fujishig

first off, the Game Boy was awesome.

But yeah, they definitely fudge the dates... late 80s makes sense because of the power glove (and by that time ROB had already all but failed), but the baseball card dates it, and then the cabbage patch craze I want to say was over and done in like the early 80s. It's a fuzzy memory/unreliable narrator kind of thing and the actual plot that the kids have is so over the top ridiculous anyway that the anachronisms didn't take me out of the movie. I kinda wonder why they didn't go for an actual nintendo game instead of making up a fighter to show it off, though.

I had to laugh because my kids were most amazed by Dunk Hunt and the light gun/zapper like it was some new technology...

Inhumans99

The OG Black and White Game Boy is arguably still the best handheld system to have ever come out. It is insane how frequently I played a simple game like Tetris on the Game Boy, and games like Super Mario Bros a bit less so, the Game Boy was indeed a game changer when it came to how we gamers entertained ourselves away from the console that had to stay plugged into your TV to work.

Quite frankly, it is a bit weird that Alan directs so much venom at the Game Boy, but this is Alan we are talking about, lol. Given his love of CEDs and Betamax and stuff like that; hating on the Game Boy just seems off-brand when it comes to Alan, but he is entitled to his own opinion.

JeffTheAlpaca

I thought this would be mediocre but I loved it.

That kid went through a lot for that NES.

The scene with the cabbage patch doll making it look like a drug deal cracked me up.

bunkaroo

I agree this was better than I expected it to be.

GuessWho

Watched this last week and my family & I really liked it.

The more we got into it, the more I realized it's a remake of "A Christmas Story."

An adult narrator tells the story of when was about 11 years old, roughly 35-40 years ago from present day of the film's production. He really, really wanted a toy he couldn't have. All of the grown ups say the toy is dangerous, but he wants it nonetheless. Along the way we get to know his friends and sibling, he wears something embarrassing like bunny pajamas or girl boots, and he learns to confront a bully. Heck, there's even one extra present under the tree they didn't notice the first time...

Alan Smithee

OK, there wasn't much of a history of portable game systems before Game Boy came out (I remember something in the 80s called Adventure Vision, and there was also Microvision which used snap-on LCD games that you can see in "Friday the 13th Part 2") but I didn't see any need to play games on a smaller screen, and having it be black and white in that era was just sad. Sega had the Game Gear which I didn't have any use for either, but I remember a TV commercial where they basically made fun of the Game Boy (using over-the-top hard rock showing their system and then sampling Spike Jones when showing the Game Boy). Betamax marked the real start of home video so that's significant, CED came along pretty early also but it was rather primitive and deservedly failed. You could argue that the Game Boy made portable gaming more mainstream, but portability has just never appealed to me- by that time it was all about playing games on the biggest screen possible and a small black and white screen was a huge step backwards from that. I did buy a Virtual Boy and most games for that when it went on clearance; that was a monumental failure that I felt I needed to get when I could (they go for crazy money now, but I got mine for practically nothing.) The idea of that was great, but it also could not do full color (everything was black and RED) and most of the games didn't really take advantage of the "virtual" experience it was capable of. I wouldn't really call that a "portable" system either, you really need it set up on a table to work properly.

The Cabbage Patch craze was Christmas 1983, so this part was off by a good 5 years. They might've been able to get away with having this take place in 1983 and have the kid lust after a Colecovision rather than NES, but of course that following year was the big video game crash.

fujishig

You never played the game and watch series, or the Tiger handhelds? The Gameboy was a revelation for me, especially as a kid who didn't have his own tv and had to share with the rest of the family. And like the NES before it, the limitations of the system itself led the game designers to do some pretty cool things with the games and gameplay.

Alan Smithee

Yes, I played the Game & Watch games but those were a long time ago in relation to the Game Boy. If it had come around shortly after those then it might have been more impressive. Yes, it sucked when you wanted to play games but the parents were watching some crappy show, I at least got to move it to the smaller bedroom TV in that case. Vectrex was another earlier self-contained game system that had a vector monitor (the way Asteroids worked, it scanned straight lines rather than pixels), I got one of those years later but haven't been able to get any more games for it.

Remembering Christmas 1982 the hot video games were Pac-Man and ET for the Atari 2600, but both are now considered among the worst games of all time (Pac-Man for its clunky adaptation of the original game, ET just for being a plain bad game all around), having a movie about kids wanting those and then realizing they suck would be cool also.

davidh777

I didn’t realize going in that it was basically A Christmas Story (and a fairly easy paycheck for NPH), but I thought it was entertaining. Back in the early ‘80s, I was the one biking to my friend’s house to play Atari 2600, and I missed the Nintendo era entirely, so I didn’t get too worried about the years not quite matching up.

fujishig

I don't think ET was ever the hot game... that's the one they filled landfills with because they couldn't sell them, right?

tonyc3742

IIRC, they actually made more copies of the ET game than consoles existed. That part might be an urban legend/exaggeration. Netflix had the documentary for a while about this game and the crash, if it's theirs they probably still do.

It sounds like it's a little better than I thought it looked. May check it out. I totally thought, 'wow, an 80's Christmas Story' when seeing the trailer.

I don't remember the quest for the consoles. I was a little bit old for that gen, I remember the awesome Christmas we got an Atari 2600. My brother picked up an NES from a friend who was upgrading to SNES. Then in college I got a Sega Genesis and that whole electronic Frankenstein monstrosity (Gen, Sega CD, 32x).

My cousins went to Babyland General to adopt their Cabbage Patch Kids

Nick Danger

What I'm getting from this thread is that if I didn't play computer games in the 1980s, this isn't the movie for me.

DJariya

Yup, if you didn't hang out at the mall, arcade and play video games in the 1980s, you're not cool enough for this movie.

fujishig

I mean, if he played with Cabbage Patch dolls he might be able to relate?

DJariya

Not trying to diss him, but I think Nick is one of the more older posters here, so he probably doesn't relate to the cool stuff from 80s us 80s kids liked.

I mean I had an NES, watched Knight Rider and also played Intellivision and hung out at the arcade. I did relate a lot to the kids in this movie.

and for the record, I also thought this was a fun movie.

tanman

OMG my parents took us to that place on our family vacation when I was around 18. I was not a happy camper. They do this thing where a Cabbage Patch kid is "born" and then someone gets to name it. To this day I have no idea why they picked the grumpy teenager in a hoodie. Maybe my younger sister even at her age didn't want anything to do with it either but they somehow shoved the mic in my face to name it. I went easy on them and named it Bob Billy because of the podunk town the hospital is located at. I know what I really wanted to name it wouldn't fly.

GoldenJCJ

I watched this tonight and really enjoyed it. Despite the not-so-accurate timeline, there was still enough nostalgia to keep me entertained. The Nintendo store displays, baseball cards and price guides, and weird shoe rules at school all brought me back to my childhood in the 80s. The power glove stuff and the shady Cabbage Patch sale made me laugh out loud and there were enough through away one-liners that had me chuckling.

Some of the Nintendo obtaining schemes got a little old but the movie ends on such a sweet note, I can overlook the plot that ran a little long.

Neil M.

I enjoyed it as well. I probably would have been bothered by how much it borrows from ACS but it's done pretty well. It probably won't have the lasting impact of that film either but this is one that I could see myself watching multiple times over the years mainly because this is my childhood.

GoldenJCJ

Sure, it borrowed heavily from A Christmas Story but it also uses ACS to pull off the bait and switch at the end. The viewer was expecting Jake to walk to the back of the shed and find a Nintendo just like Ralphie and the BB gun. If not for A Christmas Story, the viewer wouldn’t have been as surprised by the tree house.

Neil M.

I sort of disagree. I think you still would have been surprised even without ACS. It's not the typical ending and that's a big reason why I enjoyed it.

RichC2

This was a sweet lil movie, and better than the trailer made it look.

lwhy?

I just finished watching this and the ending got me tearing up a little. I didn't think it was that great of a movie until the end, but that ending made it a good movie.

DeFan

I hate Christmas movies but I like Neil Patrick Harris as an actor and I played video games back in the day so maybe I should give this a look. I also hate schmaltz but what the heck.

Michael Corvin

My family watched it and enjoyed it but it's probably not something we will revisit anytime soon.

One or two small nitpicks though. First, as a kid who wasted $75 of his allowance on the Power Glove, it wasn't very accurate as they didn't have the crazy tv receiver contraption (80s version of the Wii sensor bar). Two, I don't recall the Cabbage Patch and Nintendo craze overlapping. CPK was much earlier, 84-ish?

Also, I asked my mom about both yesterday and she said she witnessed a Cabbage Patch fight and said those were much harder to get than the Nintendo, at least for her.

fujishig

I don't think the Nintendo was all that hard to get, especially by the time the power glove came out which was pretty late into its life (post The Wizard). They kind of explain that away by having the violent game boycott thing which wiped out local stock, but again I think you can just chock it up to an unreliable narrator embellishing his story.