This Japan-only console mainly focused on "interactive movie" style games, which were a fad at the time. These were basically videos that the console would play and every now and then the player would choose a branching path (that would usually get them killed more often than not).

For a time in the late 1980s there was a short-lived move to incorporate VHS tapes into gaming. I guess the thinking was that they could leapfrog the competition and provide photo-realistic graphics right then and there, but of course this set-up is really not suited to video gaming at all due to an almost complete lack of interactivity.

This one was very similar to the previous console, except it was from Japan and most of the VHS games available were cartoon-based as opposed to live action, with some being based on popular licenses like The Turtles, and others being butchered ports of actual video games.

This was a little known VHS console from Sega where a model car controlled by the player moved back and forth on a rail in front of the TV whilst the footage of someone else driving through the streets plays on the Television screen! At the bottom of the screen is a white bar that moves around and the little car has a sensor checking when its in front of this white bar, when it is the console registers a crash and decreases your score. Its all kind of surreal. Like all of these VHS consoles the novelty wears off pretty fast but at least its a step up from the lightgun machines.

The final and possibly most interesting of the four VHS consoles of the third gen. Unlike the previous three this actually had some proper console hardware and a clever idea backing it up.

The console can overlay graphics on top of the video whilst its being played and could also silence one or the other of the two audio tracks from the VHS. So the creators could effectively shoot a video with multiple scenarios presented in split screen, and after the player chose a scenario they could obscure the unchosen footage and silence its corresponding audio.

It took me a while to decide whether to include this one. So basically this was a console mainly focused around drawing and dress-up-the-character style programs, as well as music maker utilities and such. The main draw was that it could print out stickers, so you'd design your character or do a piece of art or some such and then print out stickers of your design.

I debated with myself endlessly on whether to include so called "edutainment" consoles in this list, are they really video game consoles? Or are they something completely different? In the end I included them simply because I felt that their absence would be noticed and mentioned if left out! To be honest these systems always did have a number of actual games made for them anyway, and its not like there are that many of them so why not just chuck them all in too?

This one is the successor to the previous console, it came out 2 years after the V.Smile but is more akin to a hamstrung PS1 type console than a SNES, so I guess they were making some progress at least!

The games on the system are largely a mix of 2D and 3D platformers. Every now and then the action will stop and the player will be faced with a math or spelling problem that they have to solve in order to progress. The system had around ten games released for it, funnily enough, the Nintendo Wii, which was available at the same time actually had about 40 or 50 more edutainment games released on it than the V.Flash managed!

This was an awful Japanese-exclusive console from Gakken that has an unwieldy handle controller that's attached to the console itself! And while using it you had to hold another handle with your left hand to keep the console steady!

The Soundicvision was a largely unknown console from Hong Kong made by a company called Soundic, this was a successor hardware to their very popular "Programmable TV Game" series of budget consoles (which are often referred to as PC50X consoles these days). Soundic would design and sell these machines themselves but they would also lease out the design to other companies across the world who would produce their own versions. The Soundicvision and its clones never caught on in Europe in the same way as their predecessors though, the hardware was just too outdated by this stage.

As an aside these machines are quite difficult to classify into generations for reasons I'll just get into here. So, in the beginning consoles could only really play one game, at first that one game was pong but later on in the 1st generation you would get machines that had a computer chip in them specifically designed to play nothing but Tank Combat, or maybe just a Pinball game or such. With the second generation came the idea of putting CPU's into the consoles that could read data from a cartridge, so a manufacturer could make a variety of different games for the system over time. Now, Soundic, as well as Coleco with their Telstar Arcade console came up with a different idea, they just put all the hardware in the cartridges instead of the console! So all those different dedicated 1st generation consoles kinda' ended up being turned into cartridges for their systems. The Soundicvision, as well as a few Japanese consoles went one step further though, and actually put a CPU and the game data in every cartridge, bringing them closer in line to the 2nd gen systems.