Casio may be renowned for their innovation in watches, calculators and musical instruments but not for putting dates on things…even the packaging and instruction manual gave nothing away about the release dates of these calculators.
The AG-130 is the last of the series that starts with the AG-100 (Roulette), AG-110 (Digiris) and AG-120 (Super Digital Battle) and were among the final game calculators Casio produced.
While it looks like a basic variation of pong, gameplay is characteristically Casio with ways to increase the difficulty, move up to the net and back, and generally bamboozle your opponent.
Only trouble is – the manual is only in Japanese (which my translation skills are seriously lacking) – that said, like most Casio games, it’s a turn on and start playing calculator so it’s fun enough to learn as you go with not much in the way of a learning curve.
The sound control was a particular bonus for schoolkids who would have owned this calculator – the earlier Casio games required disassembling and wire snipping so covert games could be played in class; no such problem with the AG series, where a press of the % key was enough to silence it until lunchtime.
A good swansong for Casio’s game calculator development and rare enough to keep players coming back for more!