As a result of talks that eventuated following the creation of the Game&Watch line of console/toys, there was an immediate race to innovate game consoles into a 'handheld' market. Game Boy landed first to mass adoption in April 1989 as a result of its fairly cheap position at $89 and suddenly the handheld market was Nintendo's to lose. The next few years would be spent by other companies desperately flailing their offerings on store shelves trying to steer whatever market share they could away from the Game Boy.

The Atari Lynx came first, releasing September 1989. The Lynx was more powerful than the Game Boy, launched successfully, but potentially due to the lack of killer app to justify its $180 price, the Lynx would falter. Atari would release an updated model, the Lynx II, and drop the price down to $99, still $10 more than the GB, which did little to gain market share over the goliath competitor. Eventually Atari would shift its focus away from the Lynx which performed "within expectations" for Atari (though obviously not... well) and towards the Jaguar, which was a heaping pile of shit.

That sort of story holds true for basically every single one of the Game Boy's competitors. It was a pricing issue. The Game Boy at $90 proved impossible for competitors to gain a foothold against. Even Sega's Game Gear would launch at $150 - brand recognition, mascots and a name similar enough to confuse grandparents into a free sale could only get them so far. By 1996 they'd sold 10.6m units. The Game Boy would sell 116m before being discontinued in 2003.

And then you have the Watara Supervision. Watara would take the exact opposite approach to competitors. In 1992 they would undercut Nintendo with a blisteringly cheap $50 for the handheld, with aftermarket copycat games to support. An unknown name in consumer electronics, they would delegate the international release of their console to third-parties to sell it as their own to keep costs down. It had a bendable display to eliminate glare and could be hooked up to a TV with a linking gizmo. Unfortunately, I think I'd rather die than make a Supervision game take up more of my vision with a TV.

Because of that cheap price, however limited you might think a Game Boy is, a Supervision is worse. Obviously as a weird, off-brand console, emulation is less straightforward, but as far as I could tell this is not the fault of emulation. The Supervision is not pleasant. The sound chip sucks. The screen flickers aggressively. This thing's ass. I fuckn hate the Supervison man

Cross High was developed by GTC, a developer I can't find a fucking thing about, who would also make 2 other games for the console. Simply put, you play as a guy on a motorbike and you ride up ramps, traverse through loop-de-loops, and try to avoid bad landings or stage hazards that knock you off your bike or slow you down. On most other hardware this'd be fine, but we're on the Supervision. So the music is annoying, the screen is very green and it flickers incessantly. In 2009, an angry video game reviewer on the internet may say "this game made my eyes bleed!" but earnestly, in 2024, I would say "this game genuinely gave me a headache".

After playing Cross High, It's no wonder that no one has heard of Watara. It's an extremely unfun take on action sports that you would have found done, at least adequately, on the Lynx's launch title California Games. A more punishing version of the quick fun of the, at this point, 8 year old Excitebike. I fuckin hate this game. The Watara Supervision was home to 64 other games. They all came out in 1992. These games would be derided for being simplistic nothingburgers. The idea was to also undercut Nintendo on the software front, and games for the Supervision retailed for $15 at most, much lower than Nintendo's $30. Unfortunately, $15 for a bad game is a lot of money, and with that move, Supervision had positioned itself as a poor man's Game Boy. The console would ultimately crash and burn alongside it's competitors. Good riddance.