While riding the friendly skies with Singapore Airlines, one of the crew over at Siliconera found themselves in for a treat. Well, kind of. See, the airline offers emulated Game Boy Color games for use during your flight, to help you stab that foul beast called boredom directly in its disgusting, black heart. While a nice gesture, it turns out the emulation software has some issues.First of all, there are only two categories of play: Pokemon and Adventure. Also, the titles under the Adventure category suffer from choppy frame rates and overall sluggish play. As far as the Pokemon games go, there is no save feature, hardly making an effort to actually progress in the game a meaningless one.
Other flights, however, featured different titles. Some flights featured The Legend of Zelda: Oracle of Ages and Wario Land 3. Others even had Picross 2. All in all, seems like a good idea executed somewhat poorly.
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
9-28-2007 @ 11:21PM
BPM (FDF - Hypno-Toad) said...
Pokémon's a bad idea for this. Actually, any game that requires deep involvement is bad. Once you land down, it's game over for good, ya know?
Wario may not be that bad of a choice, though. While it had a lot of levels, it wasn't THAT involving (unless you were striving for perfection, I guess).
And why not a GBA emulator?
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9-28-2007 @ 11:53PM
rvancleave said...
I flew Singapore Airlines from LA to Mumbai and back last year and saw this on the "Video on Demand" consoles. Not only was the selection of games kinda crummy, but the interface with the "phone/remote/controller" attached to your chair was clunky. I just pulled my DS out of my carry-on and played Phoenix Wright when I wasn't watching movies.
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9-29-2007 @ 12:37AM
Adv2k1 said...
wtf??
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9-29-2007 @ 4:49AM
Author X said...
Bwuh...? What the hell's the point of emulating portable games on an airplane?
They used to have SNES games! SNES! I mean, we're talking Super Bonk, and Kirby's Dream Course!
Why did they take such a huge step back here?
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9-29-2007 @ 5:18AM
aka_ak said...
I got to play on that on the way to Australia.
I must say, it was actually a pretty good way to spend the flight. I played Super Mario Bros. Deluxe for GBC. 8D
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9-29-2007 @ 4:56PM
CyberTyrant said...
God I love that airlines.
I flew with them to NY Christmas time. And even now I still remember that flight.
Played Panel de Pon (The ORIGINAL Tetris Attack) and Mega Man X.
Of course, GBC games like Pokemon are a bad move here.
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9-30-2007 @ 5:01AM
deathwombat said...
well technically they still have SNES games on some of the flights (on the 747's I believe) but they've had emulated games for at least 10 years now
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9-30-2007 @ 5:04AM
deathwombat said...
also it's not like you can save the games or anything, which would be cool if you could get a memory card for the games on the inflight entertainment system
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9-30-2007 @ 6:32AM
AgentESPIO7 said...
i wonder if 10-15 more years they'll have emulated gamecube or xbox games or something on planes... that would be preeeetty crazy.
but yeah, i've never been on a flight with the snes emulation on it but was reading about in a magazine and they said you could play multiplayer with other passengers on board. is that true?
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9-30-2007 @ 8:41PM
iofthestorm said...
I've played the SNES games on many airlines before, although I think it was either Malaysian or Cathay Pacific that had them. Those inflight entertainment systems are really buggy though, and not worth playing. I would have brought my DS but I don't have an international charger so I just left it at home and slept through the flight.
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10-04-2007 @ 11:47PM
knocturnal said...
If the emulation was done properly I would call it a great idea. Even old school NES gaming would be a blast if I didn't have a portable with me when I flew (which I definently would).
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10-06-2007 @ 3:45AM
ZeroEx said...
I flew SIA before... was playing Super Mario World and Zelda... the rest I forgotten... seems like a step back to go back to GBC games isnt it? How abt GBA for a change eh? Theres tons of emulator out there already.. how difficult is that???
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10-08-2007 @ 9:15PM
spacesooner said...
I just had a couple of 12+ hr flights on Singapore Air in the last month with other non-short flights on either side of them, and thought this was pretty cool.
I've played a couple of the Pokemon games before, but hadn't done the GBC ones, so it was a good chance to look at the beginning of the story. I
can see how it also might hit new audiences who had never picked up a Pokemon game (or any GameBoy game) before.
The *really* cool thing was that on the 777, there was also a US power outlet on the arm rest of each seat so I could charge the DS in-flight.
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