Visteon Dockable Entertainment - Videogame History #130 - Retro Review
At many specific points in Nintendo's history, it has made several partnerships with certain companies to bring to market products that are now considered really strange, such as Sharp Nintendo Television, but many years later Nintendo would launch a really interesting product, trying to innovate together with one of its most famous portable consoles (Game Boy Advance) by launching Visteon Dockable Entertainment.
Before we talk about the Visteon Dockable Entertainment, we must remember that Nintendo has always been a pioneer in sales of portable consoles since the late 80's. The Game Boy was one of its most outstanding (in sales) consoles for a long time, as time went by, they were upgrading from monochrome to spectacular colour screens.
For 2001 Nintendo would launch the Game Boy Advance, a handheld console with 32-bit power (according to its manufacturer) that significantly improved the graphics performance of its video games. Five years later, Nintendo decided to partner with a company called Visteon, which specializes in automotive technology, resulting in a merger between a portable DVD player and the Game Boy Advance.
The Visteon Dockable Entertainment was presented at the 2006 Consumer Electronics Show as a product that would integrate Game Boy Advance technology for automotive and other entertainment without ever losing portability.
It is worth noting that at the time the Visteon Dockable Entertainment was put on sale it could only be distributed by two car companies, Nissan and BMW, so access to this product was not very easy for any consumer, also its sale price was $ 1200, quite high considering that at that time had already been released the Nintendo DS at a much cheaper price.
Visteon Dockable Entertainment had almost all the features of the Game Boy Advance, only the backward compatibility with the previous portable consoles was removed, you could insert the cartridges and the link cable on one side, so you could link through it to another Game Boy Advance or Visteon DVD.
One of the most curious accessories included in the Visteon Dockable Entertainment was a control that worked with infrared technology, with it we could play the games of the Game Boy Advance remotely, however, not being a control officially launched by Nintendo its quality on the D-Pad was not very good, the only defect it had is that we had to play in a straight line pointing to the Visteon DVD, otherwise it lost its signal in full play.
The LCD screen with the Game Boy Advance games looked really good, scaled the image on the screen correctly, however, we couldn't play in full screen, and we had the ability to change the brightness in a personalized way, in most games you could notice a small ghost effect but it wasn't annoying at all.
As a portable DVD player we had the possibility to connect it to a TV through RCA or S-Video connectors, allowing to play through the comfort of the big screen, this improved a little the image of the video games, a factor to take into account is the type of TV, whether it was a CRT or LCD.
The Visteon Dockable Entertainment was a very curious product at the time, but its high cost was one of the most relevant factors of its commercial failure, currently getting one of these is a really complicated task, most comes without power or video cables, tend to cost between $250 and $500, if you want to experiment with this strange merger you must pay a good amount of money, personally I prefer to use a Game Boy SP which is cheaper and offers you a better experience with the games of yesteryear.
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