Game.com turns 14...? [Archive] - Retrogaming Roundtable

pixelsnpolygons

09-10-2011, 12:29 AM

I can't seem to find an exact launch day... possibly because it didn't have one - but the Game.com was released in at some point in September of 1997 making it 14 years old this year. Since there seems to be a run in anniversary threads - highlighting three of the most beloved systems ever - this thread shines light on one of the least liked.

There's not a lot of great things to say about Game.com. I recall getting the system and a bunch of games off eBay around a decade ago. I was pretty much done with it forever within minutes. I couldn't believe it had games like Resident Evil 2 and Fighters Megamix until I played them and realized technically it didn't have games like that. :-(

Out of curiosity does anyone know what the hell that muffled voice says when you turn the Game.com on? It sounds like the guy is saying "Game com part two".

Also, while I am at it, does anyone have any decent Game.com screenshots? Weird request, I know.

Happy 14th-ish birthday, Game.com!

Tupin

09-10-2011, 12:53 AM

It's saying "Game.com active."

I paid four dollars for the system with three games, I like Lights Out but that's pretty much it. It really isn't that fun to play. Plus, my system has dead pixels.

WesternNYCollector

09-10-2011, 12:55 AM

I think I must have been in a very bad market for video game advertisements on television back in the day. I used to watch hours upon hours of TV on a weekly basis and only ever saw TWO advertisements for the SNES live on the air. I remember because I was so excited and shocked that I jumped up and down with excitement. Much the same for just about every other console before the PlayStation or maybe even the PS2. Now I hear that Xbox 360 tone several times an hour if I leave a TV on, which is rarely.

Long story short, I never heard of the Game.com until this year when I started regularly listening to game collecting / retro gaming podcasts. Never saw a single advert for it on TV, in a magazine, whatever. Nada. Zilch.

swlovinist

09-10-2011, 01:55 AM

I collected the system early on, and keep the collection where it belongs...hanging on a wall and not plugged in. I was really looking forward to the system...too bad it just did not deliver at all.

j_factor

09-10-2011, 02:27 AM

Long story short, I never heard of the Game.com until this year when I started regularly listening to game collecting / retro gaming podcasts. Never saw a single advert for it on TV, in a magazine, whatever. Nada. Zilch.

I clearly remember the TV ads. "It plays more games than you IDIOTS have brain cells!" Calling your potential customers idiots: a brilliant marketing strategy. If taken literally, they were marketing to the braindead, considering the system only had around 20 games.

I got a Game.com around 2003 as a curiosity. Terrible system. Lights Out is the only decent game. In Williams Arcade Classics, Joust is playable (and only Joust -- the system struggles with Defender and Sinistar). Henry! is fun for about five minutes. Nothing else on the system is even fun for five minutes. Most of the games, due to their titles, are interesting in an "lol wtf" kind of way.

Compute

09-10-2011, 08:04 AM

I remember when it came out I wanted one so I could connect it to the Internet. Fortunately I never got one. Years later I picked one up for KB Toys for pennies on the dollar. Like the 3DO, CDi, Gizmondo, nGage, and so many others, it showed what could be done to make systems more versatile and usable (touch screen, internet connectivity in this case). Also like those systems, it was too early and Tiger not taken seriously enough for it to be the launch vehicle. I seem to remember this is about the same time as the R-Zone, which demonstrated quite clearly that Tiger was flailing its paws trying to find SOMETHING to keep the Nintendo generation interested.

Without the marketing force to make the platform viable, the system failed. It didn't help that it feels like a handful of compromises. Had they been able to retail it for $200+, it would be a capable machine, probably with color screen and enough processor power to run Defender. Of course, who would buy a $200 handheld?

tom

09-10-2011, 11:20 AM

game.com.....complete:

http://i27.photobucket.com/albums/c173/thomasholzer/completegamecom.jpg

The puzzle and quiz games are quite fun, the action games are just too blurry.
Internet worked fine text-based only of course

MachineGex

09-10-2011, 11:22 AM

I remember playing it at E3 before it was released. I thought the touch-screen was a cool and novel idea.

My wife(girlfriend back then) bought me this system as a birthday present when it came out. I was pretty excited to play it again and remember taking a long drive with it while playing the trivia game. Then, the games stop coming out and I forgot about the system.

Years later, I decide to complete the library. I was already close to complete, but Wheel of Fortune 2 turned out to be a difficult game to come by. After 4 years of seaching ebay, I finally won a game.com lot which include this game. I still don't see it come up too often.

Greg2600

09-10-2011, 11:39 AM

j_factor

09-10-2011, 12:42 PM

substantial_snake

09-10-2011, 01:37 PM

I couldn't believe they were serious when I first saw the system in a store when it was released. I was like, black and white, are you serious? Sure the graphics were good, and it had some other interesting features, but B/W equaled failure.

Huh?

The GBC was released a year later so Black and White did not equal failure. Its overall bad..well everything was what equaled failure. lol

I remember seeing an add in a Sears catalog when I was a kid for one of these and I was totally sucked into all of the AMAZING FEATURES..and that it had sonic the hedgehog. Fortunately my parents said that they weren't buying it and about a year later I got a gameboy color so hooray for that. :D

Frankie_Says_Relax

09-10-2011, 04:13 PM

One of Stuart Ashen's latest reviews just so happens to be the Game.com

http://youtu.be/7tIBIny4L6E

I've always been tempted to bring my Game.com collection to a NAVA to sell/trade, but I always feel guilty about what I'd be passing on to that person.

Jorpho

01-24-2012, 09:43 PM

So, by some coincidence, Wikipedia says that the old developer's Game.com emulator was released to the Internet in October 2011.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game.com
http://www.hidden-palace.org/?updates/c/38

It came to my attention when I saw a crystal-clear animated GIF of Resident Evil 2 for the Game.com today. Apparently it's also been in MESS for a while, but http://www.mess.org/sysinfo:gamecom says the status is still "Preliminary".

What's the story here? Can the Game.com finally be played as it was never meant to be played but should have been?

Dangerboy

01-24-2012, 10:51 PM

goatdan

01-24-2012, 10:57 PM

I missed this the first go around, but would like to add...

The Game.Com is a thing that I kept thinking that I would love. Hell, I bought a couple systems with a bunch of games a year or two ago. But *nothing* quite works the way it should on it. The decent games are solitaire and Lights Out, and after that point everything else is practically unplayable. The system never found a niche -- the touch screen wasn't very good for touch games, and the screen wasn't good enough to move LCD on and off fast enough to make things look good, so with very few exceptions, nothing ever worked right on it.

I was floored by how many attempts they made with it, and it still tricks me because I think it *looks* like such a great idea. But, alas, it's not. Hey, if anyone wants some Game.Com stuff cheap, PM me :)

evilernLe

01-24-2012, 11:11 PM

I actually stood in line on a "black Friday" in 1997 for this system at a KB Toys. I still have the original unit I purchased, with the box, modem voucher and everything.

Absolutely awful system, but I did enjoy Mortal Kombat Trilogy simply for the novel of playing the game on a handheld. The magazine shots of Duke Nukem 3D didn't help much either... it looked amazing.

Frankly, this system pioneered a lot of ideas, it just failed miserably at them.

MachineGex

01-24-2012, 11:37 PM

Sadly, this system is the only "complete" game collection I own. I always thought NES or Atari Lynx would be the first sytem that I get a complete game library for......but nooooo......I ended up getting a complete game.com collection after finding Wheel 2 on ebay. I still need about 10 or so lynx games and a handleful of NES games to complete those. Still, my wife gave me the system at launch, so maybe it is only right that it is my only complete collection.

Ryudo

01-24-2012, 11:58 PM

I remember that POS.
Had the worst commercial with a yelling midget and playing it it was blurry and hard to look at. It was horrible. Collectors piece now as a nice lesson of superb failures.

goatdan

01-25-2012, 01:19 AM

The magazine shots of Duke Nukem 3D didn't help much either... it looked amazing.

Yeah -- The system looked AMAZING when it was paused, but the screen tech was horrendous when it was in action.

Compute

01-25-2012, 10:00 AM

Bahah. I forgot that the "Internet" cartridge was sold separate from the modem. :roll:

davidbrit2

01-25-2012, 11:27 AM

Bahah. I forgot that the "Internet" cartridge was sold separate from the modem. :roll:

It's also nothing but a dumb terminal. Have fun browsing the web from your dial-in UNIX account and lynx, using a touch screen.

Also, I think it's hilarious how the Game.com version of Williams Arcade Classics is so much better than the GBA version.

And for what it's worth, Duke Nukem 3D isn't that bad, despite being a fairly stark departure from the original.

VertigoProcess

01-25-2012, 02:04 PM

this game com talk is making me want to bust mine out of the box and play it for 5 min until i get pissed off at the slow screen refresh and put it right back on the display shelf....

The Shawn

01-25-2012, 03:17 PM

I think I paid $20 for a game.com off a member here 5 years ago thinking "Hey what a deal! NIB to boot" In hindsight I'm sure he was laughing all the way to the bank.

Worst attempt at a handheld ever. I believe I put 6 new batteries in it at the time and failed to take them out, I'm sure they have exploded by now from the heat of the garage...

Jimmy Yakapucci

01-25-2012, 04:01 PM

I had one a number of years ago and I have no idea what I did with it. A year or so ago I bought another one, this time the smaller model with a few games. One thing that I did like about it was that you could have two carts loaded at the sames time.

The 1 2 P

01-25-2012, 08:30 PM

I remember a few years ago I couldn't even give this system away. I sold a factory sealed one with two factory sealed games for around $30. In all the time I owned the system I never had any desire to play it.

joshnickerson

01-25-2012, 08:38 PM

I picked one up several years ago, and found the included Lights Out game to be decent, if not all that great.

Then I picked up Sonic Jam and decided to try that out.

I played for about 30 seconds and literally got vertigo from the horrid screen refresh rate.

I ended up giving it to my friend who loves to collect crap games, but even he won't turn it on.

Piece of shit. Rot in hell, you lousy Gameboy wannabe.

Tupin

01-25-2012, 09:09 PM

Really, the screen killed it. Would it have been that much more expensive if they had a TFT screen in it? Nintendo, Sega, Atari, and even NEC managed to have handhelds without such severe ghosting years before Tiger.

retroman

01-25-2012, 09:34 PM

i have both the original unit and the pocket pro backlight...games had horrible frame rates, and limited releases

VertigoProcess

01-25-2012, 10:19 PM

i have both the original unit and the pocket pro backlight...games had horrible frame rates, and limited releases

Just a note on the model 2 with "backlight", the it was advertised as haveing a backlight but it was really a front lit screen.... just another example of their mess ups with that console...

Jorpho

01-26-2012, 12:24 AM

(So I guess no one here is interested in Game.com emulation after all..?)

The Shawn

01-26-2012, 06:56 AM

(So I guess no one here is interested in Game.com emulation after all..?)

I seriously thought you were joking when you first mentioned it...

I've played better looking calculator games.

VertigoProcess

01-26-2012, 09:08 AM

(So I guess no one here is interested in Game.com emulation after all..?)

Id be somewhat interested, since the screen refresh seemed to be one of its biggest problems id like to see if some of the games were actually decent without that problem... i know theres some game com fanatics out there (apparently none on this forum haha) id like to see what they see in the system...

tom

01-26-2012, 03:46 PM

VertigoProcess

01-26-2012, 03:49 PM

It's a shame the game.com has such a bad screen, wonder what happened? I mean the game.com was so ahead of its time, handheld with internet capabilities, touch-screen, built in applications and game, 2 cart ports.....

I guess the released games are not actually bad, is just the screen refresh rate.

Well if you think about it putting a touch screen in that was actually half decent would have costed way to much back then... they had the right ideas just the technology wasn't there yet... most company's would have scraped the idea after realizing it wasn't doable in a costly manner, but they said screw it well deal with what we have... I feel like it comes down to pure cockyness...

goatdan

01-26-2012, 10:06 PM

Just a note on the model 2 with "backlight", the it was advertised as haveing a backlight but it was really a front lit screen.... just another example of their mess ups with that console...

I believe that there was a backlit model created, but it was sold in *extremely* limited numbers. I heard that they only test marketed them, and they only sold something like 250 of them or less to gauge interest near the end of the death of the console.

At one point, I knew someone that had one.

VertigoProcess

01-26-2012, 10:48 PM

I believe that there was a backlit model created, but it was sold in *extremely* limited numbers. I heard that they only test marketed them, and they only sold something like 250 of them or less to gauge interest near the end of the death of the console.

At one point, I knew someone that had one.

Good to know... I just knew the main model 2s were falsely advertised as such...