Collecting Physical Retro video games has become increasingly expensive in recent years. Gone are the days when you could walk into a charity shop and buy SNES games for £5 or a mint condition working Amiga for the price of takeaway pizza! So in this pricey world what is the aspiring retro collector to do?
Traditionally there are two options, either buy a "retro Inspired" mini console with 100's of ROMs built in or pick up the Retro collections for say the Switch or Xbox. The British company Blaze Entertainment has seen these options and decided its Evercade can be Both.
In essence the Evercade is a good quality handheld retro machine that uses changeable cartridges for its games. These cartridges are a mix of licensed older games from classic publishers like Data East or Namco and Indies/Homebrew labels such as Mega Cat Studios. This gives the Evercade a fairly unique place in the retro market as it potentially could be sustained by consistent and varied releases.
As for the unit itself i must admit i am impressed. The unit feels sturdy and well built, the buttons are large, clicky and responsive and the D-Pad is smooth and comfortable like say a Mega Drive's D-Pad.
The only gripe that i have so far is that the cartridge slot on my unit seems incredibly tight, once the cartridges are in it becomes very difficult to get it out again! Hopefully with use that will stop being an issue and as long as i'm not damaging the unit i won't hold it against the product. The evercade also sports a Mini HDMI out which outputs a fantastic 720p image directly to a modern TV and this has worked flawlessly for me so far. Overall for £60 the hardware feels like value for money.
So now the most important aspect of the Evercade, It's game library! As i mentioned earlier the Evercade's games come on Cartridges that contain anything from 2 to 20 games, usually themed around a single publisher. So far i have the Namco 1, Atari 1, Interplay 1, Mega Cat Studios and Piko Interactive studio carts (with a Data East 1 on its way!) and i have been pleased with the level of quality so far. The games are nicely emulated with very minimal input lag which is very impressive. I'm planning to review a few of the Carts going forward so i won't go into too much detail but Tanzer on the Mega Cat Cart and Earthworm Jim from Interplay are particular highlights of mine. Overall i think the 10 current carts (all priced at £14.99 Btw) provide a solid d launch library of games that has a fairly good variety overall. I must say that the Piko and Mega Cat carts provide the most varied games so i would recommended them alongside the starter or premium sets.
With Atari Lynx and Dizzy Cartridges among the ones announced for the end of 2020 i think the future is looking strong for the library to continue to expand.
Overall i think the Evercade is a very brave product that can certainly carve itself a place in the market, it is well made, well supported and most importantly knows exactly who its marketed at. If you want to collect physical retro games on a budget and play them comfortably on one machine then the Evercade is certainly worth its £60 entry point.
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