- Hey y'all, Scott here. Online personality test.
I have no idea who I am. So I'll just let Google tell me. You have to shout to
make a point properly. Yeah. Did you eat anything today? Tylenol. Do you just want to plug and play games? Do I have a face? I won! So you have a video game console, right? Welcome to the club. And you have to plug it into the wall, then plug it into the TV,
then plug in the controller, then play. This isn't plug and play technology. Have you been keeping track
of the plugs at play here? I just want to plug something in once and I'm done and it has a nose. I wasn't expecting an answer to this. Plug and play games, where the sole reason something
in my living room's corner had purpose. If you didn't own at least one of these from oh two to oh nine,
did you even exist? These things were the thing
back in the two thousands They came in these big, fat
boxes and proudly proclaimed, plug it in and play. So you know, no power adapter, extra controllers were necessary. All you had to do was pop
in a couple of batteries and plug this directly into your TV with the yellow and white cables. Or I dunno, there could be
four cause I'm color blind. These things can be anything. Composite cables, one for
video and one for sound. And if you're good enough,
another one for sound. Once you were done with the setup, you'd flick the switch on
the controller and boom, look at this. No power adapter necessary. It plugs directly into the TV. This is magical. Plug and plays were always
charming little distractions. They were easy gift ideas for kids. They were only like 20 bucks a pop. And you didn't have to think about what game console your kid had. All you had to know was, "Oh, my son likes circles. This'll do." But many times these plug and play games feel like an excuse to sell subpar games inside of a colorful container. Like I don't wanna play
this, I wanna eat it. The core plug and play brand I
remember was by Jakks Pacific but they weren't the first of their kind. The TV boy from the nineties was the first plug and play
many will point towards. It repurposed a target 2,600 games that included over a
hundred of them in an oval. Technology was evolving and fast. This was more of a bootleg console though. Pretty much all of the games included weren't properly licensed
and had their names changed. But what the TV Boy did was not only obtain a cease and desist, but also set the standard for plug and play games in the future. Power 'em with batteries and
utilize older technology. And one of the first ones to do this, legally, was the Activision Ten in One
by Toymax in the year 2000. Well, not 100% confirmed. Many do believe this was the first of the modern plug and plays. You have the cables,
the logo, the legality. It has it all. This device features
10 Activision classics from the Atari 2,600. So you know what that means? It looks like this. Yes. This is the
controller you'd associate with the games included
on this plug and play. And then this is the plug and play you wouldn't be able to
identify in the street. So the on and off switch and reset buttons are on the shoulders, cool. And we have two D-pads, cool. With one acting as the buttons, cool. And the game selection. Cool. This one isn't too great. The design's not ideal. And surprisingly, the
games aren't much better, but you got to give this
plug and play credit where credit's due. It started... ... a revolution. Jakks Pacific started up their line of plug and play console
shortly afterwards and truly popularized this kind of stuff. And soon everybody was making them. These were the ones I
owned back in the day. See, I may have had a Game
Cube and GameBoy Advance, but that didn't mean I wasn't interested in playing worse games. The Atari plug and play
is modeled directly after the original Atari 2,600 joystick and quite well at that. Everything feels exactly
how it should here. And that means it doesn't feel great. But they did a fantastic job recreating the experience
of the Atari 2,600. And it was my first and best experience with the console's catalog. Technically speaking, these
are recreations of the games. Not 100% the same as the
original 2,600 versions. Though they were made to
be as close as possible. I played a lot of breakout
and pong and centipede and tried to understand the context of years revenge as a kid. These games, well nothing crazy, were fun enough to warn
untangling this thing from time to time. This device may have been one of the first stepping
stones to me liking games nobody gives a shit about anymore. Of course, I brought up
previously how it was strange I had so many of these things when I had perfectly working
game consoles at hand, but the Atari plug and
play offered something those consoles didn't, the unique controller. Because this was a dedicated device, they were able to replicate
the original 2,600 joystick. So playing this really does feel like you're actually playing Atari. You could have just bought an Atari compilation on the Xbox, but are you really playing
Atari with this thing? So that's one thing the plug and plays had over traditional game systems. The controllers could be
whatever they felt like. Oh, we'll get to this one. The Pac-Man plug and
play by Jakks Pacific. Everybody had this one. Me, Scott, everybody. Five Namco classics at play here. Pac-Man, Galaxian, Rally-X
DigDug and Bosconian. Back in the day, I called this list Pac-Man, Galaxian,
Rally-X, DigDug, and what? This is an all right collection. These games aren't one to one
with their arcade originals, but they're better than
playing the old NES versions and also better than a bunch of the compilation disks
on console because here, we have a joystick Of course, using this now doesn't feel as good as I remember. It feels a little clunky, the stick doesn't feel substantial enough and it isn't big enough to
really, fully use the stick like I would on a real arcade machine. But it was a decent joystick at the time. And all of these games are factually more fun with the joystick. Of course, they follow this up with a Ms. Pac-Man plug and play featuring different and better games. Ms. Pac-Man, Galaga, Xevious,
Mappy, and Pole-Position. I got so much mileage out of
both of these plug and plays and this was where my love for
the Namco arcade games began. What's interesting about
the Ms. Pac-Man unit is ball position is controlled by twisting the head of the joystick. I didn't know that as a kid. and when I tried playing the
game, the car would never move. Now, how did I never know that, considering there are
multiple signs showing that this is how you
control pull position? Oh, hey, it's my friend. I don't know how I didn't realize I just twist the joystick
and pole position. I was just a kid, leave me alone. - I hate my parents - These two were my most
played plug and play. But of course, it's impossible
to ignore for much longer. My fourth plug and play was the Etch-a-Sketch plug
and play. It never worked. It came with a cartridge. Why? Like the cart came in the
box with the plug and play and was the only cart release
for the plug and play. So why make a cartridge
slot on the plug and play if there's only one cartridge for it and you could just build the
elements of the cartridge on the inside of the plug and play? What the (bleep) Etch-a-Sketch? I don't have this one anymore, so I threw the concept of it to the side, and make way for my
true final plug and play I owned as a kid, corroded batteries. I wish I would've known about
that before making that pact. The SpongeBob Squarepants plug and play. It, of course, isn't a
collection of old games but it kind of is. It features five games made specifically for this unit and each of them is incredibly similar to
another retro classic. I wouldn't consider these
to be full on rip offs, rather friendly plagiarism. This game's similar to Breakout, this one's Life Force, this one's Missile Command, this one's Zelda, and this one's Donkey Kong. But strangely, these are
all pretty fun time wasters. The controls feel really solid and I honestly think bubble
pop in this game is better than Breakout on the Atari plug and play. And the stick itself is great. I mean, come on, somebody thought of this. There's a fact for you. But while playing, the stick broke and doesn't register
the direction of down. This broke right before playing
the Donkey Kong rip off. It's all the way down there. I can't access it anymore. And all I can possibly do
with this plug and play now is play bubble pop. I'm okay with this. So these were the main ones I own. Wait, actually, I did
have an Intellivision one because all nine-year-olds
love Intellivision. That was all right. I remember the controller
feeling really cheap and generic. I mean, this is what an
Intellivision controller is, so let's play spot the difference. It seems like various plug
and plays reused old assets, whether it was games,
game design, graphics, sound effects, menus, or even
the controller shell itself. Here's the evidence. Well, look, no further
than RCA TV Joypad Console. So this uses the same controller design as my old Intellivision one. It just makes me ask, "why is there a joystick and a D-Pad?", and "how is this a D-Pad?",
it's more Hubcap than D-Pad. I would ask whether this is necessary for Intellivision games, but who knows? Maybe this controller
design was tailor made for RCA TV Joypad Console. You know, I always associated
RCA with TV remote. So they're one of my top 7,000 candidates were making a good game console. That'd be a thousand. I think we covered pretty much the three types of plug and plays. The official old-school throwbacks, the licensed kids' games that usually ripped off
other games gracefully, and then RCA TV Joypad Console. This is a collection of
cheap, low-quality games that have been spread around to various other generic
councils like this. But I mean, if you want
to play road start, Don't. There's also Go Bang, Animal Pool; that's not a sentence, it was a list. Now, that was my collection
of plug and plays as a kid. Kinda. Now these were frequently played by me which is weird to think about. Pretty much all of these had
outdated in subpar graphics and I always had better quality stuff playable on my actual game consoles. But most of the games
included on these things were addictive high score based titles. You can just pop in and
play for a bit and pop out. These were solid games
to have on these things because when you wanted to play 'em, just... plug in and play. You didn't have to worry about making room on the power
outlet or anything. Of course, being battery powered
meant more times than not when I did want to play
one of these things, I'd pull it out of storage and go, "Oh, (bleep) (bleep) I left
this thing on for a month." It kept things simple though. Now why do all of them require a screwdriver to access the batteries? I don't know. This is a bit of a pain, But there were tons more plug and plays specifically by Jakks Pacific. There was Spider-Man, Pinball, Poker, Mortal Kombat, Fantastic Four, Scooby-Doo,
Batman, Star Wars, Capcom, Superman, 1 versus
100, WWE, Dreamworks. I'm forgetting thousands more. But here are just a few more
I've picked up recently. Atari's back and this time with a knob. The Atari paddle plug-in play, similar to the joystick, but
this time we're replicating the original paddle controller, which allows for smooth as butter movement in games like Pong and Breakout. This feels so much better
than the original Atari one. I mean, I loved playing Pong
and Breakout with this thing but controlling them was a bit stiff. In Pong, you could always find one spot that the ball would just keep going to and just stay there for
hours to rack up points. In the paddle plug and play, the games are so much more
fluid in front of control. Jeopardy and Wheel of Fortune, see, Wheel of Fortune has an actual wheel. What did you do today? This is a good one, even if
it didn't accept my answer for what a slogan might be. (inaudible) That was curiously strong mint. Wheel feels great and wheel of fortune makes a ton of sense as a plug and play. Now jeopardy, if you
play with three people, you can buzz in as others. It's great. The Disney plug and play features a couple of games based on
various Disney characters. And this is most similar
to the SpongeBob one. Each game is of a different style. The first one you have
to change the direction of the bridges to make a clear cut path. And so I constantly
failed at the first level, but afterwards I swept the (bleep) floor with Timone to the Rescue. We have a Lilo and Stitch
platformer... Duck Golf? No. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. That can't work. Aladdin's another platformer
that feels a bit similar to Aladdin on the Super Nintendo. And it might just be because you can throw apples in this one too, but, it ends with a very basic puzzle game based on the Lion King. You know, that's two lion king based games in one whole... ...thing. I (inaudible) the Disney logo is slanted because I keep thinking
that's the top of the device and accidentally point the
joystick in the wrong direction. But, these plug and plays
always have such fun designs. At least the joystick looks like a circle. And to quote me at the
end of the sentence, there's always an EA Sports one. Yeah. The EA sports plug and play, shaped like a SEGA Genesis controller. It comes with Madden 95, NHL 95, and fingers crossed Timone to the Rescue. Dammit. See, I enjoyed
the fact this exists but, my God, two sports games from the nineties that stores would pay
you to take from them included in a SEGA Genesis controller you plug directly into your TV. I like when these plug and
plays offer unique-ish games or games with controllers you couldn't get on regular game consoles. This one's a bit too (bleep)
worthless for my liking but it's kind of neat. And, hey, at least it's
fairly G-rated, true. You can combine the letters
from the title screen to spell "Assrat", but I'm sure
the kids wouldn't know this. So what about a plug
and play for the adults? Well, here's World Poker Tour rated M. Actually the M rating is a sticker and peeling it off reveals the original rating was E. Well, it's a good thing they reconsidered. Can you imagine kids playing this? I kind of want to imagine the world burning the (bleep) down. There's an LCD screen on this unit and it comes with a bonus DVD. Don't mind if I do. The game itself... ... reminds me of something,
I can't remember... ..poker? Poker!! The final Jakks Pacific
plug and play I have is a Nicktoons one, focused on
various Nickelodeon cartoons. It just came in the mail, So let's cut it up and, and take a- All right, they can't all be winners. For some reason, Jakks shipped this unit with the wires pre-cut, that's unfortunate. That's lame because I
actually had an accessory for this specific unit to a game key. It should show you how
popular these devices were. They actually got accessories
like this released for them. Game keys were made for
specific plug and plays that had cartridge slides. So you could buy these and expand the game
selection on these things. It's really weird because
I thought the entire point of these things was
that they were way simpler than game consoles. You didn't have to worry
about what game system your kid had. You can just buy them a plug
and play and know for a fact they will be able to play it. But then you start releasing
game cartridges that work with specific plug and plays. And all those ones says is that it works with Nickelodeon controllers. I wouldn't be surprised if
some moms bought their kids a game key because they had a Nickelodeon plug and play that didn't have a game key slot. Here's a power adapter for
Jakks Pacific plug and plays. With the game key and this, this is starting to become a lot more than just plug and play. Jakks Pacific really rolled with the plug and play success for awhile which meant they made
some really dumb stuff but they weren't the only
company to not give a (bleep) Various others made
their own plug and plays. For example, ToyMax. They were bought by Jakks Pacific. RCA. They stunk. But here we have a Tetris
plug and play by Radica. Here's your basic Tetris. You have a few different modes. The traditional Tetris
theme, solid visuals, two players right out of the box. You can just attach to
the second controller included this as hell. This controller is a Bismal. All I had to do was put
a D-Pad and a button. But no, they had to make it unique. So you move this block as a joystick to move your
piece and twist it to rotate. Not only is this control
scheme really lousy for Tetris the control stick itself is wildly stiff. I don't know why they
felt the need to make it like this when they could
have easily saved money by using a traditional controller. And even the RCA controller
would have been better. How about Crayola:
Electronic Coloring Book? I don't know why I'm disappointed. TV Wild Adventure Mini Golf. There better not be any ducks or I'm going to (bleep) lose it. So this is interesting. It's a motion control golf game. You adjust your shot like this and wave the golf club over the sensor. Problem is, waving anything
will register it as a hit. So as long as you keep the sensor covered your character will constantly put. Here's another gimmicky one, American Idol Dance Showdown. American idol, you know, the
competition show about singing, Here's a dancing game. It's a blatant clone of
Dance, Dance Revolution. You get a mat, you lay it out, and step on the right
arrows at the right time. You see, it's fine, but I personally feel that
plug and plays work best when they supplement what
you can do on a home console with unique controllers, instead
of just offering a version of DVR that a dollar store can sell. So that should give you a pretty good idea as to what the plug and plays were back in the mid two thousands. But that doesn't mean they aren't still readily available today. Though, I have no idea
who's still buying them. Modern plug and play. So most of the ones I see look like this: big box, white joystick,
white buns, cheap fonts. This company MSI is
responsible for a lot of these and their website features Mario fan art. They have never worked with Nintendo. So these are blatantly incredibly cheap. Many of them reuse the same joysticks that already don't feel
great to begin with. But for some reason, they
decided to swap the placements of the joystick and
buttons for a few of them. Most of these are just one NES game inside of joystick and they all stink. They work, but they aren't a
great way to play these games. And so much about this
doesn't make any sense. So you wanted to make a plug
and play for people who were nostalgic over Mega Man two on the NES. So you put it in a controller. Absolutely nobody played this game with. Like seriously, why a joystick? Why not something that at least
resembles an NES controller? Was like I said, a lot of
these only contain one game This Space Invaders one, like seriously is just Space Invaders. There've been so many other
Space Invaders plug and plays before this with multiple games. This one just Space Invaders. And it's not even that
accurate to the arcade version. It's the Famicom version who
played the Famicon version?! Double Dragon. I mean, I will give this the benefit of the doubt. The batteries might be
in here a bit wobbly. See, that's a problem
with a lot of these units, graphical problems if the
batteries aren't fully in or are starting to go. But God, this looks bad and
it's just Double Dragon. One on the NES. If you have the joystick why
not have the arcade version instead are included alongside this WrestleMania? Yeah, just the NES game
in the same joystick. Why don't I hear anybody talk about how garbage this company is? But I have found this Pac-man
one at Walmart recently and it's actually pretty good. The design may not be the most comfortable and you're having the wires
contained in the bottom with a lid may sound like a good idea but just ends up making it
more complicated to put away because now I have to
cram all the wires back in and not lose the lid. But the stick and buns
feel pretty all right. And the game selection was pretty solid. It even includes the final level of Pac-Man where it's a
full on unbeatable glitch. It's sort of completely useless but it's neat to be able to play it as I'm sure most of us haven't
gone 256 levels into Pac-Man. I'm not a fan of having
to do a combination of button presses to go back to the menu. I would've just preferred
a menu button or something. But this is a selling newer plug and play. Of course there are these games
products, The Blast Units. Their wireless controllers
connecting to HTMI dongles. A lot of people give that game four since their quality, isn't
the greatest, but man this is so much better than MSI. Who the hell wakes up and says, "I'm okay with these existing"? Plug an plays were a product
of the mid two thousands. And while they're still around, I don't necessarily ever seeing
them become nearly as big. They somewhat had a resurgence after Nintendo kick-started
the mini classic console craze. As some people call these
little systems plug and play. I retaliate with, look at all these plugs. See, on the surface, these things may seem
nothing more than cheap toys but extremely basic games for children. That sentence was finished the long ago. I do have a lot of great memories
with these things though. And none of them were
groundbreaking or anything but they were fun, quick pick me ups. Even if the games were incredibly basic, many were actually designed quite well and basing the gameplay off
of old school arcade games or just offering old school
arcade games to play. I think that gave a lot of young kids a greater appreciation of classic games. Of course, none of these I
desperately want to go back to and bring them back today. It doesn't work. I mean, these worked so well
back in the mid two thousands because most TVs had
composite inputs on the front. Now with HDTVs, if they
even have composite inputs, they're on the back. And even then, plug and
plays most of the time (loud clatter) Way more. (game music)
Fun fact: the Atari Plug and Play joy stick he showed is not only made to be as close as possible, technically has a real 2600 inside. That means you can technically solder a cartrige port on it.
(Also the engineer behind it is Jeri Ellsworth, she has done several more interesting projects since the early 2000s.)
Scott using HG/SS pokemart music the day I start replaying it, damn that’s scary.
That Namco plug and play (the one that "everyone had") was where I played a video game for the first time.
Great topic, great coverage! Now I'm tempted to buy an outdated blackjack or pinball machine! Much like when I wanted to buy a Tiger Electronics Marble Madness unit, though, I'll probably realize that I don't need this thing and close my eBay tab.
Besides, I already have Clubhouse Games: 51 Worldwide Classics for my blackjack needs.
Edit: I forgot to mention it at the time because I was on a nostalgia kick wandering though eBay listings and ended up getting a couple old Radica handheld machines, but is that a brand new dude as I Don't Know How I Didn't Realize I Had to Twist the Joystick in Pole Position I Was Just a Kid Leave Me Alone?
I had the Spongebob, Wheel of Fortune, and Disney ones, and seeing them was a crazy blast of nostalgia!
It bothers me he didn't even try to fix the one that came broken.
The connection is so simple it's a non issue.
I had the SpongeBob one until it started glitching out on me and let me say, when Scott said that he genuinely prefers the SpongeBob version of breakout, a wave of nostalgia rushed over me. I LOVED that minigame, I spent hours playing it and it really was a lot of fun, so it made me incredibly happy to see that here.
Aside from that, really great video as always!
The Wheel of Fortune plug and play is the best designed controller he showed.
I vaguely remember having about three PAPs, a Scooby Doo one, a Batman one and a Whack-a-mole one.
I’ve never heard of the plug and play things before. They sound interesting