Gaming
Games
The world's weirdest gaming handhelds
Think the Nintendo 2DS is odd? Check out these weird portables from the archives.
Nintendo 2DS
© Nintendo
Late last month, Nintendo shocked gamers by announcing the Nintendo 2DS, a low priced version of its 3DS handheld, minus the glasses-free 3D effects. It sounds like a joke, and it looks like one too: instead of the familiar clamshell design Nintendo pioneered with the DS, it’s opted to build both screens into one broad face that doesn’t fit quite so easily in your pocket.
Yes, it looks like a cross between a door stop and a wedge of cheese, but the 2DS has been priced low (£104.99) and promises to sell like digital hotcakes in the run up to Christmas - after all, the 3DS has some great games, but it’s not like the 3D effects are what make them stand out. It’s also far from the weirdest gaming handheld ever to go on sale. Take these, for instance...
Sony PocketStation
Sony Pocket Station
© Kuba Bożanowski
This memory card with a screen and buttons slotted into the front of the original PlayStation, but could also be carried around to play mini games on the move. The PSone version of Final Fantasy VIII, for instance, included a PocketStation game that let you fight battles and discover rare items on the go that could then be moved across to the main game. Though it was only ever released in Japan, it was a relative success, with almost five million sold over the course of three years.
Gizmondo
In some ways, the Gizmondo was ahead of its time. In 2005, long before the era of the iPhone and the iPod touch, here was a portable device that could not only play games, but music and videos too. It was however overpriced - £229 - and a huge flop. The company behind it, Tiger Telematics, pumped money into lavish PR junkets and even opened up a flagship store on London’s prestigious Regent Street, but the chunky Gizmondo launched with just one game, Trailblazer. Less than a year after launch, it was discontinued.
Sega Nomad
Sega Nomad
© TrojanDan
Sega had its Game Gear to Nintendo’s Game Boy, that wasn’t enough for the Japanese gaming giant. The 1990s saw a vicious hardware war between the two rivals, who fought endlessly to prove their systems were more powerful and thus more fun to play - which explains why an abomination like the Sega Nomad came to pass. A portable Mega Drive, it was precisely as enormous and impractical as it sounds, with a 3.25-inch colour screen, a battery life of just two hours, and very possibly the largest handheld game cartridges ever seen. If you’re curious, you can still pick one up on eBay for around £60-£100.
Nokia N-Gage
In fairness to Nokia, the Finnish company saw the mobile gaming revolution coming from a long way off. Its 2003 attempt at creating a competitor to the Game Boy Advance that was also a phone had a few problems, however: it wasn’t particularly good as a phone or as a games console. You had to hold the N-Gage side on to your head in order to hear the speaker, and to switch out the games you had to remove the battery every time. A successor, the N-Gage QD, fixed these problems, but the game-cartridge-for-your-phone concept never really took off - it would be another five years before Apple’s App Store opened the floodgates for mobile game developers.
Tiger Game.com
Tiger Game.com
© [unknown]
Not to be confused with Tiger Telematics, Tiger Electronics had a rich history of brilliant gaming handhelds - all those video game watches and single game handhelds from the 80s and early 90s - but things went awry with its first attempt at a portable gaming platform. Though the Tiger Game.com sported a touchscreen, could hold two cartridges at once and connect to the internet, it never hit critical mass - partly due to the fact that Tiger insisted on developing all the games in-house.
The WonderSwan
Wonder Swan
© Yoppy
Bandai's foray into the handheld market met with only mixed success, though it was forged by the legendary creator of the original Nintendo Game Boy, Gunpei Yokoi. Much like its Nintendo counterpart, the WonderSwan originally debuted in 1999 with a black and white screen, but unusually, it could be played in both landscape and portrait modes. Despite Nintendo's dominance in the Japanese handheld market, Bandai managed to grab the attention of many gamers thanks to its low price of ¥6800 (Just £42), and a deal with Final Fantasy developer Square to port over the first games in the series with improved graphics. But then came the Game Boy Advance - not even Bandai’s own Digimon games could save the Wonderswan from that juggernaut.
Atari Lynx
The 1989 Atari Lynx holds the record for being the first portable gaming handheld ever with a colour screen. Unofficially, it also holds the record for being the longest gaming handheld ever made. As you can see in the advert above, though you could link up to four players side by side for multiplayer, you then had to hold the console upright, which was less fun than it was worth - though a sequel followed, it never gained the success required, and was discontinued in 1994.
Panasonic Jungle
Panasonic Jungle
© Panasonic
Panasonic was just a few years too early with the Jungle, its ambitious plan for a new type of gaming handheld, with a clamshell screen, high power specs and a focus on making massively multiplayer online games portable - big name titles were in place, including a port of Battlestar Galactica Online. Though Panasonic shelved the device before release, it’s hard not to see echoes of the Jungle in Android-powered handhelds like the Wikipad and the Nvidia Shield.
Nec TurboExpress
Turbo Express
© Evan-Amos
Released a year after the original Game Boy, Nec’s TurboExpress should have destroyed Nintendo’s new business. It had a similar oblong form factor and controls, but it also had a colour screen and even a built-in TV. In 1990. Though it racked up more than a million sales in its lifetime, and with titles like Street Fighter II and Bomberman aboard, it wasn’t lacking for games, it was dwarfed by the success of its Japanese rivals (the Sega Game Gear was released the same year).
GamePark GP32
Open-source and games consoles don’t usually go hand in hand, which is probably why the GamePark 32 never made it out of its home nation. The Game Boy Advance rival debuted in South Korea in 2001 with the promise of a new business model - it was designed to let players build and distribute their own games easily. This stopped the console from ever hitting the mainstream - although with games like Kimchi-Man (kimchi being a type of, er, fermented vegetable) on the GP32, it’s not hard to see why it wasn’t an international success.
The Nintendo 2DS goes on sale on 11 October.
