It’s time to scrape the bottom of the barrel. In this episode, the Nerd takes a look at games produced by Tiger Electronics. As is discussed in the episode, any kid who grew up in the late 80’s or early 90’s will certainly remember these things and just how terrible they were!
Before the episode really gets going, however, we take a short detour back to episode two and a few comments the Nerd made way back in 2004. One of these is a game called “Taxman” which, while not the actual name of the game James was referring to, there is coincidentally a game called “Tax Man” for the Apple ][. It’s apparently just a clone of Pac-Man, but incidentally was made by HAL Labs, the same company behind the Kirby series and Super Smash Bros.
The other thing mentioned are the Tiger Wrist games, which are something we’ll get to soon enough but first we take a look at the handheld Tiger games.
James goes over the general hell that these games were – they were cheap, available everywhere, and cost-conscious parents would buy them en masse for their gamer children.
The technology, a simple LCD panel with a bit of video game logic doesn’t make for a good game experience. Maybe back in the early days it would have, but not by the time these really hit the market, and especially not after the Game Boy had taken over. Ironically, they thrived because of the Game Boy, if anything, thanks to a demand from children for portable games.
Anyway, beyond my ranting on the topic, James pretty well covers these bastard children of the early post-Nintendo gaming surge; their terrible controls, limited gameplay potential, everything. The video really speaks for itself regarding these things.
This is where we finally move on to the Tiger Wrist Games — A watch that’s also a Tiger LCD game. Take everything that’s bad about the normal Tiger games, and multiply it. That’s what the Wrist games are — absolutely fucking terrible. There really isn’t much more to say about them.
The episode then takes a slight detour with an appearance from “Bullshit Man” from Cinemassacre series “You Know What’s Bullshit?” This leads into one of the best moments in Nerd history with the “bit wars” joke (you’ll catch, trust me) before we move on to cover a few more things from Tiger Electronics.
First we take a look at the Tiger Game.Com (read “Game Com”) which had some things going for it but what just way too little too late, especially to have been released in 1997! The idea was there, but it just wasn’t done correctly and, as you could expect, it failed.
Lastly, the Nerd takes a look at the Tiger R-Zone. Take the crappy LCD games we know and love, and put them into a heads-up-display kind of device you wear and there ya go – gaming on the go.
I don’t think I need to say more and, much like the rest of this episode, it speaks for itself.
Final Rating: 3.5/5
This episode has its nostalgic value, and does contain some of the best jokes for many episodes, but feels a little lacking otherwise. This mainly being due to the fact no single game gets talked about in any real detail.
That being said, the focus here isn’t really supposed to be any single game but is instead the idea of these things actually existing as they did. It’s wild to think of it as something that happened in gaming, but what’s more, there are still some companies putting out these same kinds of games to this very day!
This is indeed a disturbing gaming universe.