The Blaze Evercade

The Starter Pack and 7 additional cartridges.

The Blaze Evercade originally fell into the "wait and see" category when I first heard about it, as I had owned a couple of  Blaze products in the past and hadn't been overly impressed with them. Yet, as early YouTube reviews appeared, it started to grow on me. The reviews were actually decent - noting issues here and there, but on the whole, I got a very positive impression of the device. My only bugbear was the seemingly spongy d-pad that I took an immediate, if unwarranted, dislike to because of the videos. In the end, though, I took the plunge and pre-ordered the Starter Pack and the other 8 cartridges available at the time.

Delivered by what seemed to be the world's cheeriest postman at 7am last Saturday morning, I quickly disposed of the delivery packaging to reveal this:

Are you not excited by this?

The box is good quality and well designed. It reminds me very much of '80's and '90's console packaging that screams about the hardware and software, leaving you without any doubts as to what you're going to get. True, it's quite "busy" but I think it's a good design for the Evercade. The outer sleeve slides off easily and reveals the console box itself which is more restrained. Opening that box reveals the console in a plastic insert and a small Quick Start Guide. Beneath that is the included game cartridge (Namco Museum Collection 1) and a USB to micro-USB cable for charging. No plug adapter is included but it's likely you'll already have at least a few of those dotted around the house. Nor is a mini-HDMI to HDMI cable included either, so you'll need to buy one if you want to use the Evercade with a TV. One last thing to note, the plastic trays in the box are cheap but do the job, though a far cry from the quality of the cardboard packaging.

I can't fault the design...

...though the plastic trays are cheap.

Out of the box, what does the Evercade offer? A 4.3 inch screen, four main buttons (A, B, X and Y), Select, Start and Menu buttons, and left and right shoulder buttons. On the whole, these feel quite good, though the shoulder buttons do feel a little light but give a decent click when pressed. The d-pad is large and actually very good. Certainly any fears I had prior to using it have gone and I find it works very well. Some have commented about the gameplay button layout, leading to a firmware patch to remap them. That's a personal choice but I'm happy with the way it comes out of the box. Around the device, you have a power switch, cartridge port, micro-USB for charging, mini-HDMI for TV display, a 3.5mm headphone jack and volume buttons. There are also a pair of speakers  on the front that provide decent stereo sound.

Start up screen.

The console itself is well built and quite sturdy, measuring approximately 18cm x 8cm x 2cm. It's not overly heavy at 250g and fits nicely into your hands. The plastic is not textured though, so may get a bit slippy.

The screen, certainly on the highest brightness, is well suited to sunlit rooms. whilst on the low setting, it's very comfortable for playing in darkened areas. The screen ratio in games is usually 4:3 as that's their original ratio, which leaves black borders on either edge of the display, but full screen can be selected from the in game menu, as can save and load states for each title. A note of the full screen option - this appears to just stretch the image across the full width of the display that makes a lot of the titles look just plain wrong, so for me, the correct aspect ratio would be the original 4:3 for a lot of titles. Whilst I am on the subject of the screen, the viewing angles from either side are okay, but the vertical angles are pretty poor - not that this is much of a problem as this is a single player system, regardless of whether the titles offer two player options.

The screen is very nice.

The Starter Pack comes with one cartridge, the Namco Museum Collection 1, containing 11 titles. These include PAC-MAN, Galaxian, Dig Dug and Xevious. This is without doubt the best cart to pack in with the console. Given who it is aimed for, these four titles will evoke a heavy sense of nostalgia and draw you in straight away. As for the rest of the titles on this cart, most I hadn't heard of but Star Luster is a forgotten classic in my humble opinion. I also ordered all of the available cartridges at the same time as the console and, as with Namco 1, whilst there were some titles I was familiar with, there were many I wasn't and discovering these was a joy in itself. Several additional cartridges have been announced for the Evercade, taking the total up to 14 at the time of writing and more are planned. These include two Atari Lynx Collections, The Oliver Twins Collection (which not only supports the excellent National Videogame Museum, but also brings back several Dizzy titles), and a Xeno Crisis/Tanglewood double pack, evidence that the Evercade could be a good home to Indie developers as well.

It would be remiss of me not to mention the cartridge packaging. It's lovely. It holds the cartridge securely and the included colour manual for each cartidge provides instructions and a bit of history for the individual games. They are a nice touch and take me back to a time when packaging actually meant something. I don't know about you, but games manuals were often as important (and entertaining) as the games. The cases also look great on the shelf too...

Console gaming how it used to be.

The manuals are very polished and a lovely touch.

Sorry, Bazcardz, you'll have to move when more carts arrive...

Downsides? Well, I would like to see a better quality screen cover, glass instead of plastic. This is a handheld and people will travel with it. I wouldn't feel comfortable shoving this in a rucksack without the accompanying carry case which, by the way, I haven't bought. Battery life could be a smidge better - four hours just doesn't seem quite enough but it's not a major problem either. The only other issue is the cartridge slot itself - it's very tight to fit the carts in and taking them out can result in some worrying creaking from the body of the console, depending on how you leverage the cart out. Evercade have said that it gets looser with use (Oh, Matron!), but I can't help but think that there could have been an alternative mechanism used other than friction. Oh well, it's not a deal breaker and just means you have to take a bit of care, which is no bad thing.

So having played with this for a week, I am happy with the Evercade. The design and build quality are very good and the games selection is varied and entertaining. True, it can be a bit hit and miss depending on the cartridge but let's be honest here, how many compilations (be it music, games or whatever) have you bought where every title was to your liking? The current range of titles covers an awful lot of retro gaming and as noted above, there are plans for several more. Certainly, I get the impression that they're in it for the long run. With the control layout, there would be no issues with games from systems as modern(!) as the Amiga CD32 and the 3DO being released, and I am sure the Evercade could handle those with ease. I would love to see the likes of Guardian and Star Fighter 3000!

You can order the Evercade from Funstock.co.uk, Argos and Amazon. If you are a retro gaming fan and like the idea of a portable console that covers legally emulated games, then have a look at this. For the price, £59.99 for the starter pack, it's a lovely little system and one that I hope to see supported for a long time to come.

Call of Cthulhu - Lovecraftian Lollygagging

I have always had a bit of a liking for HP Lovecraft's work. Not really his writing style, which can be verbose and turgid, but the ideas and the mythology that he created and has been built up since then. I even have a copy of his complete works that I am slowly making my way through. Not only have his works inspired others to write similar tales, but there have also been numerous films, board games and video games that both directly and indirectly follow his path.

Call of Cthulhu is one such game and was released on X-Box One, PlayStation 4 and PC last October. A survival horror game (come on, a Cthulhu title is never going to be a cuddly platformer, is it???), Call of Cthulhu puts you in the shoes of Great War veteran Edward Pierce. Now a struggling private detective in 1924 Boston, he is tasked to find out what happened to the Hawkins family, who passed away in a suspicious house fire on the little known island of Darkwater, just off the coast of Boston. That's the set up and what follows is a decent role playing title, heavy on the horror and psychological terror. Add some decent, is slightly annoying stealth sequences and what you have is a solid stab at the genre. The story does get a little confusing but is engrossing, and Edward's descent in to madness (or is it) is handled well.

Not a triple-A title by any means, Call of Cthulhu looks ok, though everything seems to have been given a filmic grain that works in some chapters but not in others, sometimes hiding key details that the plot relies upon. The facial animations on some of the secondary characters is a bit rough and you are definitely in the uncanny valley as far as their eyes go. At times, that's creepier than the game itself. The voice acting is decent and I have certainly heard much worse, though the UK-based actors does sometimes veer back to their own accents rather than the New England one they are trying to master. All in all though, it's atmospheric and even I fell for a couple of the jump scares.

It's not a long game, by any means, and your first play through should last about eight hours. I say first, as there are four endings and at to see at least two of them, you'll need to change your style of play considerably. As a full priced title, it's just about worth it, but if you can get it for about £20 to £30 and you're a fan of the genre or the Cthulhu mythology, you could do far worse than this game.

Hold on again, I bought two of those!!!

Following on from the Tapwave Zodiac post the other week, it got me thinking about what was possibly my favourite piece of multi-purpose tech from the noughties - the Nokia N-Gage.

Now hold on there before you get pitchforks and flaming torches, hear me out. This was an attempt by the then biggest mobile phone manufacturer to combine said mobile phone tech with a games console, something that still alludes to this day (I am not counting smartphone gaming as  unless the rely upon simple touchscreen/gyro controls, actually playing them is a chore. I believe that physical controls trounce those options pretty much all of the time).

So what was it like? Well, Nokia took their then successful Series 60 software platform and stuck it in this:

The Nokia N-Gage - aka The Taco phone

Now I will be the first to admit that they compromised massively on the design, indeed, one of the key failures was the controls themselves, a phone keypad rather than gaming controller. It actually challenges the Atari Jaguar pad as worst design ever. Still, at the time, it was quite a piece of tech and yes, I bought one on launch day with a copy of Tomb Raider and I loved it. For a while...

Amongst the other compromises brought along on the phone side was the screen, a very (phone sensible) 11:13 ratio vertically orientated display. However, most gaming devices at the time followed the 4:3 ratio that copied televisions of the age. This was awkward and compromised the aesthetics of most of the titles. Another was the game card slot. This was inside, with no access externally. This meant that to change titles, you had to strip the battery out and re-boot the device. To be fair to Nokia, they did improve on a few things with the N-Gage QD but I'll get to that in a moment.

Despite the frankly obvious negatives above, I loved the machine. It allowed me to carry one device instead of several and even if you did look like a complete tool using it for a phone call, it ticked a lot of the boxes for me. Even the battery life wasn't too bad and it took a standard Nokia battery at the time so carrying a pre-charged replacement was easy enough. Plus pretty much everyone had a Nokia charger lying about.

Having said that, a quick check on YouTube shows that time is a harsh mistress and the titles that I remember playing and enjoying have not aged well, either by the technical abilities of the machine or that god-awful screen ratio. I ended up with about ten titles for the N-Gage over the two years I used it and it's follow up, the QD. Alongside Tomb Raider, there were Sonic N, Pandemonium, Super Monkey Ball and Call of Duty that stand out. Not necessarily for the right reasons, but I remember them well.

As per the market at the time, once the 12 month contract was over, I upgraded to the QD, a softer, more sensible re-design that slightly improved the controls, moved the speaker and mic so that you could hold the phone normally and placed the game card slot on the edge of the device. I sold the original which payed for the first five months of the new contract and held onto the QD for pretty much the rest of the following year. It was only when the software releases practically stopped that I turned my attention to newer devices and sold the QD and games off. As a collector, I wish I hadn't done that, but then YouTube is enough to remind me of the games and it's one less thing to clutter the house up.

The N-Gage QD - what the original should have been...

The N-Gage was a bold move by Nokia into the territory then (as now) dominated by Nintendo. That it didn't work, I put down to how the device was sold (this was long before children were given mobile phones as almost a human right - that's a discussion for a much later time) so unless you had deep pockets, a contract was the only way forward, the compromises brought about by trying to be master of all trades and the sheer strength of the competition. It also displayed the first cracks in Nokia's dominance of the mobile market. It failed and it failed badly. The coming of touchscreen smart devices would prove to be an even greater challenge.

The N-Gage was a technological dead end at the time, given that the hardware was probably too underpowered for gaming and the mobile networks were nowhere near capable of supporting the feature rich software we take for granted now, though the time of portable gaming and mobile phone synergy (minus physical controls) was only a few years away the form of Android and iOS devices. Am I please I owned two? Yes, as I said with the Tapwave post, they fitted a need that I had at the time. I do not consider the money spent a waste (what with selling the devices and games on, as well as having the phone contract which I would have had anyway). Would I seek out the hardware again for the sake of familiarising myself with it? No, that ship has sailed, and the rose tinted spectacles can do very strange things.

Hold on, I bought one of those...

Having a rake through a couple of packing boxes that hadn't been touched since the house move, I happened across this:

Tapwave Zodiac 2 with screen cover on

A Tapwave Zodiac 2. Part Palm PDA (Personal Digital Assistant), part games console, I bought this piece of tech back in early 20005. Common with the tech of the time, it uses a custom charging connector that is in another box somewhere, so unfortunately I can't power it up. I can, however, have a bit of a reminiscence about it.

Back of the Zodiac showing logos, charging/sync connector and stylus

I have always had a fascination about technology, and when the Zodiac was announced, it caught my interest as it combined the then popular PDA fad (almost entirely taken over by mobile phones and tablets these days) and gaming. Whilst I justified the purchase because it could replace my failing Palm 515, it was the gaming part of the package that intrigued me.

Looking at the specs now, they seem very anaemic compared to modern day devices, but by the standards of the time, they are respectable. A 200MHz ARM processor, backed up by 10Mb of RAM, the model I have has a massive(!) 128Mb of storage. It also has two SD card slots for additional storage and software. The screen is a not too shabby 3.8 inch half VGA type capable of displaying 65,536 colours.

With screen protector open

What I really like about the Zodiac is the design, rounded so very comfortable to hold and made predominantly of metal, so it feels solid in your hands. It is also just about the right size for my (not overly) hands. It's comfortable to hold for reasonably long periods and, ergonomically, it is as close to perfect as it gets, at least for me.

Still with Duke Nukem game

As well as the touchscreen (resistive, hence the stylus), you get two shoulder buttons, Home, Function, Power and four Action buttons. There is also an analogue stick, spring loaded so resets to centre when not under pressure. Connectivity wise, there's the aforementioned charging/sync connector, a headphone jack bottom left, Bluetooth, an IR beamer and the two SD slots on the top edge (neatly protected a bit by the screen cover when it's closed). So, for the time, not too shabby and it was well designed.

I used the Zodiac for well over a year, and it did a fair amount of travelling too. Indeed, by the time it was replaced, the battery had reached a point where it would be good for just a couple of hours of continuous use. Replacing that was a no-go as Tapwave themselves had wound up by then, so the Zodiac went into a drawer.

Incidentally, the Duke Nukem game that I bought with the Zodiac isn't a port of the classic 3d shoot-em up, rather it is just a generic shooter with Duke artwork. Disappointing as I think the hardware was more than capable of handling the real deal.

In general, use, the Zodiac was great fun, an extra memory card held enough music for the daily commute and back, whilst I would generally get a full days use before needing to charge the batteries. Gaming, however, was a battery killer. With the screen brightness turned up anywhere near maximum, you would be looking at three hours tops (and that was brand new out of the box!). As time went by though, I was using the Zodiac less and less for gaming and more for the core PDA functionality so it wasn't too great a loss when a Sony Ericsson K800i took on music/diary/calendar duties.

In hindsight, the Zodiac was a nice piece of kit that was technologically a dead end. PDA wise, it was up against the newer ranges of feature phones coming from Nokia and Sony Ericsson, whilst gamer's were being targeted by Nintendo's DS and Sony's PSP. Tapwave was in no way big enough to compete with any of those companies, and their target market was relatively tiny. It didn't help that the tech was caught between two stools and truly was a jack of all trades, master of none.

If I ever find the charging cable, I'll fire this puppy up and see if everything still works. Having written about the Zodiac, it has reminded me of another piece of kit I used back in the day, the Nokia N-Gage, but that's another post entirely...