Tom

After going to a dental appointment earlier this week, since I was already out in the heat and humidity anyway, I decided to make a trek to the local mall for a little while to procrastinate on work and stopped by the (no longer Sega, RIP) Gigo, which I like to do every month or two to make a pilgrimage to their still-standing Wacca cabinet. Anyway, this place has a surprisingly good lineup of gachapon machines for something that's nowhere near any tourists traps and I often end up dumping 1000 yen or so into them for some goodies and this time around, one of the units had the LCD equivalent of a 99-in-1 pirate Famicom cart, minus the illegal bootlegs (mostly). Me being me, I couldn't not plunk down 300 yen for the one I ended up with above, which feels surprisingly cheap in this day and age given that apparently the gachapon industry in particular is feeling the inflationary squeeze.

Officially titled the "Denshi Game Collection Milky Color," it was developed released by a company inspiringly named IP4, whose website you can find here.* I don't know jack shit about the industry, but I guess they're something of a player when it comes to gacha stuff because it seems like they have an extensive portfolio of stuff and more followers on Twitter than you would probably expect for a company just quietly doing this sort of stuff in the background. Either way, despite what even the title screen suggests when you boot it up, the actual signage for the machine I got this out of actually proclaimed this is a 26-in-1 unit, a total that is itself still dubious. As the instruction sheet indicates, in practice, there are about nine actually original games on the device and the rest are variants, 15 of which alone are different versions of Definitely Official Guideline Tetris. The 99 figure comes from the fact that each game supposedly has 99 "patterns," which, as far as I can tell aren't necessarily discrete levels all the time so much as dip switches like what you'd find on, say, an Atari 2600, but whether that's true is, again, probably pretty suspect.

That said, for a little unit whose main gameplay field can only display a series of block graphics, it does get a surprising amount of mileage out of such meager visual capabilities. The games are all pokey in the way that you would expect with an LCD toy like this, but they do otherwise read as the games that the instructions claim each one to be thanks to some smart design choices, like having your head and the food blink in the Snake clone so that you can properly orient yourself. My "favorite" of the bunch, if there is such a thing, is probably the Frogger ripoff, which, again, does an admirable job of recreating the look and basic feel of the game with only the most minimal of resources available to it.

It'll probably mostly hang out in glass display cabinet as a fun goof for the rest of its days, but I've spent 300 yen on worse gacha winnings, so money well spent enough, I suppose. I also kinda secretly hope that this thing ends up on MAME one of these days now that they cover LCD stuff on there, too.

*Edit: Thanks to a few folks chiming in about this, it sounds like this thing has actually existed for decades in different parts of the world and that IP4 presumably just bought a bunch to throw them into gachapon capsules. Can't say I'm shocked! Makes sense to me!

I ended up doing another run on some local gachapon machines last night and came upon what is clearly another iteration of the same handheld I posted about a few months ago above. This one is officially called the "Minigame Box Rocket" in English within the meager documentation included with it and unlike the other doohickey is manufactured by a company called Yell World, of all things, lending credence to commenters on the last point who pointed out that the game itself has been manufactured and distributed across the world for at least a couple decades. Also unlike the other device, I can't find a dedicated product listing on the manufacturer's site no matter how I try to look it up; I get the impression that maybe they only post about the ones that they create in-house and own the "IP" for since I don't see any media licenses within their promoted lineup.

I'm probably not gonna bother actually turning on these thing when I know what I'm already in for, but I will say, goofy as it looks, I almost like this device better? It also comes in multiple colors, but the white makes it look like an off-brand PocketStation, which, as someone with I think four of those and counting, I'm entirely for.

Anyway, now that I definitively know that Japanese companies are seemingly just licensing some generic game and then rebranding it for their own purposes, I'm probably going to keep an active eye out for these things from now and... probably pick up more of them if I see them because... in for a penny, in for a pound, I guess, especially when the exchange rate makes them even cheaper for me to get.

Game preservation, folks! This is definitely what the kids are talking about these days!

After going to a dental appointment earlier this week, since I was already out in the heat and humidity anyway, I decided to make a trek to the local mall for a little while to procrastinate on work and stopped by the (no longer Sega, RIP) Gigo, which I like to do every month or two to make a pilgrimage to their still-standing Wacca cabinet. Anyway, this place has a surprisingly good lineup of gachapon machines for something that's nowhere near any tourists traps and I often end up dumping 1000 yen or so into them for some goodies and this time around, one of the units had the LCD equivalent of a 99-in-1 pirate Famicom cart, minus the illegal bootlegs (mostly). Me being me, I couldn't not plunk down 300 yen for the one I ended up with above, which feels surprisingly cheap in this day and age given that apparently the gachapon industry in particular is feeling the inflationary squeeze.

Officially titled the "Denshi Game Collection Milky Color," it was developed released by a company inspiringly named IP4, whose website you can find here.* I don't know jack shit about the industry, but I guess they're something of a player when it comes to gacha stuff because it seems like they have an extensive portfolio of stuff and more followers on Twitter than you would probably expect for a company just quietly doing this sort of stuff in the background. Either way, despite what even the title screen suggests when you boot it up, the actual signage for the machine I got this out of actually proclaimed this is a 26-in-1 unit, a total that is itself still dubious. As the instruction sheet indicates, in practice, there are about nine actually original games on the device and the rest are variants, 15 of which alone are different versions of Definitely Official Guideline Tetris. The 99 figure comes from the fact that each game supposedly has 99 "patterns," which, as far as I can tell aren't necessarily discrete levels all the time so much as dip switches like what you'd find on, say, an Atari 2600, but whether that's true is, again, probably pretty suspect.

That said, for a little unit whose main gameplay field can only display a series of block graphics, it does get a surprising amount of mileage out of such meager visual capabilities. The games are all pokey in the way that you would expect with an LCD toy like this, but they do otherwise read as the games that the instructions claim each one to be thanks to some smart design choices, like having your head and the food blink in the Snake clone so that you can properly orient yourself. My "favorite" of the bunch, if there is such a thing, is probably the Frogger ripoff, which, again, does an admirable job of recreating the look and basic feel of the game with only the most minimal of resources available to it.

It'll probably mostly hang out in glass display cabinet as a fun goof for the rest of its days, but I've spent 300 yen on worse gacha winnings, so money well spent enough, I suppose. I also kinda secretly hope that this thing ends up on MAME one of these days now that they cover LCD stuff on there, too.

*Edit: Thanks to a few folks chiming in about this, it sounds like this thing has actually existed for decades in different parts of the world and that IP4 presumably just bought a bunch to throw them into gachapon capsules. Can't say I'm shocked! Makes sense to me!