The Belgians are notable for many things: Easy access to France for the Wehrmacht and some other things I’m sure. But they aren’t well known in terms of originating truly great gaming hardware. That almost changed in the early 90′s with the release of the world’s first portable disk based gaming device, the Disk Fellow by Floppe, formerly a manufacturer of nappies and diapers and latterly a manufacturer of nappies, diapers and incontinence pads. As I said almost, but not quite.
The Disk Fellow was a IBM PC compatible Laptop with an early CD ROM drive mounted vertically, rather than horizontally due to a design flaw. This left 40% of the disc area exposed to the elements at any one time and obscured the bottom centre of the screen from the user. Floppe maintains the decision was made ‘on a dare” rather than aesthetic, practical or indeed, sober reasons. The LCD screen was the same sort of panel as used in some electronic typewriters of the day, meaning it could display images of 100X15 pixels and makes ASCII art look like 1200 dpi by comparison. To say the graphics were crude is an insult to oil rigs.
The system came with a number of games. Due to the dimensions and limited system specs, many games could not be ported very well. Space Invaders didn’t work very well so new games were made specially for the system including a spiritual forerunner to games like Space Giraffe, Space Iguana (screenshot below). No other games have been recorded as having been released on the platform.
The original title in French “cum l’utilisateur phallique gargling de perforateur de poteau,” translates rather poorly as “cum gargling pole puncher phallic user” was obviously changed as Floppe prepared for a worldwide simultaneous launch in both Brussels and Antwerp to receive the machines on June 12 1991 and the rest of the world in May 1997. Their strategy of hiring a former Head of Marketing from Sega as their CEO proved disastrous and soon Floppe’s baby had flopped harder than an Xbox1 falling onto a small child’s head. The Disk Fellow was quietly removed from the market and the small child is learning how to speak again.
The Plasmaboy, from Plasmablam industries, was gaming’s first attempt to meld 70 inch Plasma screens with portable gaming.
PICTURED- Plasmablam’s first magazine advertisement announcing the Plasmaboy. Billboards featuring this ad were removed after dozens of complaints
Plasmablam industries was a failed manufacturer of Big Screen TV’s whose CEO Richard Ozen famously said “No one needs more than a 480p Plasma screen.” He also went to corner the market, buying up all of the 480p plasma screens coming out of China in the year 2005. After the market moved to 720p as a base minimum resolution, or 1080p, the idea of a 6o inch screen with a low resolution (for the massive size) 480p retailling for $8,000 seemed to be somewhat obsolete.
Attempts to foist the low resolution screens onto emerging markets failed when Ozen saw a magazine comparison of a Sony PSP and the Nintendo DS and hit apon a foolproof way of divesting himself of his inventory of old hat screens. Merging a relatively cheap handheld device and a giant plasma screen seemed a marriage made in heaven.
Screen aside, the system was roughly as powerful as a Nintendo DS with games tendning to be solid, if unremarkable riffs on popular games such as Metris, Furio Kart and So-So Furio Cousins.
Of course, Plasma screens are renown for using a lot of power so children wanting to play the Plasmaboy on a long car ride either had to plug into the optional battery pack (pictured) or run a very very very very very very very long cord to a power socket.
The Plasmaboy, alas, was not a success in the market and what units they did manage to sell only resulted in lawsuits from gamers who did not heed the warning to not rest the unit on the genital area. Plasmaboy is responsible for large numbers of infertile gamers, though funnily enough the birth rate has not been affected in any way.
Many of you will know the Wii is basically Gamecube hardware slightly overclocked with more RAM and motion controllers. Its the same way the Super Nintendo is just 14 NES chips sellotaped together and how the XBox 360 consists of six Intellivisions co-habiting. But controller1.com is breaking the news of the next iteration of the Wii. Its THE SUPER WII.
The SWii is being put together at Nintendo HQ in Japan as we speak and is intended to fix all of the percieved mistakes in the Wii Hardware. Features of the SWii include Motionplus controll, a 2 TB hard drive, 16 cores, NVidia graphics, liquid cooling, Blu Ray playback as well as DVD, Video CD, CDI and Laserdisc playback, Xbox Live, backwards compatibility with Wii, Gamecube, Nintendo 64, SNES, NES, Gameboy, DS, Virtual Boy and Radarscope arcade machines.The SWii also has six sensor bars, a 3 x 3 Balance board, 5.1 microphone and 19 megapixel webcam. The motion sensor bars, placed to surround the player, also have a built in body scanner so that your new Mii is now Pixar movie quality.
All SWii games will output resolutions of up to 3200 X 2400 via HDMI and 9.1 surround sound. There is also a credit card reader for built-in microstransactions and the SWiimote jacket is now made of leather.
The pack in Title is still Wii Sports and future games for this console include Wii ports of Mario Tennis and Pikmin
The Price? Well now that Nintendo has the Soccer Moms by the short and Curlies, the 4 SKU range will retail between US $499 and $999 when it is released in Fall 2010.
Vaporware is an occasional column here on Controller1.com. This week we look at three consoles announced but were only released in small markets or never released at all.
Firstly the The “Duper24″ was advertised as the first gaming console to feature twin colour technology. When it was later revealed that the manufacturer considered Black to be one colour and White the other, the system was withdrawn from sale until all boxes were marked with the less deceitful but still not entirely relevant claim that the system boasted more computational power than all of North Korea. Oddly enough, exports of the Duper24 to North Korea are still subject to UN restrictions due to Pyonyangs Hot-Air Balloonistic Missile Program reportedly being controlled by an gray import Duper 24 running a Missile Command Clone packed in with with the system, “I can’t believe its Not missile Command”
Duper 24 allegedly used its legal muscle to shut down the importer responsible for that sale, Sik-Lang.
