Evercade Add Tanglewood & ZenoCrisis Cart Release
If you’re not familiar with the Evercade yet and have any interest in classic video games, then you have to check out this new handheld. It isn’t just another ROM playing piece of plastic, but an affordable and capable handheld that uses it’s own format of cartridges, yes cartridges. Like the good old 80s and 90s before CDs and digital downloads made collecting less fun. Each cartridge comes in a hard plastic bookcase like the Mega Drive or Master System and comes with a collection of games from a specific platform or publisher. Like Atari, Namco or Data East. We’ve seen these sort of compilations many times through the years on other platform, but you will find some awesome retro classics on there, even from the 16-bit era, like Earthworm Jim, Splatterhouse and Boogerman.
The big news I wanted to share here was what I consider to be quite the game changer. Breaking the curse that plagues these sorts of platforms in the past, where it’s largely the same old compilations of old arcade and 8-bit classics we have seen multiple times over the years. The announcement of this particular cartridge has branched out including two absolute monster indie titles previously hard to come by in physical form. These two games are XenoCrisis and Tanglewood. This shows that there is now a new platform for indie titles to publish their games onto an affordable and easily available physical form and that Evercade are committed to bringing great content to this handheld. Without say having to dig deep for limited physical production runs or overpriced collector editions, which even puts me off sometimes.
Take Tanglewood. Widely available as a digital download largely for Steam and PC, but otherwise only available physically on a limited amount of original Sega Mega Drive cartridges. As this game was developed entirely using the original SEGA Mega Drive dev tools (the back story is awesome alone and was even featured on the BBC), it is by nature a MEGA DRIVE game. Like all the good Disney releases for SEGA’s 16-bit console, Tanglewood is a cute platforming game with incredible detail to animation and character design. Reminiscent of Lion King and Castle of Illusion series of games. I have so far resisted the urge to play this, until I get a physical copy.
XenoCrisis is also technically a MEGA DRIVE game and available on physical cart form their website, at an eye-watering £55. Again it is already wildly available on digital download on Steam , PS4 and even Nintendo Switch. It is with no doubt a great shooter game. It’s an over head arena shooter that somehow to me feels like Amiga classic Alien Syndrome mixed with Konami’s Contra style chaos. I haven’t played through this one yet, as I don’t own it. But being a huge Contra fan, I am looking forward to picking this one up when this release is available later in the year
I did never pick up the actual MEGA DRIVE cartridges obviously for both these games, so soon I will be able o grab them for Evercade on one cartridge for an acceptable £14.99 to enjoy on a £50 handheld. What I love about these price points, is that it’s exactly what made the Nintendo Game Boy such a success. Yes, there is more powerful and better hardware out there, but the affordability made the Game Boy a monster of a success back in the day and I hope this means we will also see on the Evercade a vast library of awesome indie titles, continuously released in the years to come.
Who knows what other awesome indie titles we can see on the Evercade?! Maybe even titles like Shovel Knight, Hotline Miami, 198X, Celeste or Super Meat Boy could all make an appearance. I’m sure the hardware limitations might make titles like Fez (god I love that game) or Limbo from coming to this platform as they were very much built for HD style smart gaming systems. But anyway, take this as the first huge Evercade release.
Have you ordered an EVERCADE console yet? What other popular independent games would you like to see released on this platform? Reach out on social media to let us know what you think.