Tag: Handheld

The Virtual Boy was Nintendo’s ill-fated attempt to create a 3D virtual reality gaming system back in the 1990s. The system required that gamers align their eyes with a tabletop viewer, much like those things they make you look into when you get a vision test at the DMV.

Like many of you, I love to play retro arcade games. I even have a custom built MAME cabinet in my basement for when I’m craving a little game of Pac-Man, Dig Dug, or Donkey Kong.

When it comes to retro gaming systems, SEGA made some of my favorites, including the Master System, Genesis, and Dreamcast. Long before modern mobile devices, the Japanese video game company created one of the first full-color handhelds, the SEGA Game Gear.

The Nintendo GameCube and Wii both offered up lots of fun and classic video games. But neither console was particularly portable, so the only way you could play those games on the go would be via software emulation.

Software developer Panic has announced that it’s working with synth maker Teenage Engineering on an unusual handheld gaming system called Playdate. The upcoming portable gaming device has less than advanced graphics, and not so advanced technology, although it does have WiFi, Bluetooth, USB-C, and a headphone jack.

Woodgrain. There was a time when all of our coolest gadgets (and station wagons) were covered in this fake veneer. I for one, think it looks awesome and wish everything from our phones to our computers was still covered in the stuff.

Retro gaming handhelds and compact consoles are starting to gain some serious mainstream popularity these days. But some of the cheaper systems out there either only run pirated ROMs, or come only with bad homebrew copies of games.

If you want to relive some of that ’80s gaming glory you had on the Atari, there’s are a couple of new ways to enjoy that, courtesy of PQube. For starters, the Atari Retro Handheld system features a 2.4″ LCD screen, looks inspired by the classic console, and comes packed with 50 games inside.

This alarm clock looks exactly like the Game Boy you used to play on the go. It even has working buttons. The only difference is that instead of playing classic games, this version is all about waking you up in the morning.

When I was a kid, I used to play the heck out of that Mattel Pocket Football game. I always sucked at kicking, but I was quite adept at running down the field fast as hell.

Retro-Bit revealed some exciting news at CES this past week in the form of a handheld game system loaded with old-school classics. The company calls it the Go Retro! It has a Game Boy style look, but in a black and red color scheme, with 4 buttons.

Nostalgia among gaming nerds is big business. The NES and SNES Classic Edition retro consoles are still selling out. Obviously a Game Boy Classic Edition must be on the way from Nintendo, right? Maybe, but Hyperkin is working on its own remake and beating them to the punch.

I recently had the opportunity to test out Retro-Bit’s RES+ console, which lets you play classic 8-bit Nintendo games over an HDMI connection, resulting in image quality heretofore unseen from these classic games. If you’re looking for something a bit more versatile, you might want to check out this system out of Japan, which lets you go handheld, while also offering an HDMI output when you’re at home.

I spent a whole lot of time and a whole lot of quarters in arcades when I was a kid. Now that I’m a grown-up and make a halfway decent living, I’ve got my own custom-built MAME cabinet in my mancave, so I can play all of my favorite games whenever the mood strikes me, and without spending any more quarters.

It doesn’t seem like the Nintendo 3DS has been around that long, but it has been six years since the original model launched, and the new version came out in 2014. Kotaku reports that an official notice on the Japanese website for the New Nintendo 3DS states that production of that handheld if over.

Anyone who didn’t grow up back in the early ’80s doesn’t really understand how awesome it was when video games started hitting the scene. In those days, if we found a quarter in the road, we were in the gas station arcade 60 seconds later.