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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