If you were a kid in the 80s or 90s and loved video games, there's an 80% chance you once played with one (or more) of Tiger Electronics' abysmal handhelds. Yes, Tiger Electronics, that company dedicated to licensing all sorts of famous properties and turning them into disastrous LCD handhelds (in the style of Nintendo's Game & Watch).
Tiger's strategy was always clear: 1) Spend a lot of money to secure the rights to a famous license with its own fan base, 2) Make a quick game, no matter how incomprehensible, without investing too much, 3) Sell the game to fans of the license and to the occasional fools who were swayed by the box art. Easy money!
That's how their consoles quickly invaded the market. They were LCD handhelds, very easy and cheap to build. They were everywhere! They reached the whole world! Their catalog of frauds included prestigious properties like Castlevania, Sonic (from Sega!), Double Dragon, Jurassic Park, Mega Man, Robocop, and Street Fighter II, among many others. But don't get excited about those big names! Every single game made by Tiger stinks. You might wonder how someone could ruin something as perfect as Street Fighter 2? Well, watch the video below and tell me yourself.
So Tiger's handhelds were always super cheap, especially compared to Nintendo's Game & Watch. They were accessible even to kids, who could buy one by saving allowance for a few weeks. And you know how kids are, gullible and highly vulnerable to the Machiavellian forces of directed marketing. That's why, even though Tiger's games were terrible, they sold like hotcakes! They were disposable, because the illusion they generated was worth more than the game itself (which almost always broke our hearts). The problem for Tiger began when it wanted to play in the big leagues, when it wanted to face off in a gun duel against giants like Nintendo and Sega, armed only with a dull knife. That dull knife was, of course, the Game.Com console.
Game.Com, One of the Worst Consoles in History
The Game.Com, Tiger's handheld console, was released in 1997. Games came on interchangeable cartridges and it featured a not-so-radiant black-and-white screen. Sound too much like a Game Boy? Well, it is! But no. The Game.com had a touchscreen and a 14,400 bps modem, since in theory it was not only a console but also a PDA (a sort of organizer). The problem was that data was erased every now and then because it depended on the internal battery and its whims, making it useless for that purpose. Who would want an organizer whose data could be erased at any moment? And if it was bad as a PDA, it was terrible as a console. To give you an idea, the screen resolution was 200 x 160 and it had a Sharp processor (SM8521 8-Bit) that could barely move the simplest games smoothly. As an example, look at how Mortal Kombat arrived on the Game.com. I'd even stick with the pirate NES version!
https://www.youtube.com/embed/H2vSmp4JT78How to Emulate Game.Com
The Game.com is just a footnote in video game history, it's true. But there's always the digital archaeologist who loves unearthing these consoles from the dust of obscurity and giving them a new chance, with a better perspective once the disappointment has passed. For them, we bring this perfect Game.Com emulator along with many of the ROMs for its known games. But, since it's a beta, it's not as simple to use as classic Sega and Nintendo emulators. So here's a small guide.
- Download the emulator with the ROMs here
- Extract the content of the zip file
- Inside the GameCom Emulator folder, find the file GAMECOM.EXE and double-click it
- If you get any error, click cancel until the program opens
- Go to "Windows - Open Disasm Window"
- In the new window, go to "File - Load Bin File" (and choose the game you want to play)
- In the "address??" line, leave it at zero.
- Back in the previous window, go to "File - Load Kernel - Full Kernel"
- After that, just click the "Run" button
- You should now be emulating Game.com. To play the selected game, click with the mouse on Cartridge. You can also navigate the PDA by clicking any of the other options.
Done! You can now boast to your hipster friends that you played with a lost relic of video game history, in true digital Indiana Jones style. You have all kinds of games to choose from! Including Duke Nukem 3D, Resident Evil 2, Sonic Jam, Indy 500, among many others. Each of them is a missed opportunity, a terrible disappointment, a dagger to the heart. Nothing new under the sun, coming from Tiger Electronics.
