridge slots, no lighting, and four AA batteries. It also featured a sound switch to mute the audio along with a volume switch.
• The Game.com Pocket Pro required 2 AA batteries, had 1 cartridge slot, offered a screen that blurred less than the original design, and came in a variety of colors. The stylus had a different storage location on the Pocket Pro. The Pocket Pro was also unable to access the Internet. The original Pocket Pro unit did provide frontlighting, similar to the Game Boy Light.
• Later releases of the Pocket Pro removed the frontlighting. These versions were available in multiple colors.

[Reaperman]

I don't like to think of game.com as a terrible handheld, so much as I like to think of it as Tiger's very best video game offering by a good bit.

I rather liked the built-in solitare, and if I recall, the williams arcade classics weren't the worst.

Not that any of it is super awesome, but it's better than Tiger's attempt at, say, a Castlevania handheld, sports featuring Bo Jackson, or anything under their R-zone branding.

 

I think the initial pocket pro's frontlit screen and smaller size easily make it the superior system. I'll probably play it again, which can't be said for a lot of handhelds. I still fondly remember picking it up on sale for $19.99 from KB Toys. It was in a wire discount bin they had rolled completely out of their store into the mall.

 

But to answer the question posed in the topic. "Well duh, and holy jeez, stop the presses, there's more than one Intellivision to boot."

Other than that, this thread reminded me to remove the 2032's from my game.coms before they damaged the systems. It makes me worry about all those various game carts with batteries--I don't know how or when I'm going to start handling those.

Edited April 30, 2018 by Reaperman