GameMate Brick Game 9999-in-1
A couple of years back it was just about impossible to pootle into a pound shop or market around these ‘ere parts without tripping over at least one variation of block game; the GameMate Brick Game 9999 In 1 under scrutiny here is probably one of the most common variations on the internals and certainly has the most frequently seen body shell, a chunky, rounded case that is divided into two (one for the controls and the other for the screen) with the area between the two being rather bizarrely shaped like a speed hump. The groove this forms across the base is presumably there for players to place their index fingers into when holding the controls, although it only works for gamers with smaller hands and I really think about this stuff too much don’t I…
There are nine buttons on the lower half of the case in total; the four on the left placed in a familiar diamond are for motion and a larger fire button to the right are accompanied by three smaller buttons which are a power switch, the start button which also pauses games during play a the volume control which offers three possible sound levels and mute; surprisingly, prodding the power switch when in pause merely suspends the game and it can be resumed when the Brick Game is turned on again, a rather civilised feature for such a simple piece of kit. Speaking of simplicity, the screen clocks in at 30mm by 47mm with the play area itself taking 18mm by 43mm and offering a stunning ten by twenty pixel resolution – wow, it isn’t often I get to write hardware specifications that impressive!
GameMate Brick Game 9999-in-1 - playing a Tetris variant
Since we ask the burning questions here at Retro Tat, is there really a whopping 9,999 games crammed into this single unit? Well no that’s pretty much hyperbole on the part of the manufacturers because there are twenty six actual game settings, each labelled with a letter of the alphabet, half of which are, unsurprisingly, variants on a Tetris motif and presumably the multiple modes of play and adjustable speed variables are being included as separate games in the same way Atari used to count variations on 2600 cartridges. The games themselves are a mixed bunch, a couple are driving-based with chunky cars either weaving through traffic or trying to keep between the curbs of a winding B road (familiar to anybody who remembers typing similar games into an 8-bit computer from a magazine) and other classics represented include a couple of variations of Breakout, a decent stab at Snake and a rendition of Frogger where the graphical limitations of the hardware mean that the player hops their block between moving gaps in a wall of… erm, blocks.
The unit has a small selection of shooting games included so that was me happy, obviously! One begins with an attacker at the top of the play area that slowly advances towards the player, dispatching parts of itself as bullets whilst the player tries to chip away at the main body. Another option is a severely boiled down clone of Konami’s cool action puzzler Quarth where a broken wall advances relentlessly down the screen towards the player, who is in turn lobbing bricks up to complete rows and remove them before being crushed to death. And of course there’s that ocean of Tetris variants, thirteen in all which add elements to the classic design such as flipping the entire play area vertically, having the wall of bricks move sideways after each piece is placed or periodically adding new rows to the bottom of the well to force everything upwards.
GameMate Brick Game 9999-in-1 - playing a driving game
Some of these changes render the games pretty much unplayable (the mode where the button cycles through all of the available shapes rather than rotating them) and the same is true of the variations on some of the other titles, but there’s still a lot of fairly playable games. At the end of the day, these things were only a quid (with some of the more recent variations still being picked up for not much more) so they’re almost the definition of “cheap and cheerful” and putting in a decent pair of AA batteries gives the thing a half life that would make Dungeness B’s core look somewhat fleeting. As long as the sound is turned off and you’ve got big pockets to lug the thing around in, the Brick Game 9999-In-1 can be dragged out on a bus whenever a distraction is needed.
