As some of you may know I’m pretty obsessed with the Intellivision Amico, a vaporware nonsole that piled bad ideas on top of each other like a miser at a pay-per-plate buffet. It is impossible to dive into the Amico discourse without hearing about other contemporary projects that had more success through the radical business strategy of actually manufacturing and shipping products for people to buy. These include the little yellow Playdate handheld, the runaway success of the Steamdeck and, perhaps most analogous to the Amico, the Evercade line of products.
The Evercade line is made by Blaze entertainment, a small British company that started by producing a modest handheld console with physical cartridges that held emulated versions of classic and “classic” console games. It has expanded somewhat to include both a home console and a souped up version of the original handheld and to produce cartridges containing games from British microcomputers, arcade games, and even a few native ports of popular indie titles like Alwa’s Awakening and Xenocrisis.
By focusing on controlling prices (I picked up the base version of the home console of the Evercade, called the VS, for $70 with one controller and one game cartridge with several arcade games included, and each cartridge with multiple games launches at $20 MSRP) and building on concrete and achievable goals (starting with just a portable and console games and then expanding to a home console and then upgraded portable and into arcade and microcomputer emulation) Blaze seems to have built a sustainable business (though it’s a private company so nobody knows the exact finances or how many Evercades or cartridges have been sold.) There are dozens of cartridges with hundreds of games on the market and additional cartridges continue to be released regularly.
I was aware of the Evercade since its launch, where it was reviewed in various outlets, but didn’t really get interested until two things happened. The first was that they released the VS console, meaning I didn’t have to play on a handheld (I do not like handhelds and do not understand people who prefer them except if they have to share a TV with others) and the second, which happened simultaneously, was that they announced actual arcade games for the machine. That’s right, for the first year or so the “Evercade” only had console games. The combination of having an actual console and some arcade games I was interested in, as well as Intellivision lineup that included many games being remade for my beloved Amico, was enough to get me to pull the trigger. There was a $30 discount on Amazon for Prime Day 2022, and so I picked mine up a little under a year ago. I bought some carts with it and since have bought a lot more and at this point it remains hooked up in my bedroom with a few piles of carts nearby. I wouldn’t say I play it very regularly but a few times a month I get the urge so I wouldn’t say it gathers dust either. I definitely bought too many cartridges that I’m not actually interested in but if I had focused on just the Evercade and the cartridges that I actually like I probably would be happy with my purchase. Here are some more specific thoughts about what’s good and bad about the system and its software.
THE GOOD
The hardware itself – The actual Evercade VS console is compact but feels solid, with plastic that doesn’t feel cheap despite its low cost. Even better, the controller that comes with it (2 in the deluxe version and additional ones available for $25 each) is pretty darn good. I’ve bought various retro style controllers from 8bitdo and other companies, and used the faithful reproductions of old controllers provided with the various mini consoles, and the Evercade controller feels as good as any of them. It has a disc style D-pad like the Turbografx-16 controller with 4 face buttons and 4 shoulder buttons like a PS1 controller, as well as start, select, and a menu button. Zero complaints, and it has a 10 foot cord and good durability considering how many times I have accidentally yanked it off my dresser. The console itself has ports for two cartridges (and since all carts are multi-carts that means you can keep a fair number of games loaded) and four controllers, and the system can recognize most USB controllers, though not all. This means that if you have spare mini console controllers or third party controllers or even Xbox or PlayStation pads with USB cords you can use them with Evercade. You can also play arcade games with an arcade stick and it all works well. The game carts themselves come in Sega Genesis style plastic clamshells (though smaller and not quite as high quality) with color inserts (they call them manuals but they aren’t really) and sometimes stickers or fake overlays, and the carts are sort of like Game Gear cartridges and feel fine. For such a small company they do a very solid job in producing something that feels high quality to actually deal with physically, which is very important in a console that is ultimately selling itself on physical media and collectability.
The emulation – This is the other most important thing for a system like this and they get it right. No emulation is perfect, of course, and you’re going to get some lag and sound weirdness etc but this stuff is very good and feels up to commercial standards. My understanding is that if they can’t get the emulation up to snuff they just won’t include it. The system is capable of receiving patches, so when there have been some sound bugs they’ve mostly gotten fixed. For the most part Evercade feels pretty close to actually playing on a real system.
The price – Every cartridge is $20, and every cartridge includes multiple games. There are many games that are not available right now except on the Evercade or the used market, and most Evercade cartridges cost much less than even 1 of the games on them elsewhere, and can contain up to 20+ games. Even for cartridges that have games that are available digitally it is almost always much cheaper to buy the games on Evercade than to buy even half of the digitally even on sale. Considering this is (decent quality) physical media it’s almost shocking how good the value is on a per game basis.
Access to games that are otherwise not easily (legitimately) accessible –
Look, if you like pirating games then the Evercade doesn’t have much for you. But if you, like me, only want to play games to which you have a legitimate license then Evercade has a lot of stuff that’s either not available anywhere else or pretty expensive.
The Renovations cart may be the best on the whole system and has a grip of classic Genesis games like El Viento, Granda, Gaiares and more. Some have since popped up on other systems or services (Granada is on the Genesis Mini 2 for example) but others have no modern releases and are only available used if at all. There are also a number of games for which this is the only ever physical release, or even the only release outside the arcade at all.
Many of these obscure games aren’t classics but are a lot of fun. There’s a Spanish company called Gaelco that has two arcade carts out with some pretty interesting games. Alligator Hunt is kind of like Wild Guns but impossibly stupid in the best possible way. You start out as a kid on a skateboard shooting aliens before entering a space ship to go shoot aliens and the kid and the space ship control the same way. The game also has bizarre Spanglish cut scenes that give any Engrish a run for its money. There’s a Mega Cat Studios game called Tanzer that would have become a cult classic if it were released in the early 90s and that is only otherwise available as an actual Genesis cartridge for $50. The Combatribes is an interesting arcade brawler.
If you’re like me and you like old games and weird games Evercade offers a lot o fun things to explore. I finally got to play that Bruce Lee game that Jeff talks about non-stop and has streamed multiple times (It’s just called Lee here with the license removed but otherwise seems intact.) I got to satisfy my curiosity about old Intellivision games I’ve thought a lot about recently (Astrosmash is good but gets boring and has weird color choices, Shark! Shark! Is boring, Nightstalker is mediocre and Cloudy Mountains is awful.) I’ve looked forward to Evercade releases just because they’ve given me the chance to play things I’ve always wanted to try out legitimately for a reasonable price. This is probably my favorite thing about the console.
THE MIXED
Game selection– Blaze is a small company and it’s clear that they’re putting out whatever they are able to get the rights to at a reasonable cost. There are cartridges from some pretty heavy hitters of the 80s and 90s, including Data East, Technos, Toaplan and Irem. There are Namco cartridges that only work with the handheld (so I don’t have them) and the latest handheld even has a bunch of CAPCOM games pre-installed (all of them widely available via Capcom Arcade Stadium.) So we’re talking real games that you’ve heard of including classics like R-Type, Double Dragon and Burger Time. There are also a lot of more obscure games including lots of obscure indies from companies like Mega Cat Studios and whatever odds and ends Piko Interactive has picked up.
I mentioned above that there’s some really cool obscure stuff on the Evercade, like Alligator Hunt and Tanzer. Other obscure games may not be classics but are fine and worth playing. But some of that stuff is just straight up shovelware. The Atari Lynx collections include some of that handheld’s best games but also includes home brew tech demo that might be interesting on the Lynx itself but are totally worthless when emulated because who cares that you can make a fake Lynx do interesting things? The Piko interactive cartridges include whatever that company can get its hands on and some of that is good and some of that is utter trash. The same with the Indie Heroes cartridges. I don’t want to be too nasty towards home brew devs, many of whom are doing this as a hobby or just sharpening their skills and learning, but when you put a game on a cartridge and sell it for money it can be criticized.
Even many of the non-obscure games are just horrible. The Renovations Software cartridge may be the best on the whole system but it also has the notorious Beast Wrestler for…some reason. The Evercade can handle PlayStation emulation and there are a few PS1 games scattered throughout the collections, and they’re mostly absolute bottom tier trash, like Hardcore 4x4, a game I also bought as a “classic” on PS3 and hate just as much the second time around. Some of the cartridges just flat out suck, with nothing worth playing on them, but most have at least fair amount of trash. The Bitmap Brothers may be legendary but their cartridge has 3 bad Speedball games, a lousy shooter, and the acceptable but not great Chaos Engine. Codemasters is an important British developer that still exists, but their cartridge has Cannon Fodder (not great to play on a controller with no analog support because it’s meant to be played with a mouse) and then a dizzying array of bad stuff. The C64 is one of the most important early platforms, and the games for it are just not fun to play in 2023, even though there are Atari 2600 games I can still enjoy. There are some games on Evercade that I keep coming back to (most of which are also available elsewhere) but I would say that the majority of the games range from meh to flat out bad and some of the cartridges have nothing worth playing for more than five minutes.
Genre depth/balance – This is similar but not quite the same, at least to me. Evercade has great depth in some genres like platformers, beat-em-ups, and shmups and practically a desert in others. Fighters are particularly dire, especially if you don’t count the Capcom games locked to the new handheld. Not including Weapon Lord either because it’s on the locked Namco carts you basically have Fighter’s History and the two horrible 16 bit Clayfighter games. But there are other genres poorly represented too. There are a fair number of sports games but mostly in odd subgenres like the California Games series (though there is a lot of soccer.) There are racing games but mostly mediocre top down affairs or bottom tier efforts. There are a few RPGs but no RPGs that you’d actually want to play through even if you like the 16-bit classic style. I’m sure these imbalances are down to what was available for license, but if you don’t like platformers, beat-em-ups and shmups you’re probably going to have a bad time.
The OS – Evercade is an emulation console and it has a full front end. You boot (slower than I’d like) into a main screen that shows the various games on the cartridge(s) you have inserted and select the game you want to play. There are also some basic options like fake scan lines and audio stuff as well as, on the VS, a game of the month. The console can connect to the Internet to download firmware patches, which are released about once a month. These patches include whatever patches are necessary for the game cartridges (so if you’re running current firmware there is never a need to patch individual cartridges) and even a free game of the month that you can play for as long as you have that patch active, which is neat, though it leaves the system when you download the next patch. These games are then collected at the end of the year into an Indie Heroes cartridge. Like most Evercade games the free games range from cool stuff like Donut Dodo (a modern take on old single screen arcade games) to bad games like Thunderpaw (A homebrew Genesis platformer that’s so simple it feels like it belongs on the 2600.) The downloads are slow and clunky. There are also some secret games you can unlock on the console with codes, though nothing really worthwhile.
There’s nothing really bad about the interface but it’s a bit slower than I’d like and isn’t super feature rich. You also have the ability to save 6 save states for each game, including a quick save slot, which is cool, but it’s a bit slow, again, and the ability to rewind, as many emulators now permit, would have been nice. Maybe the Evercade isn’t quite powerful enough for that, but if I’m getting the downsides of emulation I’d like the upsides too. In general the interface is adequate but just a little sluggish and kind of bare bones. It’s hard to be too upset about this for a console I got for $70, but it speaks to why buying digital games on modern consoles may provide a better experience, if not value.
THE BAD
The button mapping – Blaze Entertainment sucks at button mapping. They’re legitimately terrible at it. I think they play the games because you’d expect more emulation errors if they didn’t test them, but they’re British and grew up in the microcomputer era so their beliefs about how buttons should be mapped are perverted and wrong. They are mostly selling old Japanese console games (with their English localizations) but the buttons are mapped like they’d never even heard of the NES or Megadrive, let alone played one. Sometimes it feels like a prank. “Put the jump button on the top of the button diamond? Why not!” Sometimes it feels thoughtless. Jumpman for the C64 has jump, the only action, set to the rightmost button on the diamond, which kind of makes sense, but for me the bottom button seems more natural and…why not both? It’s the only action available.
There are options to remap every button on a system wide basis and some of the games offer some customization but overall it’s a mess, and the default button mappings are often pretty bad. It’s not system breaking because you can usually adjust or use one of the remapping options if you have to, but it seems like a very easy thing to get right and they consistently get it wrong.
The bonus games – For some of the collections if you have two carts from the same publisher (like both the Gaelco carts) you get an extra game. These are obviously just included on the second cart and only accessible if you put both in. This is problematic in a number of ways. For one I think it’s impossible to access these games on the Evercade handhelds, which only have one cartridge port, though I’m not sure because I don’t own either. For another these are like on disc DLC in that you’re buying something but can’t access all of it unless you buy something else. The games aren’t advertised on the boxes so it’s not like some scam, but it’s annoying even if you have both carts and the VS because you need to load both of them just to play one game. The bonus games on the console itself used to require re-entry of the codes each time but that was fixed in a firmware update.
The hardware locked games – On a similar note that are a bunch of games that aren’t compatible with the full lineup of software. The Capcom games are only on the new handheld and otherwise not accessible. The Namco cartridges do not work with the VS. These are minor gripes but they’re still annoying. I’d like to have played Splatterhoue 2 and 3 on the Namco carts but I’m not buying a handheld I don’t want to do it. The Capcom games don’t bother me personally because I have them elsewhere, but it’s not a great look.
The lack of support for other kinds of controllers – As I said the Evercade supports a lot of controllers, which is great. What’s not great is that it doesn’t seem to support analog (for the few PSX games), paddles/trackballs, steering wheels, lightguns (tough on non CRTs to be fair) or anything else despite having games that would benefit from them. I don’t blame Blaze for this given that they’re edge case scenarios and the number of games that would use these alternate controls are few, but it’s worth noting.
The lack of true commitment to physical – I don’t really care about physical games and am basically all digital on other platforms unless something is much cheaper physical, but if you’re going to sell a system for physical collectors relying on firmware updates to patch the cartridges and having all digital games on the new handhelds makes you a bit neither fish nor fowl. You kind of get the worst of both worlds, having to patch and update while also having to store and take care of physical objects. If the whole purpose of your console is to sell physical versions of games then that’s what you should do. Blaze tries to have it both ways a little, and that dilutes the purpose of the system. Could have just been a bunch of Switch games? Maybe.
CONCLUSION
In the end I am a little lukewarm on the Evercade. Part of this is just because I bought too many cartridges, which is on me, but on the other hand they only release new cartridges every couple months and some of them being flat out bad is a problem. Every game that’s awful feels like a missed opportunity to at least put something decent on there. On the other hand I’ve really enjoyed some of the games, been amused by or had my curiosity satisfied by others, and there’s something cool about the physical nature of the thing.
I also like the nature of the multi-carts, which have gotten me to try games I otherwise would not buy or play. I bought the Irem collection because I like some of their games but I never enjoyed Moon Patrol and I only decided to try it a few times because it was on the cart I already had. I ended up with a much better appreciation of that game and why it’s good. I also enjoyed getting a sampler of some systems I was always curious about like Intellivision or Atari Lynx. There have been other ways to get some of these games but this was a good one and my curiosity was sated. Some of the cartridges can replicate that feeling of digging around in a rummage sale or flea market and finding some game you’d never heard of for cheap, only to get it home and find out it’s pretty good. The Gaelco games are weird and generally pretty playable. Alligator Hunt isn’t a great game but it’s very weird and not awful, which is a good combination. Even when a game is very bad, like Incantation on the Interplay collection 1, it can be kind of entertaining just to see what it’s like.
On the other hand this is a very niche system, and it’s not 100% clear who it is for. If you love physical games do you really want these emulated collections? If you play modern games do you want these crusty old games, many of which aren’t even GREAT crusty old games? I’m a weirdo and I’ve had some fun, but it can’t replace any of the current mainstream consoles, just supplement them. And I can’t help thinking it might be better as just a digital storefront or something.
Do I regret buying my Evercade? The system itself, not really. Some of the cartridges? For sure. At such a cheap cost of entry and with enough really good or really weird games available at good prices I do think it’s worth a look, but it’s far from essential for basically anyone.
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