Games

Pixel Perfect Memories: Electronic Baseball

33 Comments

Today begins the Top 50 of my NES countdown.  Today's featured game is Dragon Warrior.

Release Date: 1988
Platform: LCD Handheld
Developer: Tiger

Yeah, the entire Tiger system is painfully outdated, with it's blippity bloop sounds and constantly flashing graphics.  But I spent way too much time playing it.  How about you?  There's really no need to review the game, but here's a picture to refresh your memory.

This month's questions is as follows: What were your favorite Tiger handheld games?

 

33 thoughts on “Pixel Perfect Memories: Electronic Baseball”

  1. It's really funny that you posted the handheld games, as I was just thinking of them. When I was a kid, we went camping a lot and these games were the in car entertainment. I went camping this weekend with my girls, and thought about these versus the ipod touch my oldest was playing with...

    Electronic Pinball was always a favorite in the car. Whoever got stuck with Bowling was always a bit bummed.

        1. actually, i think the bowling game was my favorite. maybe because i was on a bowling league and could control the hooking and such. i'm pretty sure i had the baseball game, but don't remember it so well...

          1. I just read on the picture up there that it says "realistic batting." I wonder what it was comparing itself to to make that claim.

  3. My first game ever was Mattel Hockey. I don't know how my parents would have come across that (garage sale, I expect?), and I'm realizing I probably should have kept track of it.

    My first video handheld game that I purchased, Plane and Tank. With no other video games to play I eventually started beating it with restrictions (play while holding the game upside down, beat the game using only your toes, etc).

    The classic Bo Jackson Baseball/Football game. I hated the football side, but on the baseball side, I was always able to rack up several hundred runs by bunting the ball into the outfield over and over again (you basically scored hundreds of runs by bunting for a base hit, which you could always do, it was Dick Bremer's dream game).

    1. Ah, the joys of bunting on basic video games. A few years back, I dusted off RBI baseball for the NES, and discovered that you could bunt for a HR fairly reliability against a computer opponent. If you placed it perfectly, the computer would have the catcher pursue it and if the ball was going just fast enough, he'd go all the way to the OF wall.

      Good times.

      1. You would always make contact, and the ball would always find its way between the third baseman and the second baseman. Basically, once you figured out the trick, it was "score runs until you get bored". I tried seeing how many I could score in a nine inning game, but couldn't make it past the 6th inning, when I already had 750+ runs.

        1. I've played this game a ton, and while I've done what you guys are describing many, many times, I've never been able to do it automatically because the pitches never come in at the same speed or place. Half the time I bunt it foul or pop it up to the catcher. With good players, I have found it more beneficial to swing away.

    1. Yeah, I've read this before, but in such an insanely detailed article. Nice find. I still have several games, and a few of them rarely work anymore, probably due to this reason. The real problem is that Nintendo created such a finicky system that required inserting the game multiple times to get it to connect right. This was rarely a problem on the Atari or any other cartridge system I've played with.

  5. While I do remember playing electronic games like that, it was probably a little before my time and they never held my attention. Mostly because I was really bad at them.

    All of my video gaming this month has been focused on Borderlands 2. Like the first one, it's very good. The story for the main game is much better this time around, but I didn't mind the last game either. I love how it gives characters to the PC's from the last game.

    1. I really want to play Borderlands 2, but a purchase now would probably not make my wife happy. Someday, though, someday.

  6. Okay, now you've got me obsessing over this, and I remember two more games, though neither of these were Tiger or had LEDs, they're still close enough to where I'd call them "video games".

    The first was a racing game. There were two loops of some sort of film that made up the "lanes" of the road. There was an actual steering wheel, which directly controlled your car as you weaved through the lanes. There was also a shifter, which controlled the speed of the game. There was a 'slow' lane and a 'fast' lane, and you had to manipulate the speed to weave in and out of the racecar traffic as quickly as possible. Colliding with another car would cause a horrible sound out of the game, as well as the only actual lighting of the game (a sort of explosion looking thing) and your car would stop as the timer kept going. The goal was simply accumulate as many "laps" as possible before time ran out.

    The second was a basketball game. Two people could play, each on opposite sides of the game. The facing was painted with the different basketball players, the only indication of who had the ball and what was going on was a series of red LEDs that were behind the facing. Defense mattered, and you could steal passes and block shots with a bit of skill. My brother and I played a lot of this game.

    I'm going to have to do some research when I get home.

    1. we had this game, Talking Baseball. It was pretty awesome at the time. Each team had individual player cards with statistic on them. We had AL All-Stars, NL All-Stars, Cleveland, Milwaukee, Detroit, and Toronto. I believe it was the 1987 stats. The game had a pretty good announcer. Unfortunately, it got very easy to score tons of runs, so games would take forever. Also, the prescripted lines for the announcer got a little predictable after a while.

  7. Tiger games? I had a bunch, since my folks wouldn't let us get a Nintendo. I definitely played Road Race a lot. I liked bowling. Baseball was a staple. But my absolute favorites were Mini-golf and Jordan vs. Bird.

    The last month has seen me dust off Civ V.. I won a military campaign in game 1. Game 2 I'm going for a tech victory, I think. Maybe diplomatic.

    2. Also, I'm feeling less and less bad about getting an Xbox360 instead of a PS3 these days. I'm over not being able to play The Show.

      1. The divide in first-party games is hugely in favor of PS3. I can't think of any recent first party title that interests me on 360. Not one.

  9. I don't really have much recollection of playing Tiger games, so I can't add much to that discussion.

    I had restarted Fallout: New Vegas recently in the hopes that playing a fresh game with all of the patches to this point (damn you, Bethesda) would not have a couple of the crippling bugs my last game had. But, about a month after doing that I picked up NBA2K13, so I've been playing that and only that. Despite spending a lot of time on 2K11, I am terrible at it. Its been difficult getting used to the new control scheme and the players move in a much more "life-like" way.

    More importantly, though, is I get to control Rubio. I noticed something while playing the first time: playing a game with Rubio in is significanly more fun than when he gets subbed out and I have to run the offense with Ridnour or Barea. That's some good realism right there.

  11. I recently bought a copy of Uncharted 2 from a thrift shop for about 5 bucks. I've gotten my money's worth for sure. This brings the total of games I own to three, two of which were free from ps3 for the system being hacked.

  12. Still playing Dark Souls. In fact, I recently decided that this has become my favorite game of all time.

Comments are closed.