When the Evercade was announced it seemed like something that I'd wanted for a long time but had never been done right before. It was a new cartridge based system that put old games back into print, legally, in physical form for reasonable prices at a high quality. The team at Blaze did an incredible job of designing decent hardware at a good price point and then licensing out games from publishers both major (Bandai Namco) and tiny (Pico Interactive) to put on carts and sell again. I've long held that many older games are still worth playing and that game preservation is important and should be rewarded, so this is very cool. The Evercade has received positive coverage from a lot of the retro game enthusiasts I follow and the fact that the cartridges cost $20 and come with multiple games mean that the price point is reasonable and we're not in the situation we've slipped into on the major consoles recently where even ancient releases like Baldur's Gate Dark Alliance are being repackaged and sold for more than top notch new games like Hades.

The Evercade was always a bit of a monkey's paw for me because it only came in a format I have never jived with. The portable. I just don't like portable game systems. I've owned a lot of them, including every major Nintendo portable and the Vita, and I've just never really enjoyed playing things on them. There are definitely portable games I like, of course, and I've been willing to put up with using portable systems to finish games like Uncharted: Golden Abyss, but if I have a choice I'm playing stuff on a TV. I find it easier on my eyes, more immersive, and probably most importantly easier to control because a gamepad fits much better into my big hands than the often diminutive controls on a portable system. The original Evercade did have a 720p TV output, but it wasn't designed for big screen play and that alone was enough to keep me away.

With the Evercade Vs Blaze created a version of the Evercade specifically designed for home play. The Vs has no screen and four controller ports (as well as 2 cartridge slots for some reason.) It's a home console that takes cartridges and not only comes with its own controllers but allows you to connect third party controllers from various manufacturers. It's an Evercade for people like me (or local multiplayer enthusiasts) and I like the attractive, small, case. For $129 with two controllers and a pair of game paks with multiple games it avoids the Intellivision Amico's biggest problem (the price) and because it's compatible with almost all the original Evercade game cartridges it already has a library of hundreds of games (if you treat each title on the multi-game cartridges as its own game.)

Despite all this I don't really want one. Part of the issue is the game selection. Not only are these old games, but they're mostly old games that have been released on a ton of systems already. I don't need yet another way to play mostly the same old Atari games available for every other system, or the same old Namco titles. They're fine games but I can boot up my Xbox right now and play Asteroids if I really want to and I really don't want to because while Asteroids was incredible at the time it's just not fun anymore. The Evercade does have some games that have rarely been re-released, including some canceled games and prototypes that have never been on physical media before and some indie stuff that's not on other consoles, but it lacks a killer app. There's just nothing super special on it that you can't play elsewhere. That may change in time, but it hasn't yet.

Part of the issue is the fact that the vast majority of Evercade games are emulated. I don't have a problem with emulation, whether commercial or not, and I've played a lot of 360 games emulated on my Series X recently, including games that are themselves emulating other games creating multiple layers of emulation (looking at you Midway Arcade Origins), but there's something about buying a physical system with cartridges that's based around emulation that just doesn't jibe with me. It makes sense from an economic perspective (you're selling multiple games per cart at $20 each with low print runs so true ports are not feasible) and I don't have an issue with it, but it makes the package less attractive. A bigger problem with the emulation is that to cut down further on costs a lot of the emulated games are themselves inferior ports. This is also true of Namco Museum on the XBONE and PS4, but again that's just a digital game on a system I already have so I cut it more slack. If I'm going to buy a physical system to play a physical game then it's got to be something more exciting than an emulated version of the NES port of Pac-Man. I'm sorry but there's no point in playing NES Pac-Man or Galaxian in 2021 when there are tons of true ports of the arcade games unless you have specific nostalgia for those ports, which I don't. Recently some carts have been made that offer actual arcade emulation, so it's improving, but much of the library is still console ports of games where better versions exist elsewhere. There are also a fair number of true ports of small indie games so this isn't a universal issue.

I think the bigger problem is that the Evercade is a physical system in a world where that increasingly feels unnecessary. There are, of course, people who insist that physical media is inherently superior to digital licenses, and it has some undeniable advantages. You can resell it, it's harder to patch it in a way that makes it worse (like stripping the soundtracks out of the GTA games, a heinous practice that doesn't get enough flack and that there were ways to avoid), and you aren't locked into whatever you've downloaded if the servers go down (though who knows if/when that will happen with Xbox and PlayStation given backwards compatibility.) Recently we've also seen that physical media is also cheaper because of competition among retailers, which is an interesting development and one that perhaps more than any other makes me question the all digital future. On the other hand you can lose physical media or have it stolen (account jacking does happen with digital but is usually reversible), it can break on its own from disc rot or cartridge battery leaking, and, perhaps most importantly, it takes up a bunch of space. I have massive digital game libraries that I wouldn't have room for if they were physical, and I can keep hundreds of games installed on my systems. This is especially important for a portable, and one of the reasons the Evercade always seemed a little weird to me. I remember juggling cartridges for the Gameboy and it sucked. Even though I don't love the Vita or the Switch in portable mode, the ability to keep big libraries installed on them made them a way better portable experience than anything I've used that required me to swap cartridges on a bus or a plane.

I think the physical media only issue is the real reason I don't want an Evercade Vs. I'm just done collecting unnecessary physical things. If it had a bunch of unique games I wanted to play or it did something else special I might get one, and I could see myself buying one down the road if I have a bunch of extra money and maybe a different living situation, but for now it just looks like more clutter, especially with the physical games. I'm happy playing digital versions of retro games if they're going to be emulated anyway, and for someone like me who plays primarily modern games this thing would be more of a novelty to mess with than a system I spend a lot of time with, so it's not worth the expense or space.

I know there's a market for the Evercade and the Vs and I'm happy Blaze has found their niche. It's just surprising to me that I'm not part of that market. Similarly I'm surprised that the Giant Bomb community has so little interest in it. We're all video game enthusiasts who have spent hours watching Jeff play ancient arcade games and listening to him rant about the wonders of Mr. Do, so the fact that we, and he, don't care much about this thing is surprising. It's a niche product designed for people who really love official physical versions of games and things like color manuals and box art. I'm just not part of that group anymore. I care about old games, but only the games themselves. Beyond the importance of preserving the other stuff in museums for research and historical purposes, I'm willing to let the rest of the trappings of youthful video game experience fade away. I love Gyromite but would I buy a fully functional replica of Rob the Robot? I would not. And I don't need my games on cartridges either.

There are a lot of these retro consoles that have caught my eye, but I think what stops me is thinking "how much am I really going to get out of this?"

The evercade falls into that grouping and I question if it will be around in a year or two, because outside of the "everything" video game collectors I don't see a mass appeal for kids to buy one to play asteroids.

Does it flame out like the ouya or is it here to stay for awhile.

@imunbeatable80: I agree that for most people the value proposition of new hardware like this is pretty low even if the hardware is cheap. How much time are you really going to spend playing ancient games? For the majority the answer is "not much" and while Nintendo sold a ton of NES Classics that was based on nostalgia for those specific games, and even then they have stopped pursuing that model.

On the other hand I think that Blaze has targeted a very specific niche and based their business model around selling a small number of units to a hard core consumer base. How many purchases does Blaze need to stay in business? I don't know but it could very well be 100,000 or fewer. The hardware is cheap to make with off the shelf parts. The games are all licensed, presumably quite cheaply, and slotted into pre-existing emulators so software development is dirt cheap. Everything is priced at an impulse purchase range and also a range where average people can collect all of it as it comes out if they want to.

The Ouya didn't flame out, it basically failed to launch for a number of reasons, including a lack of appealing software and a digital distribution model that made it easy to pirate stuff or sideload emulated games and made it hard to sell what little good stuff it actually had. By using physical media and licensing older games that people already like Blaze has avoided those pitfalls. I think Blaze learned from Ouya's mistakes and I think their business model could be sustainable in the long term. They've already been around for over a year and they've launched new hardware and consistently put out new software so from the outside looking in they seem to be doing okay.

You can make a sustainable business with low sales numbers if your costs aren't too high. On the flipside Sega sold 10,000,000 Dreamcasts in 2 years and went under because of debt and the costs of their business model at the time.

@bigsocrates: that's fair.. I think for me the question is maybe not whether the company will be in business but will I be playing that system in 2 to 5 years.. obviously a business that is still afloat and kicking out games or reasons for us to come back help, but even at its price point, am I going to still want to fire up lunar lander on this thing over and over.

Like you said, a lot of these games are available on other hardware and has been for awhile. Am I more likely to fire up my Xbox, PC, or switch to play these games.. probably.

I could still see myself owning this (I did pre-order a polymega, so I can be a sucker for this stuff) but I think I need to see what I hear in 6 months to see if people are still enjoying it.