Tiger Electronics Handhelds

[PikoInteractive]

Anybody remember those?

 

Did you liked/hated them?

 

I grew up in a lower income family. I had everything I needed, but when it came to toys and all that stuff. Most of the time my parents bought second hand or low tier toys.

 

I remember all the rich kids had the gameboy, but my parents couldn't afford it, so they bought me several Tiger Electronics handhelds (street fighter, ninja gaiden, power rangers, double dragon) in several occasions not all at once.

 

I wonder if there is any interest from the retro gaming community on those?

 

I recently picked up Home Alone for 2 bucks at the flea market.

[CaptainBreakout]

I had an Altered Beast wristwatch, and thought it was fantastic. It wasn't really, really, but that's the thing about these tiger games. I wish there was a word for it (maybe there is), regarding the idea that one is getting something valuable and awesome, but the actual item is pretty sub-par, but there's a huge emotional investment which colors the ensuing experience. There's more of a chance to have fun with it because of all the preconceived notions.

 

Funny thing is, my memory for detail on old video games is vast and very detailed. I can tell you about thousands of titles across a hundred platforms. But Tiger games? I know I had a few... And besides the Altered Beast watch I really couldn't tell you which ones I had.

 

That says something. Even the bad games for other systems I remember in vivid detail. Tiger games... I can barely summon the recollection of them.

 

I've never recommended him before, because everyone else has already heard of him already and either likes him or not... But the AVGN did a very on-point review of Tiger handhelds, I thought.

 

It's kinda weird... I'm trying to remember which ones I've encountered... I'm drawing a complete blank. So strange for me for something video game related.

Edited June 16, 2018 by CaptainBreakout

[FOX2600]

But the AVGN did a very on-point review of Tiger handhelds, I thought

That was the very first nerd video I ever saw! I told him that when I met him.. but he didnt really care lol

[FOX2600]

Anybody remember those?

 

Did you liked/hated them?

 

I grew up in a lower income family. I had everything I needed, but when it came to toys and all that stuff. Most of the time my parents bought second hand or low tier toys.

 

I remember all the rich kids had the gameboy, but my parents couldn't afford it, so they bought me several Tiger Electronics handhelds (street fighter, ninja gaiden, power rangers, double dragon) in several occasions not all at once.

 

I wonder if there is any interest from the retro gaming community on those?

 

I recently picked up Home Alone for 2 bucks at the flea market.

There is definitely a scene for tiger handheld collectors, but its a niche market within an even nicher market, but Damn do some of them take it seriously, ive seen insane prices for tiger handhelds on eBay especially when sealed but even loose. I dont think anything compares to the Nintendo game & watch collecting community though, get ready to throw down some ca$h if youre interested in those, but they can all be emulated and theres been various re releases and game boy and DS with the game & watch collections.

 

I have a few of them, my favorite being Ace Ventura pet detective (I really want the When nature calls one though!) and I got beauty and the beast which actually is kinda fun, and American Gladiators.

 

My favorites are the ones based on movies & TV like the home alone one you got. But I love the Full House, Waynes World, Congo, and Dennis the Menace ones too. The weirdest yet coolest one, and also rare and expensive has to be the MC Hammer tiger handheld!

 

But if youre into the LCD handhelds I recommend googling and checking out handheld empire and handheld museum, because there were LOADS of other companies besides Tiger who made fun little handhelds, great resources. Oh and theres a tiger handheld emulator online that looks fun too, and a microvision one.

 

Also check out handheldgamefan89 on YouTube, big time collector and reviewer of tiger & Konami handhelds, hes cool.

Edited June 16, 2018 by FOX2600

[keepdreamin]

I'm sure I had more, but the ones I remember actually owning:

 

GameTalk baseball all stars

Sonic 2

Batman Returns

 

They were all sold at a garage sale at some point after being gifted a Game Boy. I don't remember hating them, they were mildly entertaining at the time if you didn't have a Game Boy, but I wouldn't buy any today.

[Video]

I like them. The more simple old ones can be great. Some of the newer ones tried to bite off more than they could chew, so to speak.

 

My favorite is actually a game boy styled system called game wizard and actually used carts. I got several And a dozen or so games for it.

 

Mario bros was cool for lcd. Actually most of nintendos game and watch games are pretty good.

 

I got pacman and star fox as watches, and think their great for lcd games.

[SiberianSpForces]

I still have T2, MK, and MK 3. One in a while I'll pop batteries in and play them. Some guy started putting up in browser playable LCD games on the archives.org site. It would be great to download them and get them working on a Pi. There's a few Pi Zeros that have been put in the Tiger shells. Here's the archives link;

https://archive.org/details/handheldhistory

Edited June 16, 2018 by SiberianSpForces

[mbd30]

I've never had much interest in Tiger handhelds. And I was a lower middle class kid who never owned a Gameboy either.

 

My first video game was Epoch's Astro Command, which was so much better quality than the Tiger stuff. Portable LCD games went downhill.

 

[BassGuitari]

I had a few of them growing up, although my favorites were actually the TMNT ones by Konami. Few things trip my nostalgia trigger like those Konami "boogie board" LCD games.

 

From Tiger specifically, I know I had Street Fighter II, Batman, and Baseball. (Everybody had Baseball.) There was even an R-Zone in there at the end. A friend of mine had Pinball and Karate King, which I enjoyed as well.

 

It wasn't a Tiger, but I recall a Universal Classic Monsters "cartridge" handheld, too (IIRC the games were Dracula, Wolfman, and Frankenstein's Monster). I imagine there were some others I can't remember, as well, Tiger and otherwise.

 

I remember actually being impressed with Street Fighter II. Even as a kid I kind of understood how LCD games basically worked--essentially that all "graphics" are allocated to specific locations on the screen, and whatever the game is going to do has to use some combination of those permanent shapes--and I thought it was really cool that they actually got six(?) different characters in there, and even with their own special move sets.

 

My wife and I actually have a fairly large collection of these things now--most of them are actually hers.

 

We rip these things to shreds these days, and maybe rightfully so, but you know, as a 7- or 8-year old kid in the early '90s, before smart phones, these things did the trick on long car rides or at recess or at friends' houses while waiting for turns on the Nintendo. Or when you were supposed to be sleeping on a school night but you were sitting up under the reading lamp with the sound off instead...

 

The older VFD tabletops were waaay better, though.

[Opry99er]

I miss my Tiger handhelds.

 

As others have said, the rich kids had the Gameboys... I had a few Tiger handhelds and Mattel football.

[Tanooki]

I have over the years since they came out had them and not. Currently I've got a few but I've had more and I do sell them off on occasion. Currently with the manual too Baseball, Castlevania 2, and Karnov, just the handheld Sub Wars(excellent), Mega Man 2, and Skeet Shoot. I'm considering ditching SS and I am getting rid of Miniature Golf. In the last few years though I have had Ninja Gaiden, Double Dragon, Street Fighter II, and a few others. I do wish I still had Gauntlet as it was a good but strange one.

 

If this was beyond just Tiger I have some other interesting stuff that's older.

[Tartfox]

Owned the Jurassic Park LCD game when I was younger. Limited enjoyment with that one.

 

Have to hand it to Tiger, they were very effective in flooding the market with their LCD games and successfully managed to snag a lot of TV and movie licenses. Archive.org's helped me play some of the titles I was curious about. Their 'Back To The Future' game is actually surprisingly enjoyable even in this day and age.

 

What's even more impressive is the diverse range of gaming products Tiger had. Everyone knows about their common LCD games but there was also their R-Zone gaming system (which tried emulating NIntendo's Virtual Boy), their '99x Games' line which had tech similar to their Game.com console, and the 'Midway Arcade Games' which were like mini arcade machines with a flip top (but whose tech was also similar to their Game.com console).

 

I did love what other manufacturers were able to put out. MGA had a lot of interesting LCD handheld games including Mappy, and Konami's Ninja Turtles games are still great. The VFD tabletop machines like Q*Bert, Frisky Tom and Frogger are also a joy to play.

[Flojomojo]

I dislike the Tiger handhelds. Nice packaging but not fun to play. I always felt that any money or effort put into Tiger handhelds are resources that would be better to save up for something better. That was 20+ years ago, and I doubt anything has gotten better since then.

[godslabrat]

I was a bigger fan of the Radio Shack LCD games. Still not anything I'd want to go back to.

[Tanooki]

You have to remember a good bit of the time those Tiger handhelds existed there was no Gameboy as it came out in August of 1989 and really didn't steam roll out a good bit of systems until Christmas and into 1990s still with a limited library. Tiger was sadly about as good as it got for LCD portable gaming so those NES and arcade and tv/movie licenses were the best taste of home you'd get stuck in the car with your parents. I'm forgiving on a few of them over that, but not many. A few despite the limited nature of how they work are pretty interesting still though. A lot are just rubbish, just like any of the lCD games, even the Game & Watch too and their clones and at least those worked as a clock-alarm.

[Skullazzi]

Yes I had a Tiger Mortal Kombat with a barcode reader. It came with a deck of cards you

would scan and that would unlock the special moves. Supposedly weird stuff would happen if

you scanned UPCs from other products but I never got around to trying that. Anyone else

have something like that?

[derFunkenstein]

I didn't realize that Tiger made any handheld LCD games beyond sports. I had baseball and football, and I could routinely roll the score over beyond 100 on both of them. I can't find pictures of either of them, but they were both two player games where you'd have to rotate the game 180 degrees to switch between offense and defense. I'd just play both. Pitch and then swing in baseball, for example.

 

edit: Oh, sure as soon as I post I find them on Amazon.

 

Head to Head Talking Baseball

 

Head to Head Football

[Tanooki]

Tiger has a crazy amount of things they've done.

 

If anyone really truly cares, this is a bit of a read and more so a crap load of links, prehaps some dead or not, that lists everything ever made by them in that style we're basically talking about here:

https://www.geekyhobbies.com/tiger-electronic-handheld-games/

 

and then an abridged version from this classic site with a list, usually a pic of everything box and all, sometimes just the unit with the basics -- http://www.handheldmuseum.com/Tiger/

[Andromeda Stardust]

I had a ton of Tiger Electronics games as a kid. We got rid of most of the Tigers but I kept the Game-N-Watch ones. I recently (last year) repurchased Electronic Mouse maze on Amazon. This was one of my favorites, and one of the few that wasn't based on some type of arcade or movie IP:

 

I did keep the four Nintendo Game & Watch units I had: Donkey Kong, Mario Bros (bottle factory), Super Mario Bros (yes, 8 unique worlds on an LCD handheld), and Cement Factory. The Mario Bros and Donkey Kong were both dual screen clamshells.

 

Seems now that they are making the little Mini Arcades, some with segmented LCDs, backlit vfd style or frontlit monochrome, some full color video, accurate and not so accurate ports of arcade and NES games. It's almost like the old days of handhelds have returned, this time based on arcade IP. Mattel Football is even back. It's definitely a cash cow bonanza of retro nostalgia right now.

[dj_convoy]

I think many of the Tiger ones were fairly lame, but occasionally the game lent itself to the format. I still have my Paperboy unit, for instance, which was actually decent.

 

Some of the actual Game and Watches are still pretty fun.

[thetick1]

I think many of the Tiger ones were fairly lame, but occasionally the game lent itself to the format. I still have my Paperboy unit, for instance, which was actually decent.

 

Some of the actual Game and Watches are still pretty fun.

 

All the ones I ever played were complete crap even back in the 70's and 80's and they are still crap. The Angry Video Game Nerd sums it all up ... Not safe for kids, work or the wife.

 

Edited June 18, 2018 by thetick1

[Torr]

My first LCD handheld was Tiger's Double Dragon.

I loved that game and played it very often.... until some batteries leaked and ruined it.

 

Over the years I aquired some goodies (like Zelda and DK3 which I had since childhood) but sold them all about a year ago... just wasting space, I'd rather someone who appreciates them more than I did to have them.

I did keep Bart Simpson's Cupcake Crisis and TMNT2: Splinter Speaks though, and I wish I still had that Double Dragon one. EBay prices are just TOO high though.

Edited June 19, 2018 by Torr

[Opry99er]

My favorite game store has a few.

[Jess Ragan]

That guy looks like he's pretty much done playing the Angry Game Nerd. "Okay, here's some history on Tiger handhelds, a few swear words, a guy wearing a cowpie on his face, a little more profanity, and now a yell of frustration. Aargh. Are we done? Good, because I'm done."

[Opry99er]

When he does the "James and Mike play" videos, he is actually a pretty funny laid back dude. I do not watch AVGN videos because I don't like that persona.