Does anyone else remember putting the plastic tab into the tamagotchi and pulling it out repeatedly in the hope of glitching the device into giving you a powerful monster? I definitely succeeded more than once, I would love to know the explanation of why it worked!
The Tamagotchi Cemetery
81–90 of 122 posts
Re: The Tamagotchi Cemetery
#82Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are various models released in Japan: https://toy.bandai.co.jp/series/tamagotchi/
Evangelion-themed tamagotchi is the weirdest thing but perhaps also a good marketing product - tho, not sure how the series holds in Japan nowadays
I'm a Japanese and I haven't seen kids playing Tamagotchi for years.
Re: The Tamagotchi Cemetery
#83The most memorable video games of my childhood were Final Fantasy 2 (aka FF4 in Japan), and FF7. And the most memorable moments from those games are when they killed off playable characters that I had become quite fond of. Those 16 bit graphics on the SNES, combined with the right musical score, could create a pretty moving experience. I never had a Tamagotchi, but I can understand how the loss of a digital pet could…
Not sure if voice acting is the problem because the first Metal Gear Solid on PS1 is still one of the best video game and movie experience for me.
Metal Gear Solid is a good counter example that I hadn’t thought of. The voice acting (or at least my memory of it) was excellent, and I really did develop a fondness for Snake and everyone else on the radio.
Re: The Tamagotchi Cemetery
#84The most memorable video games of my childhood were Final Fantasy 2 (aka FF4 in Japan), and FF7. And the most memorable moments from those games are when they killed off playable characters that I had become quite fond of. Those 16 bit graphics on the SNES, combined with the right musical score, could create a pretty moving experience. I never had a Tamagotchi, but I can understand how the loss of a digital pet could…
I don't think it's age. These days I've replayed The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall and I find it more immersive than The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. Both are of the same genre. The latter has much better graphics (and it's a great game) but the former's labyrinthine dungeons, with foreboding music, rats and bats screeching and skeletons roaring, never fail to make me feel the oppression of being in hostile underground tu…
I suspect that the difference is that, if the graphics are just "bad" enough, the player starts filling in details from their own imagination, and I suspect that this increases immersion.
Being young and impressionable probably also helps.
Re: The Tamagotchi Cemetery
#85Does anyone else remember putting the plastic tab into the tamagotchi and pulling it out repeatedly in the hope of glitching the device into giving you a powerful monster? I definitely succeeded more than once, I would love to know the explanation of why it worked!
The tab is there to disconnect the battery while the toy is in it's package.
The battery is a standard button cell type and there is a little metal spring that touches the battery to complete the circuit. The plastic tab acts as an insulator between the battery surface, and the conductive spring.
Pulling the plastic tab out may cause the spring to bounce a couple of times on the battery surface, effectively closing and breaking the circuit a couple of times before it settles. 'Bounce' is a well-known phenomenon in electrical engineering, and designing 'debouncing' circuits and software is common practice.
The problem here is that due to capacitive charges the CPU in the Tamagotchi may not fully reset during the short power-loss times when the battery spring bounces. This is known as a 'brownout' event. A brownout may cause memory corruption, which makes behavior of the software unpredictable. It is also possible that the RAM resets, but the CPU doesn't, this causes the software to run on garbage data as the memory initialization doesn't happen.
Since the state of the software (so effectively the 'soul' of your virtual pet) is stored in RAM, corrupting the RAM influences the state of the virtual pet. It is typical for RAM to flip it's bits to the '1' state on brownout/reset, thus suddenly your pet now has all values set to its maximum (99 age, 99 health, etc).
Normally, a reset circuit is placed in the electronic design of a computer, that holds the CPU in reset for a short time during power-up. And brownout detection may be implemented to prevent the CPU from memory corruption. But since Tamagotchis were designed to be as cheap as possible to produce, I highly doubt there was any reset circuitry or brownout detection.
Re: The Tamagotchi Cemetery
#86Meanwhile, your neopets haven't died, they're just still starving :(
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Re: The Tamagotchi Cemetery
#87Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Was the original Tamagotchi only marketed towards girls? It looks like the new one will be available only in purple and pink. IIRC, the boy version was Digimon. Basically the same toy, but you could battle them.
No, the Digivices [0] were a completely different toy: It lacked the caring aspect and used a pedometer to make progress in traveling the world, where on occasion you'd get an alert about encountering an enemy digimon. If you ignored it your Digimon would be injured and you'd have to heal it. In addition, to get in on the craze, other companies made their own products that played identically to tamagotchis. Tiger Ele…
They were basically battling tamagotchi.
Re: The Tamagotchi Cemetery
#88good riddance, kids today have the pleasure of modern entertainment https://i.imgur.com/7SNVCKH.png
Does it also download 40GB of updates the first time you turn it on? :). I of course mean it as a cheap swing at modern consoles. It dawns on me that kids today won't experience the same thing I did when I was growing up - the ability to just turn on a console at a friend, drop a cartridge, play a few rounds of Contra or Mortal Kombat, and then go do something else. Or the experience of unboxing the new PlayStation,…
That's still a thing though, on smartphones. They're the closest thing you'll get to instant-on games. Flicking between apps is a lot faster too.
Re: The Tamagotchi Cemetery
#89The most memorable video games of my childhood were Final Fantasy 2 (aka FF4 in Japan), and FF7. And the most memorable moments from those games are when they killed off playable characters that I had become quite fond of. Those 16 bit graphics on the SNES, combined with the right musical score, could create a pretty moving experience. I never had a Tamagotchi, but I can understand how the loss of a digital pet could…
> I wonder if modern graphics and voice acting might actually be making games less immersive, by asking less of players' imaginations when it comes to completing the characters.
I’ve had Red Dead Redemption 2 for two+ years and I accidentally read a spoiler early on and I still can’t bring myself to complete the story because I’m so attached to a character I know will die. I’m probably dreading this character’s death far more than I dreaded my Tamagotchi’s and I was well and truly devastated the first time my Tamagotchi died.
Re: The Tamagotchi Cemetery
#90I wonder if there was a pattern or analysis of tamagochi sales success by country.
I certainly read about Tamagochi growing up...but i hardly saw one or heard of friends owning one.
Curious if these prospered in countries with free trade agreements with Japan? Or just the right distributor? Or something else entirely?