...huh, apparently there was a portable version of the PC-Engine / Turbografx, with a gameboy form factor but a backlit screen and full compatibility with all PC-Engine games
and it came out in 1990
apparently the reason it didn't do well was 1) NEC was really bad at advertising, 2) it was expensive as fuck, and 3) NEC wasn't really a well known game company on the scale of nintendo and sega
(only reason 2) applies to japanese sales though)
looks like used ones still demand prices upwards of $350 on ebay too
it's called the TurboExpress incidentally if you want to look it up. it looks really neat
honestly the turbografx is such a neat system it's kind of a shame it didn't take off
dont' think it had a lot of games that are particularly to our taste on it though, seems to be a lot of action and fighty games
it did have ys though, ys is good
@Felthry play jb harold
@Zlchxo hmm, looked it up and it doesn't particularly look like something we'd enjoy that much, really! Why do you recommend it?
@Felthry Hmm, I guess not! Kind of more of a personal favorite for me by way of Twin Peaks. But I just think it's just really well presented, very noir, very lo-fi, very retro, and the sound effects and music and graphical presentation and "cutscenes" and everything just comes together really well. It's not super gory or violent or anything
@Zlchxo *nods!*
we don't actually have anything that plays pc-engine games anyway, was more just talking about a neat thing we'd discovered
but it's a neat thing to know about! noir stuff isn't our style (much more high fantasy worldbuilding-heavy stuff for us) but it sounds like a very well made thing
@Felthry jb harold was HUGE... 5 games (4 good ones because the last one is fmv trash released years later) sold 20 MILLION copies! and 2 and 5 were only available overseas from japan on fucking laseractive while 3 and 4 weren't available at all. huge influence on the gaming industry, on visual novels and wacky 90s japanese adventure games and hideo kojima, and anything that was in turn influenced by them.
@Felthry i think the 5th one was produced by the american studio commissioned for the 2nd's laseractive footage, but idk. different and worse in story, options, and gameplay, but not cinematography/actors
@Zlchxo i have never heard of laseractive before but it looks kind of neat and also kind of trying to do too many things in one box
@Zlchxo whose idea was this and why were they allowed to make it a thing
this was well into the era when CD-ROMs existed, why make a new format for storing digital data on a laserdisc
@Zlchxo they weren't even like cd-sized or anything they were literally 30 cm across
what the hell
@Zlchxo sorry just, the reality of this thing is baffling to me
did it also sound as terrifying as conventional laserdisc players when it spun up
@Felthry it was a little bit ~upscale~ so not quite but you have the general idea correct
@Felthry brb meeting up with johnny at the playground to loan him my copies of jb harold 2 and 5 which i am forced to carry around until lunchtime (i guess now that i think of it you could also play cartridges and cd games on it so johnny could also get jb harold 1 on tgcd, that's really interesting!)
@Zlchxo it's a neat idea i'll give them that but wow that seems excessively ambitious
i wonder if the bit where it could play sega genesis games would work with the eleventy thousand add-on things they made to it, could you plug in a 32x or a sega cd to it
@Zlchxo sega's philosophy in the 90s seemed to be "never make a new console, everything must be a genesis add-on"
@Felthry it doesn't seem like the venture was ultimately profitable, but pioneer was never trying to become a dominant player in the industry or sell millions of units. they wanted to promote laserdisc over cd especially vs cd-i (later playstation). having add-on pacs from other companies, which were required even for the exclusive games, was something that was agreed upon bc they didn't really see each-other as competitors. laseractive, in conception, was an expandable premium laserdisc player
@Zlchxo of course laserdisc ultimately died in favor of dvd though i guess it really died before dvd even existed
pioneer seemingly did okay though, considering we bought a BD-RW drive from them like two years ago, so they must still exist in some form
@Felthry they're doing great even, still making upscale disc hardware, usually considered best in market. i think they mostly did laseractive just because they could. like you said earlier with cds being around it was a way of showing that laseractive could handle digital more than anything. dvd actually came about in 1995 or so
@Felthry now that i've mentioned cd-i i get to say it also got an rpg/adventure sci-fi game called Laser Lords, made by the zelda cd-i crew before that. it's iconic, hilarious, even thought-provoking and woke, and unironically very good (much better than zelda), but a tedious watch because of the sidequests (but you'll still get the idea). it's the only game worth looking at the hardware for, makes it more interesting than 3do in my opinion (everything got ported)
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL-42_xDI2uiy2qIb8CB1QF18tEWjP-zKV
@Felthry although i will say about the 3do that it had immercenary which is not a good game but damn is it a trip
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uU9-QvLQMbU
@Felthry you didn't need to! the base hardware played cds and it just kerjiggered to the mega ld :) and the cartridge port would hypothetically work like the cartridge port and let you use add-ons, yes: on models they don't work on, it's usually some physical obstruction more than anything except for the 32x's cable situation which would require engineering
https://forum.digitpress.com/forum/archive/index.php/t-26327.htm
the sega cd didn't use the cartridge port so you wouldn't be able to attach it (unless you got really creative?)
@Zlchxo we never actually had any of those add-ons, I just know they existed and were weird, so I don't know how they connected
@Felthry YEAH JFIOPWEJAWJEJF YES THEY WERE