Gaming on a Plane

 

If you've ever been on a plane for a long flight before you'll be familiar with the in flight entertainment system.  Most people use these things to watch movies on but if you actually take a moment to go through the menus you might have seen that a lot of them have a selection of games on there.  This sounds cool but unfortunately gaming on in flight entertainment is one of the most frustrating things in the universe.  

Straight off the bat there's the problem with selection.  Most of the games on offer are crappy little flash games or things like parlor games but this is sort of minor because you'd have to be a bit stupid to expect the latest version of Dissidia or Wonderland Wars.  The real problem is that despite these games being so simple and undemanding the systems can BARELY handle them.  For example I killed a few moments by trying to play Bejeweled at one point and the screen was so unresponsive that I had to push a gem about 5 times before it would select. The passenger next to me tried to play a bowling game that involved a flick on the touch screen and she attempted this gesture for a good five minutes before the game shot her ball off into the gutter at 5fps.  

There was one flight I took that actually had Street Fighter 2 on it that was controlled with the little handset mounted under the screen.  This sounds cool but it ran SO POORLY that even moving your character a step to the left side or right was an exercise in pure misery.  Even the Commadore 64 version of SF2 2 ran better. 

Now most people have the good sense to bring a portable system with them.  I had my Vita for my last trip and tried these games for curiosity's sake but I'm sure there's some people who, on a 10+ hour flight who have desperately wished that they could play a game of Zuma instead of sitting through another AAA Hollywood blockbuster.  

But the real reason I'm making this post isn't JUST to shit on bad quality plane games.  I really wanted an excuse to talk about the Sega Mega Jet! 

This was a handheld device that worked with the seat monitor on JAL flights.  It allowed passengers to bring their own carts onto the plane and play to their hearts content.  Obviously you can't use them anymore but a long haul flight would be a hell of a lot less boring if I could rock some Dynamite Headdy.  My biggest question is why don't we have this today?! I know we have a lot more options for portable gaming nowadays but taking my hardware outside of Japan always makes me horribly paranoid since using a system in public in England and maybe America makes you a target for heavy judgements at least and a mugging at most. Wouldn't it be cool though if let's say Valve released a thing where you could put a couple games on a USB and then play them on the screen in the plane.  Even if it ran like shit some in flight Slay the Spire would help kill the boredom. 

Still no one expects plane games to be good and this is such a non issue I don't really know what the fuck I'm on about