freedom to play

Remember these?

            

Nope? Me neither. They’re THE pioneers for the handheld console gaming market. In fact, these 2 items are considered antique. The one on the left is actually an American football game with an LED display on it. It’s just amazing… I don’t even know where the heck it displays the football. Probably the first handheld gaming console. Made by Mattel. The other one’s made by Milton Bradley, which is synonymous with Hungry Hungry Hippos (Milton produced it), called Microvision. Interesting thing about Microvision is that it was the first handheld console that produced interchangeable cartridges. Well predictably they only had a handfull of games. And check this one out…. the LCD screen was prone to ROTTING, and the cartridges could be permanently damaged just by an iddy… bitty… static charge.

So… the next generation of consoles appeared. This was the time where gaming really started to get a grip on society. If you weren’t especially well off, or you couldn’t score above 95 marks for your primary school exams… your parents may have bought this…

And… if you were well off and did get 95 marks and above for school tests, you get…

 

…. and probably also this.

Ok… 2 things… either you’re probably yawning your head off, or drooling and gawking right now. I seriously wonder how much these babies are selling for on ebay. Anyhow… during that era Nintendo was the giant monster of the gaming market. At least till Sega came up with superior graphics. Seriously… although Game Gear was really awesome, you really couldn’t play any longer than a couple of hours till the battery got wiped out. And… Nintendo was really brilliant to released Game Boy together with the ever popular Tetris. And… games such as R-type etc etc were just plain cool.

Well… just to speed things up…

    

In case you can’t tell what’s on the top, its an NGPC (Neo Geo Pocket Color). Posed really good graphics at that time but apparently they never got much support from third-party developers (games) and failed to attract enough gamers to legitimately challenge the still dominant Nintendo.

So then technology moves on yet again and you may or may not have gotten these…

  

The latter 2 are currently at the forefront of the handheld console market. Need I say what they are? Nah… But despite the queer manner of talking on it, the Ngage was one of the best phones that I’ve ever used. The sound quality on this thing is phenomenal. And somehow it just blended into my lifestyle, only sad thing was Nokia couldn’t really get adults to play network games on the train.

I’ll bet you feel like playing one of these babies now…