Knuckles knuckles@home.com
on Thursday, August 31, 2000 at 15:20:48
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This was a neat little system
that allowed you to play some simple liquid crystal games. each
cartridge (if you can call
them as such essentiall replaced the front face of the unit and put an
overlay on top of the small
LCD screen. For example the overlay for Connect Four allowed the
small black squares to become
circles (ingenious hehehe)
With that in mind, one of
the best and most addictive being Connect Four. Released in Canada by
Milton Bradley it sold very
poorly. I managed to pick mine up at a garage sale for $5 with about 10
games. I can't remember
all of the titles but there was some simple Star Trek game that leaps to
mind.
"Microvision was introduced
by Milton Bradley in 1979. Designed by Jay Smith (who later designed
Vectrex),
Microvision combined the
cartridge interchangability that was propelling Fairchild and Atari into
the forefront with
the portability that had
helped Coleco and Mattel sell millions of hand held games. While
the idea was fine
(witness the success of
Gameboy and Game Gear), the timing and support were not. After some
initial success
(grossing $8 million in
its first year of production, and boosting Smith Engineering into a million-dollar
operation),
and an initial release of
seven cartridges (including Block Buster, which came with the unit), Milton
Bradley rolled
out just two new cartridges
in 1980, and a final two in 1981. With a small library, no tie in
to a home unit, and a
screen resolution that provided
little ability to produce meaningful
graphics, Microvision soon
became little more than a memory.
Still, the Microvision was
a pioneer, overcoming the limitations of the light-emitting-diode displays
that were standard
for hand-held games at the
time. For all the limitations of the unit, many of the games produced
were quite good."
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