By Andrew Liszewski
While Nintendo’s Game & Watch devices can probably be credited with jumpstarting the handheld electronic gaming market (or at least giving it a much needed boost) the company was no where near as prolific at releasing different segmented LCD display games as Tiger Electronics was. A few weeks ago I managed to dig up the first Tiger Electronics game I owned, which was a simple and generic version of baseball. No MLB tie-ins, so sports celebrity endorsements, just plain old baseball. The game’s sat untouched in a drawer for almost the past 20 years (it’s dated 1987 on the back) but I wasn’t surprised to see the rough condition it was in since I can remember throwing it in my school bag as a kid and taking it everywhere. However, I was surprised to find that the game still worked when I popped in a set of AA’s.
By today’s standards Electronic Baseball is downright crude, with cheesy beeps and blips used for sound effects, and uninspired baseball diamond graphics in the background. Besides the smaller buttons used for power, sound and difficulty settings, the game only has two simple controller buttons which are used for swinging and advancing your runners on base. And even though the graphics surrounding the display clearly show fielders wearing jellyfish and boxing gloves instead of traditional baseball gloves, your team never actually takes to the field. In fact the game is more like a home-run derby in that you really just need to swing on every pitch and hope for the best. Since this was one of Tiger’s first handheld games (at least in this form factor) it’s not surprising how simple the gameplay really was, but as a kid I still played with it for hours on end. Fortunately over the years the Tiger Electronics handheld games did get a bit more advanced…
