I had a Barcode Battler. I loved it. Looking back, I guess the fun came from the book that accompanied it along with creating my milk, cereal, or soap themed heroes.
Back in the early 2000s there was a Jurassic Park III-adjacent game that used the same gimmick. It was called Scan Command and the idea was the bar code scans would give you genetic parts that you could use to upgrade your dinosaurs. I very quickly found out you could use a thin blanket and rub the scanner back and forth over it to get as many parts as you want.
most of my Skannerz memories are of scraping the thing back and forth on the back of tissue boxes until the barcode rubbed off, bc the things were not great at actually scanning barcodes.
retrohandhelds.gg
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