/vr/ - Retro Games

>The Action Max system requires the player to also have a VCR, as the console has no way to play the requisite VHS tapes itself. Using light guns, players shoot at the screen. The gaming is strictly point-based and dependent on shot accuracy, and as a result, players can't truly win or lose a game. The system's post-launch appeal was limited by this and by the fact that the only real genre on the system were light gun games that played exactly the same way every time, leading to its quick market decline.

>>9471851
would???
it *was*

Probably this although I have a Superboy that's never worked and a Tiger N-Zone too.

Lemmie show ya'll the "Action Max" system. I'm not sure I'd describe it as a video game console, per se, but they sure as hell tried to market it as one.

This thingie was meant to be hooked up to a television with a VHS player. A number of VHS tapes were made for the console, and they were the "games" for the system. It also had a lightgun. The gun was the only controller it had, and was the whole selling point of the system.

When you played a tape the movie had "targets" on the bad guys of our story. Shoot lightgun at targets. Pretty simple. Action Max had a red LCD counter on the top of the unit that would keep your score. (Not so dissimilar from the way the "Captain Power & The Soldiers of the Future" toys would interact with the weekly television show, if you're old enough to remember that one. Except that the bad guys there could actually "shoot back" at the toys, an extra interaction Action Max didn't have, but I digress.)

If I recall correctly, it only went up to 99 so I suppose you could argue that you'd "beaten" a tape/game if you could get the score to roll over.

I never owned one of these stinky piles of shit, but my best friend growing up did. Funnily enough, his father got WAY more mileage out of the thing than we ever did. We had Atari 2600's and a Commodore 64 between us. No contest there.

For the truly trivia minded, Action Max here was the brainchild of the "Worlds of Wonder" company. These were the people that brought you Teddy Ruxpin, Lazer Tag, a slew of other eighties-era toys, and were the original distributors of the NES in North America.\

Anyway, I vividly remember "Pops Ghostly" as one of the tapes we watched his dad play through regularly, although his favorite one was a sort of "Top Gun / Iron Eagle" inspired fighter jet shooting movie, the name of which escapes me after all these years.

The Action Max. Weird stuff from my youth.