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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