Push your friends to the edge — literally.

There is a certain irony to this pair of products by STD: one of them, the Handy Gear, makes your portable game console more rugged and less likely to break. The other, the Handy Boy, makes your console less rugged and more likely to break.

And both of them make you want to kill your friends, as this ad shows.

But seriously. One of my friends as a kid (who is amazingly still living) owned the Handy Boy accessory that snapped onto and around your Game Boy. The controller extension part looked cool but was useless and made playing games more difficult. But the magnifying glass and light were genuinely useful (especially the light part), since the Game Boy was notoriously difficult to play in low light conditions — which meant just about anywhere indoors.

By the way, long, long, long time readers of VC&G might remember that I lampooned this ad eight years ago in a column for GameSetWatch. But I just realized that I never featured it as a proper Retro Scan, so here it is.

Discussion Topic of the Week: Did you (or do you) own any notable Game Boy or Game Gear accessories? Tell us about them.

TG-16 Accessories: Designed specifically to tease children

I don’t usually isolate a photo from a document I’ve scanned these days, but I found this neat TurboGrafx-16 pamphlet scan in my older scans folder and thought I’d share it. It’s from a small accordian-style fold-out pamplet that likely shipped with a TurboGrafx-16 game or accessory. (If I had previously scanned the whole pamphlet, I’d share it with you. The pamphlet is currently packed away somewhere.)

I particularly like this photo because it shows a fully-loaded TurboGrafx-16 system, complete with TurboGrafx-CD add-on, TurboStick, TurboTap, and of course, a TurboPad. The only thing missing is the TurboBooster, which plugged into the back of the TG-16 (currently occupied by the CD unit in this photo) and allowed composite video and stereo audio output through RCA phono plugs.

Discussion Topic of the Week: What’s your favorite TurboGrafx-16 game?

—

See Also: TurboGrafx-16 Logo (RSOTW, 2009)
See Also: Too Little, Too Late? (RSOTW, 2008)
See Also: Keith Courage in Alpha Zones Mini Comic (RSOTW, 2007)