Evercade Evolution Issue 5 review

The fifth issue of Evercade Evolution was released a few weeks ago and, after ordering the physical copy directly from Amazon, it turns out that the team have done it again - 64 pages (excluding covers) of handheld gaming goodness!

As per the previous issues, the magazine is well laid out and packed with both text and imagery. The star of this issue is the 50th anniversary of Atari. To cover that, the team have reviewed the Atari Collection 2 and Atari Arcade 1. Other features include a trip down memory lane for Vaughan Anscombe, a chat with YouTuber Thunderm00se, and a tremendously informative and fun interview with former Atari employee Scott Rhoades. The usual news and high score sections are also present. 

I may have said it before but I really like the way the reviews are laid out in the magazine. Each cartridge gets an overview review, with separate scores from some of the other team members too, then each title gets its own page, again with a second opinion to add context to the scores. It's a format that works well, especially considering the nature of the collections - there may be a dozen or so titles per cart but there will be some stinkers amongst the selection. 

For example, Atari Collection 2 contains decent titles such as Yars Revenge, Haunted House, Solaris and Asteroids (the 7800 version). It also has less... "good" entries like Air Sea Battle, Human Cannonball and Street Racer. As always, nostalgia will only get you so far, and it's good to see that the reviews do highlight this. The good thing with Evercade carts is that there is always enough wheat in the chaff to warrant a purchase.

The same goes for Atari Arcade 1, and the inclusion of Asteroids and Crystal Castles more than offsets the inclusion of the turd that is Canyon Bomber. 

Evercade Evolution issue 5 is another well written edition that is very much an essential purchase for fans of the Evercade family of devices (the original handheld, the VS home console and the recently released EXP handheld). The £7 physical copy is as good as you can get from Amazon publishing for the price and you don't even have to go physical if you don't want to - the Kindle version costs £2 and even then, there is also the free .pdf copy available directly from the Evercade Evolution website. Given the options available, there's no reason at all not to give it a read!