What Do People Think Of The Evercade?

[Ghost]

[MENTION=1646]Ghost[/MENTION], where did you order all those goodies from?

https://funstock.co.uk/collections/evercade/products/evercade-all-in-edition-1-10-white

From here

[fuse]

Evercade Vs is, surprise surprise, delayed. Headline is: "Evercade Release Update – VS Delayed until Mid December (EU) and January (US)"

https://evercade.co.uk/evercade-release-update-vs-delayed/

Not massively surprised given global events, and it seems they're still pretty confident in getting one to me this year, so not too worried.

[Dogg Thang]

What's a real shame is that a bunch of their carts seem to be delayed too, and I think some of those had already been delayed.

[gunrock]

So, the missus ordered me the Evercade Vs Premium pack for Xmas. I'm hoping she'll get the Worms, Bitmap Bros, Codemasters and Namco Vol 1 carts too. We will see.

Can't wait to beat my 10 year olds at the end of Double Dragon!!!

[Dogg Thang]

Actually getting these games is a pain in my rear end. I've had the Bitmap Brothers collection on preorder from Amazon since the summer. Originally due to ship in September, I think... or maybe a bit later. Got delayed until early December and still hasn't shipped yet. It exists. I've seen people on Twitter have it but actually getting it here seems next to impossible.

[fuse]

It arrived in my hands as part of the Evercade Vs Founders edition this morning! I appreciate this is not helpful.

[Dogg Thang]

II appreciate this is not helpful.

Ha! It is not. But it does seem like all of the copies I have seen in the wild have come from that same bundle. I don't think it has yet been available separately.

Curious to know how the Vs system is.

[wakka]

If you are waiting on some kind of cool handheld gaming thing, basically, fuse already has it.

[Dogg Thang]

Damn him!

[Dogg Thang]

I finally got the Bitmap Brothers collection. It contains Speedball, Speedball 2, Speedball 2010 or something, Chaos Engine and Xenon 2. So how is it? Well in true Evercade style, it isn’t quite what it could be but it’s still okay. The version of Speedball is some 8-bit version and that’s doing the game a huge disservice because, even though overshadowed by Speedball 2, the original game was superb on the Amiga but that’s not the game we have here. It’s barely playable.

Thankfully Speedball 2 is a 16-bit version. I suspect the SNES version but I’m not certain. It looks good and it plays well and that’s the game most people will be buying this for. So at least that’s something.

Speedball 2000andwhatever is the PS1 sequel that I hadn’t played and I don’t think many have played. Having a quick go, it seems to be a 3D remake of Speedball 2. It’s very dark and the text is next to impossible to make out on the handheld Evercade unit but it seems to play pretty well. I’m going to play more to see if it clicks.

Xenon was never my type of game and so that leaves Chaos Engine which is fairly standard. Again some 16-bit console conversion is what’s on the cart and I guess that’s okay.

[samanosuke]

Shame Speedball 2 & Chaos Engine aren’t the Amiga versions which were the definitive ones for me, but I guess it’s more difficult to emulate them legally as the Kickstart ROMs are copyrighted.

[gunrock]

Given that most Amiga games in that era throw away the OS as soon as they start loading (after a short bootstrap to get their track loader up and running), I'm surprised that a small Kickstart replacement couldn't be made for a limited emulation environment like the Evercade.
Full WHDload type environment with 020 & HD support and autoconfig etc. would be very difficult, but an A500 with 1MB (extra 512k slow mem) and 68k only, wouldn't be mission impossible, I'd have thought.

[gunrock]

Anyway, got my VS yesterday and I'm a bit mixed on it. I think that the value proposition and form-factor is great.
I think the collections on the carts are very lumpy. Some of the games are interesting curios, some are pure winners, some are total dross.
It's well put together and I quite like it, but I need to spend some more time with it, to gauge it properly.

[Dogg Thang]

It might sound weird but I kind of like that they release stinkers that just don’t get rereleased anywhere else. Overall, my experience has been positive but my big thing is just that, like with the Speedball games, so many times they just don’t include the best versions of the games they are selling. And that’s frustrating given they’re very unlikely to release another collection of the same stuff with the best versions. So I feel like they never fully meet their potential.

[Nu-Eclipse]

Genuine question: What exactly is so good about the Evercade machines??

Honestly not trying to derail here but they've always looked like sh1te to me. More than happy to be convinced otherwise.