Episode 3 - Tiger Game.Com

Hello and welcome to That 90s Video Game Podcast - the show that takes a look back at the golden age of video games.

I’m your host, Fergus, thanks for joining me for this episode that is all about a lesser known handheld console from the late 90s - the Tiger Game Com. 

If you’re not familiar with this system I’ll take you through all its features and talk about why this console was not so much of a commercial success but it has earned its place in retro video game history. I’ll also give you my honest thoughts on this one, and without giving too much away it’s not going to be particularly complimentary but don’t mistake that for hatred - I really like this console and I hope by the end of this episode you will too.

Ready? Let’s get to it!

*** Game Com startup sound. ***

There’s a good chance that unless you are a video game fanatic, you won’t have heard of the Game Com. That’s probably for a very good reason - it wasn’t particularly good and it wasn’t particularly successful. That said, it has some unusual and interesting features, and is definitely a console that is intriguing if not always for the right reasons! 

But who were Tiger Electronics? Tiger are probably most famous for their basic standalone handhelds - these were less like video games and more like beefed up pocket calculators. An LCD screen with fixed elements that lit up to give the illusion of movement. These proved to be extremely popular, not least because of their low cost but mainly due to Tiger’s ability to secure popular franchises such as Sonic, StreetFighter, Duke Nukem and many and various Disney titles and other movies. Pretty much any movie released in the 90s seemed to have one of these handhelds. The format was typically a few buttons on each side of the screen, and the console itself was adorned with decals of the characters and game that were more appealing to look at than playing the games themselves. 

If you’ve played one of these handhelds, and you’ve figured out exactly how to “win” then please let me know, because the gameplay was famously not intuitive. 

But Tiger had eyes on Nintendo and the hugely popular GameBoy. And of course, Sega and Atari who both had decent systems during the mid 90s. 

And so, the Game Com was released by Tiger Electronics in August 1997 and featured a touchscreen, stylus and dual cartridge ports. Were you forever swapping game carts on your Gameboy and getting tired of doing so? Fear not the Game Com had the solution, to something that wasn’t really a problem to begin with. 

And that thought is probably the best way I can sum up this console - it had a load of great ideas but ultimately wasn’t executed particularly well. It was also developed at the same time that Tiger were working on the Furby, which I’m not going to talk about other than to say there were clearly a few competing interests at the company at the time. 

Tiger tried to get this system to do too much - it could pay games yes, but it also was touted as a PDA, with a special cartridge you could connect to the internet and check emails. It had a calculator, a phonebook. But why? This wasn’t a pocket sized system, and the so-called PDA features feel like they were added in just because it was possible. 

When you look at the system you’ll see a D Pad, 4 face buttons labelled A B C and D (sorry to X and Y for not making it onto this console), an on off button, and three options buttons: Menu, Sound and Pause. Below the screen is a stylus. 

On the sides of the console there are contract and volume wheels, a 9V power port, COM port (more on that later) plus a headphone jack. On the right hand side are the dual cartridge ports - it’s not a terrible placement for them but they do disrupt the ergonomics of the console a bit. It feels fairly well made overall.

The D Pad is sadly terrible. It feels loose and rolls, and you’re never entirely sure what direction you are pressing. The action buttons feel good but their placement is not the best. 

It’s a fairly sizeable unit, and there’s also a fair weight to the system as it takes 4 AA batteries. 

So overall, it’s a solidly built system with a few annoying design flaws but what is it like to actually use?

*** 

Before anything else, we need to talk about the screen. It’s 3.5” with a resolution of 200 by 160. It’s monochrome, it has a terrible refresh rate and suffered from blurring and ghosting in games. If you emulate games for this system that issue is not present, and some of them are much more playable as a result, but using the system itself is overall a bad experience. 

There is no backlight, so your ambient lighting is essential to get right - but the contrast dial on the left hand side of the unit ranges between pitch black and totally washed out. Now the GameBoy also suffered a little from some of these issues, but not to the extent that games were unplayable. I guess it’s easy to be critical but the Game Com has a worse screen than the original GameBoy, released a whole 8 years earlier. When you think that the GameBoy Colour was released under a year after the Game Com, it was almost obsolete before it even got going.  

What is cool about the screen is it’s a touchscreen. The console comes with an integrated stylus that is displayed on the front of the unit. The touchscreen itself is grid-based, with 12 x 10 matrix. If you tilt the system side to side you can faintly see the grid. And it works fairly well. This was I suppose revolutionary at the time, it was the first console to really have this feature and perhaps the best game to showcase this was LightsOut. I’ll talk about games in a bit more depth later on, but it’s easy to see why that title in particular is fun to play on the Game Com. There is a built in Solitaire game on the system and this also works really well for that as well.

It is definitely a ‘first try’ at a touchscreen system but the idea clearly was good because this was utilised to great effect by Nintendo with the DS 7 years later.

The audio is also fairly limited. The system only has 4 channels and there is no MIDI support so games can’t play music without getting interrupted by sound effects. Some of the games would benefit from have no audio at all. Let’s hear some audio from the Indy 500 game. 

*** Indy 500 ***

So far so good but this is it now. No music, doesn’t matter what you do in this game, besides crash, there is just no end to constant droning engine noise. 

Best without sound this one. 

*** Crash ***

Worse than the audio though is the processing power of the Game Com. It’s simply not good enough. Running a PDA-style operating system in the background seemingly left little power for games and it really shows.

Slot in a copy of Sonic Jam and you are given a choppy frame rate and essentially an unplayable game. A poor imitation of Sega’s flagship title. 

A lot of games are like this, but this is the worst one for me. 

We will dive into the internet functionality of the Game Com next before we talk about gameplay a bit later on, but before we do I wanted to say thank you for listening to this episode - let me know what you think about the Tiger Game Com, or any other thoughts, by emailing me at hello@that90svgp.com. 

Also if you have a couple of minutes to leave me a rating or review on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts, it would be really appreciated. OK, let’s keep going!

*** 

So its 1997 and you’ve got your brand new Game Com, plus you’ve bought the Internet cartridge and the 14.4 kbit modem. What’s next? Well you can check email, and surf the internet - in a text only browser. For the time I suppose this was fairly useful but if you’ve gone to the trouble of connecting the device to the modem (which itself is not particularly portable) the chances are you had a PC to use in any case. Plus you needed to use the Game Com dedicated ISP - if it’s all sounding a bit complicated and a bit pointless then that’s because it was. But that’s the thing about firsts - in the last episode I talked about how Nintendo and the control stick on the N64, and this is similar. It was a sign of things to come. 

Whilst none of the games directly made use of the internet functionality, what was a great feature, although sadly I suspect not widely used, was the global High Scores. On the main menu of the Game Com you could collect high scores from all your games - and then if you connected to the internet these would be uploaded to a global leaderboard. This seems very mundane now but it was a fairly forward thinking idea. 

In 1999 Tiger released a second version of the Game Com - the Pocket Pro. They dropped the second cartridge slot and added a backlight. The latter was much needed but sadly this was too late for the system. The console was discontinued in 2000 having sold less than 300,000 units. All of which makes my own Game Com that little bit more special - I suspect many have been discarded, and there is no shortage of ‘converted’ Game Coms that can be seen online housing a colour screen and a Raspberry Pi. So I’ll hold onto mine and this little piece of 90s video game history. Plus, I haven’t lost the stylus yet which I think is a real bonus!

And now, let’s take a look at some of the games that were available for the Game Com and see what you would have had to play.

***

That was the title music to Batman and Robin, which is a version of what was considered to be a fairly bad game for the PlayStation. The game is a basic side scrolling beat em up but this is extremely repetitive. I’d love to tell you who or what the enemies you are fighting are but they simply aren’t that distinguishable. Honestly this is probably one of the worst games I have played. It runs badly on the Game Com and with the screen ghosting it’s hard to tell exactly what is happening all the time. Sometimes with old games and old consoles, going back to play can be a disappointing experience - things are never as good as you remembered them to be. But I don’t think that applies for this one! 

The best bit is the music, but I mentioned earlier - there is only one channel. So every time Batman throws a punch or a kick the music is interrupted for the sound effect. I can’t even score this game so let’s move on. 

Probably the best game for the Game Com is Lights Out. It’s a puzzle game based on a handheld released by Tiger in 1995. Due to the format of the game, it lends itself really nicely to the use of the stylus and the touchscreen. These sort of puzzle games have an enduring appeal, but is it really a video game in the proper sense? Probably not. 

So I said that Batman and Robin was bad, but Jurassic Park The Lost World is equally unplayable. And I’m not entirely sure I know what I’m meant to be doing half the time. There’s some driving elements to the game and the truck either points straight of 45 degrees to either side. Neither of which seems to change much.

Then there’s Monopoly. This is a game that is always painful to play in person, usually even more so on a console. And this version is really no exception. 

I mentioned Sonic Jam earlier, and this is a terrible take on Sonic’s adventures - but at least you know what you’re meant to be doing in the game which helps a bit.

But Tiger didn’t stop trying, and they delivered one of the hottest games of the late 90s - Duke Nukem. Is it any good? No. Is it better than the other games I’ve just mentioned? Yes. 

And look, it’s easy to be critical - but there’s a reason this console wasn’t a success. Tiger took the logic they applied to their previous handhelds and tried to make this work on the Game Com. 

So rather than score individual games for the Game Com, let’s put our scoring system to work for the games and the gameplay as a whole:

3 for visuals

4 for music

2 for gameplay

5 for nostalgia

That’s a score of 14. But there’s something about the Game Com that keeps me coming back and I think intrigues others too. The best way I can describe it is to compare it to the car industry - sometimes you see a concept car that looks great in photos but never makes it into production. I can’t help but feeling if Nintendo had implemented a few of the cool ideas from the Game Com they would have worked well - dual cartridge slots really felt like a great feature at the time.

So overall, this is definitely a system to add to your collection just because it’s interesting, and if you want to see more check out some of the many videos you can find online - a particular shout out to Classic Game Room on YouTube. 

***

Well that’s the end of this episode, thank you so much for joining me. If you haven’t subscribed already then please do you get the next episode first. A review on Apple Podcasts, or whenever you get your podcasts, would really help me out as well. Check out our website at that90svgp.com, and don’t forget to send me any of your thoughts or ideas to hello@that90svgp.com. 

I look forward to seeing you for the next episode of That 90s Video Game Podcast - thanks again for joining me, and see you again in a few weeks!