Tiger R-Zone XPG
Well, here's a handheld system I'd never heard of before. Although information on the net is limited, the Tiger R-Zone XPG was the third in a series of R-Zone consoles released by Tiger circa 1995-7. They're based on the same LCD technology as Tiger's ubiquitous series of pocket games except they take R-Zone game cartridges. The first model in the R-Zone line was the Headgear - a headset that featured a drop-down eyepiece you'd look into to play games with shitty LCD graphics. The second was the R-Zone Super Screen which was layed out like a Gameboy, only with shitty LCD graphics. And then we have the XPG, which also features shitty LCD graphics, but has one feature that makes it infinitely cooler than the others: a flip-out, red, mirror-like screen that the games are projected onto. It ends up looking something like this:
That's a screen shot of the game that came lodged in the cartridge bay of my XPG - Star Wars: Millennium Falcon Challenge. As you might imagine, playing shity LCD games which are PROJECTED onto a DAZZLING RED MIRROR is a lot more fun than playing them in their usual state. At any rate, it's technically a console - and a fairly obscure one at that. In other words, the kind I go for. $1.88 at America's Thrift Store in Baton Rouge. Oh yeah... here's what an R-Zone game cartridge looks like:
That square in the middle of the cartridge is actually a flimsy little LCD screen that contains all of the game's graphics. In the Super Screen version of the R-Zone, you could use colored overlays in conjunction with this screen to spruce up the backgrounds a bit. Neat?
