Bits & Bytes is a weekly column where Editor-in-Chief Robert shares his thoughts about video games and the industry on a lazy Sunday. Light reading for a day of rest, Bits & Bytes is short, to the point, and something to read with a nice drink.
Blaze Entertainment has been producing its lineup of Evercade handhelds for a couple of years now. The mission statement of Evercade is to provide affordable game consoles with physical cartridges—no digital. Evercade, to this point at least, is also focused on retro games. The importance of this can’t be overstated—Blaze is making game preservation both accessible and affordable. That’s pretty awesome.
What’s even more awesome is the Evercade VS. This is the home console version of the company’s handheld and is capable of playing the exact same cartridges as the handheld. We’ve written about VS in the past, which you can read right here. The reason I’m writing about VS again right now is because the console is officially in my home. It’s sitting on my bed to the left of me as I type this, a surprise delivery considering early adopters had been told shipments would be getting pushed into 2022. I’m more than happy to see it here and now.
New consoles and Christmas are the peanut butter and jelly of the gamer world. It definitely feels like an early Christmas to me—I can’t wait to crack the box open on my “Founder’s Edition” and start setting everything up. Nintendo has done an admirable job of keeping physical media alive with Switch. I sincerely doubt that future generations will get quite the same visceral thrill of opening up a card or something on Christmas morning declaring that their download of “Game X” is ready to go.
No, physical is the best, and it makes me incredibly happy to see the folks at Blaze keeping things going with Evercade. I’m going to have full impressions of the console soon, but in the meanwhile definitely give either the handheld or VS itself a look. For retro gamers or people who want to give retro gaming a try, Evercade has managed to snag licenses for a ton of classic software. The only catch is that Nintendo isn’t interesting in licensing its own games, naturally, but devs like Bandai Namco, Data East, The Bitmap Brothers, and many others are all accounted for. It’s a really rich library to sift through—the perfect way to spend a cold, winter day indoors.
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