R-Zone

"The new dimension in LCD gaming!"

Here it is, folks: the bottom of the barrel of video games.

Tiger Electronics, the king of low-end LCD games, came up with this piece of junk to ride the hype train for the Virtual Boy. Maybe they got some poor clueless parents to buy it, because it was very cheap. But all it did was leave some poor sad child pining for the Virtual Boy. Yes, it was bad enough to make the Virtual Boy look fantastic in comparison. That bad.

It was a handheld console, technically, in the sense that it was a portable machine with a number of games. It actually had a good number of games, 30 or so. And each cartridge had its own display — remember how those LCD games were? Rather than pixels, the character and objects were pre-drawn in different places of the screen — a technology so ancient that Nintendo had abandoned it years before. But anyway, what made it unique was that it was a sort of headset, and that shitty picture was projected in eye-searing red, right before your eyes! Oh, sorry, I mean right before your right eye, you had to keep the left one closed. And the sound was some crude bleeps, better suited to a pocket calculator than a game machine.

Later variants made the system more similar to a normal handheld, but they couldn't fix the fact that the R-Zone was awful in every way and outdated by well over a decade.