Check back soon
Once posts are published, you’ll see them here.
Mattel, the toy company that's brought happiness to many a childhood is no stranger to the console market. In 1979 Mattel realeased the Intellivision to rival the then biggest console: the Atari 2600 and later released the Intellivision II! They more or less fell off the gaming worlds radar, times moved on, the bit wars saw the end of it's biggest opposition of Atari, the rise and fall of SEGA and the domination of Nintendo! Fast forward to as recent as 2006 and we see Mattel ready to revive its fallen glory! Mattel launched the Hyperscan but it was far from anything that could have stood out against the Nintendo Wii, Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3!
Many failed consoles were those that relied on gimmicks, consoles such as the Panasonic 3-DO which relied in full motion video to sell it's console (but as I said when we talked about E.T. we'll come back to this). What did the Hyperscan rely on? The Hyperscan was the console that combined trading card collecting and video games! Surely a match made in heaven! Think about Pokémon, the cards were hugely popular among children and pretty much everyone else! Trading cards born from one video game franchise, cards which made millions and millions of pounds! Why wouldn't Mattel want to follow suit?
Mattel aimed this console primarily at young boys who weren't really ready for the mainstream consoles aged about 5 to 9. The age where card collecting is probably at its highest. The console worked by scanning a card over the scanner, the console had RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) technology. RFID works similarly to the technology found in Amiibos, Skylanders or Disney Infinity characters. Scanning the card would affect the game, scan a character card and the character would appear in the game. Of the three modern examples it would be most like the Amiibo as the console did not require the card to stay in position like Skylanders or Disney Infinity characters. The cards came bundled with the games and separate booster packs were sold to boost your deck of cards, but what about these games?
The Hyperscan has 5 officially released games! Even the Homebrew community stayed away from this console! There were 3 Marvel games: An X-Men fighting game, a side scroller and a Spiderman as well as another fighting game and a Ben 10 game. All games disappointed, the graphics were good, for an early 90s game but this was 2006! The Wii, Xbox 360 and PS3 was already breaking graphical boundaries. For the X-Men game you had to scan a character card and a modification card, to get into the game you had to wait through a very, very long load screen. It's almost as long as the Commodore 64 but that was an old computer system, not a new console competing with the current titans. After a fight which is most like a very watered down Street Fighter (and not as good) you have to wait through another of these loading screens to see the results screen! After that? Another load screen! The Ben 10 game constantly interrupts and pauses the game with text boxes (not adhering to the World 1-1 template at all!) with gems of wisdoms like "Jump over the holes". To tell you this however, it pauses you over the hole and drops you into it! It has to tell you that every time too! The other non-Marvel fighting game is too quiet, much quieter than the rest.
The console was pulled from shelves in December 2007, 14 months after launch! The launch price was $69.99, by December 2007 you could pick one of these up for $9.99! Mattel has since left the console market, it's a shame too, with the Intellivision they made the Intellivoice Voice Synthesis Module which was one of the first time voices could be heard in video games! They made landmarks, they tried to take down the giant Atari! And now, they have a console considered to be one of the worst consoles of all time! The Hyperscan ran off of a gimmick, something unpredictable wether it would work! For the RCI Hacyldon, the Action Max and 3-DO (among a lot of others) found this out the hard way! Although the RCI Hacyldon and Panasonic 3-DO had another killer, especially the RCI Hacyldon but we'll get back to that. The Hyperscan offered what consoles like the SEGA Mega Drive and SNES offered in the late 80s and early 90s! Will we ever see Mattel have another go? We can only hope...
