I’m going to talk about video games.
I wanted the entirety of the Evercade review series to be in video format, but since reviewing the system itself involves camera footage and that means hitting closer to showing my stupid quarantine face on camera, that’s not going to happen.
The Evercade is a fancy doohickey that launched within the last month or so and has stirred up quite a fuss if you consider low pressure winds to be a fuss. Actually that’s not true, as far as classic systems go the Evercade and its cartridges are apparently selling just fine. Now I’m as much of a connoisseur of retro games as I am modern MMOs so I immediately jumped on this without even thinking of turning it into content.
The Evercade itself is well priced, at $80 for the system plus one cart or $100 for the system and three carts. The main gimmick of course is that the system uses licensed cartridges as opposed to being a vessel for you to dump roms onto, with the added bonus that since the emulation software is contained within the cartridge, the Evercade is not constrained to specific systems or forced to release new firmware or hardware to support new consoles.
It’s whatever they can get running on the hardware.
So I wanted to talk first about the hardware itself. The Evercade feels solid as a plastic rock, and I tried to bend it and twist it to see if it had any weakness which it does not. Willing to risk shattering my limited edition, no longer on sale Evercade for you, the viewer? Of course I am. Granted if it broke in my hands I wouldn’t need to review the ten cartridges, I would have my answer. Every system comes with at least the Atari collection #1.
One thing I will note is that the cartridges can suck, but inconsistently. The carts are meant to fit snugly in the system and a lot of people have had them get stuck resulting in damage to the console and the cartridge. I had my Namco cart get stuck after probably 10 times of it fitting in fine, and I’m not sure what factors play into that.
My suggestion for the carts is to push them in slowly, and don’t force it and if it seems to be getting stuck, definitely don’t force it. It only appears to happen with certain pack-in carts, and according to Evercade regular use of carts that work should stretch out the cart slot and make this a non-issue within a few days.
The system itself is pretty comfortable with four face buttons, a d-pad, two shoulder buttons, a menu, start, and select button. Battery life is supposed to last roughly four hours which I have found to be true, and there is an option to run the video out via HDMI. You will need a mini-HDMI to HDMI cable for this. Power is turned on with a slider, audio jack on the bottom for headphones, and two buttons for volume control.
There are a few issues that I found incredibly amateurish on the part of the Evercade people, such as requiring a firmware update to have buttons be mapped on the controller as they are on their original consoles and that coming only after people started cancelling their pre-orders in anger. There is also the issue of the HDMI out not always working, specifically with certain games, and generally with a capture card in play. Outside of the cartridge issue these are minor problems.
I hope the Evercade is incredibly successful because with 10 launch carts and 4 already announced I’d like to see what kind of licenses these folks can pick up. Personally I’m hoping for a Konami collection.
MMO Fallout 