#casio loopy

[gamemories]

[nicole-the-hololynx]

I would very much like to know about "old videogames hardware" please oh great wise one.

I'm gonna take this opportunity to gush about the Casio Loopy.

Here she is in all her glory! The Casio Loopy is a 32-bit console released in 1995 by Casio exclusively in Japan. It's largely notable for its heavily girl-centered marketing and for its defining gimmick, having a built in sticker printer to print all sorts of things!

This magnificent piece of hardware is powered by a Hitachi SuperH 32-bit CPU. It's part of the same CPU family as the one Sega loved to use, being in the 32X, Saturn, Dreamcast and a bunch of arcade machines! Of course, the one included in the Loopy is much less powerful than any of those, but it's still a fully fledged 32-bit CPU running at a decent 16 MHz!

The games..... I've actually never played any of them >_> And even if I did I wouldn't get a lot out of them since they're all in japanese... Only 10 of them ever got released (11 if you count the Magical Shop, more on that in a bit), with Wanwan Aijou Monogatari looking like the main standout title (A small adventure title about a girl and her dog... notable for having its story written by Kenji Terada of Final Fantasy fame!)

(image courtesy of femicom.org)

Another interesting release is the Magical Shop, an accessory that adds AV-in ports to the console, letting you pass video through from other devices and using it for your stickers!

It's a shame the console didn't get much support... I bet it's got some hidden potential underneath it all... But I guess that's part of what compels me so much about consoles like this.

I know your day will come someday, little Loopy

[princess-viola]

Little Romance, 1996 Casio Loopy

[idoldigigirl]

being completely serious, we need another casio loopy type console or game company or something. not marketed as something for girls, but marketed as things that are cute and lighthearted fun. cuz fashion and cooking and designing are for everybody! and so are action games and rpgs and platformers!

there just should be a bigger market for things that are unashamedly cute and feminine, but they shouldn't be marketed as the video game alternative for girls or strictly for girls. video games are for everyone. and some of us happen to love fashion and stickers and romance!

i wish there was a larger fanbase for what's considered "girly games" because it's such a small amount of people with not many games to work with, especially considering language barriers.

the truth is girls like all kinds of games, and there's nothing wrong with liking things that are stereotypically feminine. there's nothing wrong with anybody liking those things for that matter! femininity in gaming should be embraced as something for everyone. there's a market for these games, but no one wants to make them.

the casio loopy was made targeted to girls under the assumption girls didn't like video games like super mario, which was a false assumption. but that doesn't mean there wasn't an audience of people who wanted and still want cute games anyway!

[antoinettish]

mentally i am here

[andrasandreas]

Rūpī Taun no O-heya ga Hoshii! (I Want a Room in Loopy Town!)

1996 / Casio Loopy / Casio Computer Co.

Casio Loopy was a Japan-only console marketed towards girls, and this game was a room decorating simulator with job minigames to pay for furniture

It predates Animal Crossing by 5 years, and the game’s scenario writer was Kenji Terada, the scenario writer for Final Fantasy 1-3

Scanlation / Info Source

[lepartiprisdeschoses]

Casio Loopy Review

[systemst91]

https://www.instagram.com/p/CnP9IqNt0Cl/

[literalgrill]

This is by far one of the coolest packages I've ever received! Feast your eyes on a Casio Loopy in its original box. A 32bit console released exclusively in Japan, the Loopy has a built in color thermal printer for making stickers! Yeah it flopped hard, but it's a glorious girly silly flop that I've always wanted. Finally... It is mine...

[gothycollie]

I gave my protogen RH-7501 the mamagen upgrade! (Yes she's based on the Casio Loopy)

[pluagemask042]

Loopy-chan

[hellopopculture]

The Absolute Worst Video Game Consoles of All-Time (Part 4)

Description: This list will rundown the worst home gaming & portable devices of all time. Some you may have played, many you i’m sure you have not because either they were complete market failures or they folded under the weight of other much better products at the time.

20. BBC Bridge Companion-Right off the bat, even if the games were entertaining (which they aren't), i'm not sure what the designers were thinking when they decided that the controller and the console itself should be the same unit and it takes big thick ass cartridges too, so you can only imagine how uncomfortable this is to play. There are quite a few consoles that were all-in-one this gen and you could maybe forgive it if the games offered some amusement but there aren't many redeeming qualities here. The graphics are ugly as hell and most of the games are card games. It's basically a slightly advanced calculator with games on it. There isn't even any sound and this came out in 1985, so it was beyond unacceptable for this console to be so far behind the curve.

19. Nichibutsu My Vision-A console that plays virtual board games with simplified graphics is completely pointless. That's about all I have to say about this. You could have more fun just playing the actual board game and interacting with other human beings. I never got the obsession in Japan with Mahjong games any way, and more importantly board games already are what they are on their own, you don't put board games in a video game format, that's stupid. Some of them like Chess and Monopoly work but for the most part unless you don't have any friends why would you play a board game on a console?

18. Gakken Compact Vision TV Boy-Pretty much anything that COULD be wrong with a game console WAS wrong with the Gakken.  The device itself looked like a clutch from some type of cheap vehicle-based toy but it was attached to a box with handle, so already they don't seem to care about presentation. The Gakken company's wheelhouse was educational electronics so you can imagine how that translated to recreation. It doesn't have detachable controllers, it was one of these systems from Generation 2 where the console and the controller were the same unit.  It only had 6 games and the only one you will probably recognize is Frogger but this version of it was far too primitive even for 1983.

17. Tomy Pyuuta Jr.-Tomy Tutor-The "Tomy Tutor" as it was known in the States was a failure pretty much due to the fact that it was sold to us as an educational toy and that's what it was. It wasted it's superior processing power to it's competition with games that didn't take advantage of those graphical enhancements. Tomy produced several different versions of this console in attempts to continue competing with the hot items in the market but as you will notice with a lot of entrants on this list, the existence of the Famicom & NES made it hard for a lot of early developers to carve out some space for themselves. Nobody buys a game console to learn.

16. Casio Loopy-The Casio Loopy is barely a console, it's basically just a dress-up sim and sticker maker for girls. Why it has such a well designed and elaborate joystick is beyond me because you pretty much don't have to use all the buttons. I get who this was aimed at and how it works but the only reason i'm not completely trashing this is because of the fact that it's a console that produces it's own stickers and that's actually a pretty neat idea, it just doesn't really have the game library to justify it's existence though. Maybe if they could have gotten the property license for Sailor Moon or Barbie or some other popular media that is aimed at girls and maybe had some games made based on those characters to give the system more of an edge, but they didn't seem to think girls actually valued gameplay.

[sugarysweetsprites]

And TODAYS aesthetic is 90s-styled anthropomorphizations of obscure 90s japanese-exclusive sticker printing gaming consoles

[nervespike]

Chakra-kun's Charm Paradise (チャクラくんのおまじないパラダイス) 

[sailormoontoys]

Interesting, I had never heard of the Casio Loopy game console before, according to the Wikipedia page, it was released only in Japan in Oct. 1995 and was specifically marketed to girls, but was discontinued soon after its release. This ad is from the August 1996 issue of Nakayoshi magazine - scan courtesy of MissDream.org

[dreamyriot]