In reality, there are 16 games, each with assorted modes…and as we’ll see, half of those games are just variations on Tetris. Each game also has 16 levels and 16 speed choices that don’t actually impact much of anything. The menu here lets you choose the game; as far as I can tell, the letter G is just for “game” and the second letter (A-P) is specifically the game you’re playing. I’m not certain what the big number is (it seems to be “game mode” for each game), but you can change it with the up and down keys. Left and right control the level and speed (and are labeled as such). Rotate/mode (the big button) controls the game letter, and you need to press the little red start button to start a game.
Game A is a tank shooting game, which that wiki article calls “Fire Tank Attack.” (There are no in-game names or labels). I don’t see any difference between the two modes. You start in the center and other tanks come in from the sides, and if they ram or shoot you, you explode. If you shoot them first, you get points. It’s like an extremely primitive take on Battle City. (I’m going to go ahead and reveal that most of the games on here are going to have the sophistication of an Atari 2600 game with calculator graphics—even simpler than what Nice Code was putting out, and without the wonderful title screens. I think people were writing better games for the TI-86 around the same time.)
Game B is a racing game (actually a dodge-em-up) that I’m guessing is “Race Car”. You need to move side to side between lanes to dodge the other cars as you pass them, and get points for how long you survive. In this, the number determines if there are two or three lanes of traffic, and whether you race up from the bottom or down from the top.
Game C is a shooting game; clearly an attempt to make something Space Invaders-like that I’m pretty sure is titled “Shooting Attack”. The patterns of blocks creep down from the top and you need to shoot them before they reach the bottom. The thing is, you have turbo-fire and the blocks don’t move side-to-side, so you basically just rotate through each line knocking out all the blocks until you get bored. This game has 8 modes, but the only difference again seems to be that some come from the top and some from the bottom.
Game D is “Frog-A-Log,” a Frogger clone that’s really hard to play because it’s unclear whether dark or light lines in each row count as the safe space. Like, I don’t know if I’m looking at logs or trucks in any give row, and it seems to vary.
Game E is “Ping-Pong,” a simple Breakout clone. At level 1, I actually didn’t have to move the paddle at all to clear half the screen because the ball just kept bouncing back to the middle.
Game F is "Swallow Snake’s Egg," a "snakes" game where you have to maneuver the growing snake to the flashing ball. In theory, this is actually a great game to put into this form-factor, because it’s already grid-based and doesn’t need any other bells and whistles. In practice…the controls are terrible. You know what game can never support a delay in control input? Snakes.
Game G is the other top-down shooter, “Flying Bees.” In this case, the bees peel off from the “hive” block at the top two at a time and you need to shoot them before they hit you. It’s a marginally better game than Shooting Attack.
Game H is supposed to be a boxing game called “Hammer Attack,” but as far as I can tell it’s not boxing, it’s whack-a-mole. I think you need to press the direction and main button when one of the four dots changes, but either due to bad input or me not fully understanding the game I couldn’t manage to score any points.
The other games are all “Brick Games,” aka Tetris clones. I’m not going to bother with more pictures; they all look the same.
Game I looks like normal Tetris until you put down the first block, and then the entire stack rotates one space to the left (with the left edge wrapping to the right). This is actually a really clever Tetris variant that I’d love to see from a more playable system! (If anyone knows of a real game that uses it, please tell me.)
Game J adds broken lines to the bottom of your stack every few pieces…but changes the active piece when it does so, which is a betrayal of my trust and should never be allowed.
Game K…seems to be the same as Game I, with the rotating stack.
Game L has an odd quirk that when you clear a line, it inverts the rest of your stack.
Games M, N, O and P are four more variations of Tetris, but I love Tetris and the bad controls on this thing are making me hate it.
The takeaway here is that there are nine games on this system, not 200, and if the inputs were better 25 years ago on a brand-new device, Tetris would be playable and the others would be worth 30 seconds each.
What it really comes down to is that this system only exists to make your grandparents think you’re an ungrateful spoiled brat. It sounds like a “great deal” only if you know nothing about video games at all, and no one who actually plays games would ever buy one. It’s the same market niche occupied by the My Arcade Go Gamer handhelds. I would argue that there’s a secondary niche for things like the 500-in-1 Famiclones, because anything with actual commercial NES roms on it can appeal to those of us with nostalgia value and/or possibly be entertaining to children for brief periods. But in order for something to be both 100% legal and cheap, they have to cut corners somewhere, and that’s always going to be in actual quality.
(Thanks,
@Ixo!)
