Tiger LCD games. Those little plastic slabs with the built-in game and the tinny speaker that could drive a whole car to the brink of madness.
If you grew up in the 90s and your parents didn’t buy into the GameBoy hype, these were probably your main portable gaming devices. They were many, including me, for years.
I’ve been collecting them for a while now, and this collab with Lucian was a good excuse to pull some out of the drawer and see how they hold up. Short answer: variably!
How they actually work
No pixels here. Everything on screen is hand-drawn, pre-printed on the LCD layer. The machine decides which assets to turn on or off to simulate movement. It’s closer to a calculator than a console, and your imagination does most of the remaining work.
Battery life was absurd though: 15 to 20 hours on two AAs, because there was almost nothing to power in the first place.
The games we covered
Lucian went through Beauty and the Beast (colourful but basic, 4 stages, completable in under 10 minutes), Power Rangers (genuinely decent: more moves, actual variety, the best of his batch), and Virtua Fighter (fighters split across two sides of the screen, ring outs included, a clever format match). Daytona USA from the VRT-X series is the low point. Nice hardware, external light source, holographic background. Shame the controls are mapped so badly you can’t actually race.
My contribution: an Aladdin that’s been dead for years and refuses to cooperate on camera, Castlevania II (which holds up better than it has any right to, since the source material maps to the LCD format almost perfectly), and Star Wars Imperial Assault, a 1997 release where Darth Vader himself is the joystick. That’s not a metaphor. The figure physically clips onto the unit and you play the game through him. Best design gimmick Tiger ever pulled off.
None of these are good games by any conventional measure. They were always on you, though. There when nothing else was. The cover art made them feel bigger than what was actually inside, and for a lot of us, that was enough to build an actual memory around.
The games were just the trigger.
Watch the full video on The World Gamer Show and give Lucian a follow, it’s a great gaming channel
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