They all kind of sucked. I figured out how to 'break'
this game the first week my cousin got it. You held the direction button either left or right (forgot which), and hit the attack button as the stage started. The game would think that you cleared the stage. I thought it was a cheat code. He was pretty pissed his six year old cousin beat it before he could.
I assure you, there is good ones. Ones that are worth a play and generally enjoyable for what they are. Obviously you're never going to be able to compare to a Game Boy of any variety, let alone a phone or DS, but they're simple stupid fun that can occupy you for a few minutes at least. General consensus is that Game and Watch Pinball is one of the best ones, but YMMV.
Even Tiger had a few games that were decent (I've heard Strider is basically all right for instance). The problem is that when Tiger basically dominated the LCD handheld market, they crushed all competition pretty quickly, and companies like Sega and Konami basically turned over their entire LCD production to Tiger to save on costs. At that point Tiger just shit out units as quick as possible to strike while the iron was hot.
The reason Tiger was able to secure market dominance so quickly was through massive production runs that kept costs low. They re-used components for basically every system (there's a reason Tiger's white shell models are so iconic), to the point where all they needed was a new background cel and new LCD Screenset and they were good to go once a game was finalized. This lowered production times and costs to the point where they could essentially undersell the entire market and release dozens of games in the span of a month.
One big reason this worked was that the alternatives were expensive. The Game Boy was nearly 100 bucks at launch, and Nintendo's Game and Watch series was around 40going into the late 80s when these were taking off. Acclaim's ones were around 25. Tiger meanwhile routinely launched games for under 20 dollars.
Tiger is a very interesting historical footnote in video gaming but I cannot for the life of me understand it having a surviving fandom. Game and Watch I can understand, since most of those played quite well and it helped lead into Nintendo's development of more conventional titles later (with the original Game and Watch games coming out over two years before Nintendo's Famicom). Most of Tiger's games were clunky cash-ins with very little staying power.
