News: PlayPal

February 12, 2007, 06:15 PM

by brandon, via Playpal -
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The PlayPal is re-branded variant of the Coleco handheld I mentioned some time ago. Both are Game Gear/SMS-based systems, with 20 games built in. The trick is, the PlayPal is currently selling for $20 CDN at canadian Wal-Marts, which is like $15 u.s. dollars. I don't advocate shopping at Wal-Mart whatsoever, so steal it if you must. At Target, the original (arguably cooler) Coleco branded one is $50.

Here are some impressions from comic-kaze, who bought one: "Feels quite solid and very cool. Unfortunately, the screen scales the sprites quite a bit and you get a wierd grainy effect on some textures in games because the colors are dithered (image dithering on a color printer). And with games like Sonic Drift 2, it's Game Gear resolution so it's small than the overall screen space which is small enough already (GBA Micro size). Still a neat thing for $20 CDN. This also has one of the better TV outs I've seen and the games that have scaling issues with the LCD look fine on TV." I'd also like to add that it's stereo. Pretty rare for something like this.