I was walking through my local Five Below (and if you don't have a Five Below in your area, it's basically like a Dollar Tree, except that things cost less than five dollars (if you don't have a Dollar Tree, it's like a thrift store, but they sell lower quality stuff, and everything costs a dollar or less)), and a little electronic gadget caught my eye. It was a little device with a keychain on it that promised that you got 100 games for $3. That's a pretty good game to dollar ratio, so I bought it. I mean, just look at this thing! It's got things like swords and bombs and coins and all kinds of video-game trope-y things all over it. And batteries are included!
Once I got it home and checked it out, I found that the thing was pretty small.
Okay, that's not entirely true. I could very clearly see that it was small when I looked at it in the store, but when I pulled it out of the package, it kind of hit me how small the thing actually was. It's small enough that it's about the size of this thumb drive I conveniently had laying around.
The problem is, though that my thumbs are also about the size of that thumb drive, and trying to hold the thing in any way that let me press buttons was going to become uncomfortable in a hurry.
But, those are all minor issues. The real test is to figure out how this thing played. And how good the hundred games are. Are they like the ones on those other gazillion in one portables or are they worse? Or (*gasp*) better?
The first thing I noticed when I pulled the tab to engage the batteries, was that the thing played Ode to Joy.
So far, pretty typical. Eagle-eyed viewers might notice that the resolution on this thing is pretty low. 10x20 low. That's not really a knock against it or anything, but with the pixels that large, you're not going to get the fidelity of, say, an original Game Boy. You're going to get something more akin to a calculator watch.
But all of that aside, what about the games?
First, there aren't 100 games on here, at least not by any metric I could use. You have 26 games, labeled A - Z, and each game has a setting that goes from 0 - 99. The settings just seem to make the games go faster (though, to be fair, I didn't try all 100 settings on all 26 games).
The games are all pretty basic. You have one game where you have a low-res vehicle of some kind and you have to shoot other low-res vehicles that look identical to you before they get you. You have a game that's basically Simon. You have something that's almost Frogger, but not quite, you have something that's like Quarth where you have to complete lines and some oddball games that I wasn't sure how to play (there are no instructions, why would you think that they would include instructions).
You also have about 15 variations of Tetris. You have Tetris where the playfield moves one space over to the left every time you get a new piece. You have Tetris where instead of rotating the pieces, each time you press the button you get a new piece. You have Tetris with garbage blocks and one the above modifiers, and so on.
The games are alright, especially if you like Tetris (and who doesn't like Tetris?). LCD game technology has come a long way since I had a calculator watch, which helps, but with the thing being so small, it's really hard to play any of the games that need any kind of reflexes. Yeah, okay, maybe my age has something to do with that. It certainly has something to do with the size of my thumbs (I'm pretty sure they were smaller when I was a kid).