Have been replaying the Gates of Zendocon on the Lynx (well, Evercade) quite a bit lately, and am very impressed at just how well designed, innovative and varied this game is.
🎮🐱 The Atari Lynx (Lynx II in the photo) is the first portable console with a color screen from 1989. Like many others, it unsuccessfully attempted to compete with the Game Boy, even though it has several advantages over it:
🌈 Backlit 4096-color LCD with a resolution of 160×102.
💥 A special chip for hardware-accelerated graphical effects.
👈 Left-handed mode.
This one was a big ol’ After Burner rip off. But given that the home ports of that game were dreadful, the Lynx game gave its owners a brief period of smugness in the 17 seconds before their console’s batteries ran out. During that time they got to enjoy perhaps the most remarkable visuals on a handheld at that time – albeit twinned with rather repetitive gameplay.
A fun, informative and irreverent romp through the history of more than 40 pieces of personal tech, charting the successes, failures and oddities from over five decades of our obsession with gadgetry.