Alba Y755 games

The Mickey Mouse watch has been around almost as long as Mickey himself (1928 if you can remember that far back).

And the early ones were memorable for … their less than perfect build quality, leading to the term ‘Mickey Mouse’ becoming part of the vernacular to describe something cheap or badly made.

Maybe so in the early days, but given that brands like Ingersoll and Seiko have produced Mickey Mouse watches, you can safely assume the quality has improved dramatically over time.

This pair of watches is part of a series of Y755 model watches made by Alba (Seiko’s budget-price brand) where the same game was ported to several different watches with slightly different LCDs but essentially the same module.

Surely you couldn’t put a game in a watch this small, with no dual LCD, and only a single button to play and score? Guess again. You can, and Alba did.

Each of the watches has a theme – the one on the left is love hearts, the one on the right is butterflies. Other versions of the watch have Mickey and Minnie playing tennis and Donald Duck flipping pancakes to his nephews.

In typical fashion, the designers made best use of what they had. Which wasn’t much. The calendar markers (which show the day of the week) also double as the game animations.

So to the game. Players press the bottom right button which starts the game and begins the journey of the game piece (heart, butterfly, tennis ball, pancake) from the left hand side of the screen to the right. Players must press the button a second time to successfully catch the piece at the other end. It takes a few goes to get the hang of it, but really only a few minutes play and you know what you’re doing. For the first eight times, that is.

Then it gets faster — really fast in fact — and your perfectly timed catches suddenly aren’t so perfect anymore. To win you must catch 15 pieces in a row and the last seven are diabolically difficult. I think I’ve got to 13 once, but that’s about it. Supposedly when you win you are rewarded with a new melody (different to the melody alarm on the watch) but I’m yet to hear it. Must keep trying.

For something so simple it is a lot of fun and very addictive. After all, how could something so unsophisticated be so difficult to beat?

Look hard for one of these watches, they are out there but don’t come around all that often.

If you have another variation of the watch, please send a picture to me and I’ll add it here. Now back to the game…here is one of them in action –