Wow this brings back childhood memories! I played several of those and “Sea Battle” was my favourite. :) I think it was the physicality of the controls - I can still remember the smell of the rubber on that periscope! The actual gameplay was very primitive, very much in line with some of the Flash games that were so popular in the past on the web.

I also had a handheld “game console” which was a one-game thing with an LCD with 4 buttons that would move a wolf character out of a famous cartoon to the 4 corners of the screen to catch falling eggs.