The Evercade, if you haven’t heard of it before, is a handheld console which was released in 2020 by UK based Blaze Entertainment. It’s premise is that it is a cheap portable console which uses cartridges, and that each cartridge released will feature a collection of games from past consoles and arcade.
We’ll do a review of the console separately, as there are a lot of things to go over about the handheld, but for today we’ll be reviewing the Namco Museum Collection Volume 1 cartridge. The Namco collection features 11 games from the arcade and 8-bit and 16 bit generations.
The selection of games featured includes heavy hitters such as Pac Man, Galaxian and Dig Dug, and also lesser-known games such as Battle Cars and Metal Marines. Rounding out the list are the games Libble Rabble, Mappy, Mappy Kids, Quad Challenge, Star Luster and Xevious. It’s a good mix of games, so that if you were to take out your Evercade for a nostalgia fest on a plane or train journey you’d have enough variety to keep you entertained for the duration.
With the benefits of variety come that they have clearly been selective to give you some classics and some filler. The fact that this was a launch title for the Evercade and is named Namco Museum Collection 1 showed that they wanted you to also have to buy Collection number 2 (which was also a launch title). Still as it is the Evercade cartridges are only about £15 a pop, and you can get the Evercade bundle online that comes with the first 10 cartridge collections.
To give an overview and thoughts on each of the games included, the obvious big one here is Pac Man. A super simple game where you control the famous pizza dude missing a slice as you go around a maze and eat pellets whilst avoiding ghosts. If you manage to get to one of 4 power pellets you are then able to turn the tables on the ghosts and can chase and eat them for a limited time.
Pac Man is genuinely one of the most addictive and repayable games of all time, and is just as fun to pick up and play today as it was back in the day. Similar to other games of the era such as Space Invaders or Donkey Kong, the game just loops over and over again with the enemies and challenge increasing slightly each time. The goal is to keep playing to get a better score. If you get into it, you can find yourself playing for long stretches to try and beat your high score, but in most cases this’ll be just a short fun distraction where you’ll figure why not just play Pac Man for 10 minutes.
Next up we have Galaxians which is a Space Invaders like shooter. It’s a very similar game with more colourful graphics and that the invading aliens are more bug like and will fly in more surprising patterns and break ranks at times. Another classic which fits into the fun for a 10-minute blast here or there, but may leave you wanting to look to the next game quite quickly. This isn’t a bad thing though, it’s just the nature of arcade games from the era where they were mostly designed to be played in short bursts before heading to the next game, whilst still addictive enough for you to come back to, to best your high score later on.
Battle Cars was the game I played next and although it was one I’d never heard of, it was one I instantly enjoyed and felt it was a easily likeable game. For full disclosure, the length of time I gave each game varied based on how much it gripped me and whether I had already played the game to death in the past. I played Pac Man for maybe 25 minutes and my impression is that it was Pac Man all present and correct, and so I didn’t feel the need to attempt to get to level 256 to see if there is the kill screen where the game just breaks.
Battle Cars is a mode-7 style racing game which feels like Super Mario Kart mixed with Mad Max. You can choose from a variety of cars and colours and get to shoot projectiles at your opponents. You can also earn cash to upgrade vehicles and the gameplay is easy to pick up and a lot of fun.
When I first started playing, I attempted to slide with the shoulder buttons like you can do on some other racers and didn’t realise that you could use the shoulder buttons for general turning which meant that I was overturning a lot, but when I realised this, I actually preferred to play with the should buttons to control the turning. It’s a good little racing game. It’s not a Mario Kart beater by any stretch of the imagination, but definitely a fun game to switch to, to mix up your play sessions on the Evercade.
Dig Dug is a fun game and another classic which fans of Mr Driller and Boulder Dash will get a lot out of. A simple concept where you control a character who digs through the earth and you have to clear the screen of baddies by either dropping boulders on their heads or shooting a rod into them and inflating them until they explode.
Now, I’m not as familiar with the lore of Dig Dug, so if anyone can explain that process better than me…good for them, but to me it looks like you inflate them to death.
This is a game which isn’t as addictive as Pac Man, but one you will happily go back to again and again just to see how far you can get. And as the Evercade has a built in Save States feature, you can easily save your progress and periodically come back to it to continue your game without having to start again from scratch.
Along with Battle Cars, the other racing game in the collection is Quad Challenge, which I didn’t especially get into. It wasn’t as pick up and play fun as the other game, and I did feel like if I made a single mistake that the race was all but over. It’s a shame when you feel this way on a racing game as quickly becomes frustrating. I’m sure if I play it a lot more I’ll get more into it, and the game does have fun gameplay and good graphics for it’s era.
Libble Rabble is a game I’d never heard of before and it’s a bit of an oddity. I played the game with the Evercade connected to my TV via HDMI cable and I’m not sure why, but no sound would come through. This technical issue aside, the game sees you control two connected arrows which are tethered together, and you move them around the screen and create shapes by hooking the tether around pegs. If you complete the shape by closing the gap between the triangle and the tether you seem to collect any treasure, and kill any baddies inside the shape.
It’s surprisingly fun, but I didn’t 100% understand all of what I was supposed to do or learn all of the tactics yet. This will definitely be a game I plan to put more time into and can see it being an addictive puzzler.
One thing which jumped out to me is that on the game selection screen the game is advertised as an 8 Bit action puzzler, but the accompanying artwork shows a Super Nintendo controller which obviously was a 16 bit machine. Upon investigation I learned that it had been an 1983 arcade game, but was released onto the SNES in 1994. This being the case it’s a shame that they didn’t update the graphics of the game to 16 Bit standards as whilst it’s fun to play and nowadays people are much more accepting of retro graphics in modern games I get the sense that this may have been a more noteworthy franchise if it had been modernised graphically for the SNES release.
Mappy is a platformer where you play as a mouse who goes around a house trying to avoid cats whilst trying to collect all kinds of loot. Stealing TVs and paintings almost like a Robin Hood stealing from the cats as an ironic cat burglar. Gameplay is ok, but repetitive and slightly frustrating. You can only jump by landing on trampolines and if you are touched by a cat you instantly lose a life. This means you can often find yourself bouncing on a trampoline repeatedly just to dodge a cat and wait for the timing to land and enter a room. You get used to it quick enough, but isn’t really a gameplay style that would be chosen in more modern times, and feels dated.
Mappy Kids is a sequel that instantly feels much more modern then Mappy, but changes things up significantly. The style of game goes from an old school Mario Bros styler affair to a slightly more modern Super Mario Bros 3 style game. You can now jump and jumping on this game feels really odd, like your character is too light and they float up and down at a weird rate. You can tap the jump button to rotate your tail to float more, and also unlike the first Mappy game you can also fight the cats with a kick.
After reaching the end goals of each level you’ll enter a fruit machine bonus stage followed by another competitive mini game. There are various mini games like waving flags Simon says style and one based off of sumo wrestling and they vary in quality.
The next game on the cart is Metal Marines which is a real time strategy game, which if you can get into it, and if RTS games are your cup of tea, this will probably add significant value to the overall package which is otherwise made up of mostly arcade experiences that you can jump straight into. This isn’t the case with Metal Marines.
There is definitely a learning curve to this game and being an older RTS game you’ll probably feel quite clueless as to what you’re supposed to do when you first boot it up. Within a few minutes of experimentation, you can start to get a sense of what you need to do and how to strategize.
If real time strategy isn’t your thing and you want some more instant action from a shooting game you have a couple of choices available on the collection. Xevious is a top-down scrolling shooter which is a lot of fun. I found that this was a game where I quite quickly was relying on the save states to progress as it was super challenging after a short while. Definitely a product of its time in this regard, but also very playable.
Star Luster is the final game on the cartridge and is a cockpit first person space shooter. Think older school Star Fox. Strangely it also had a map system where you choose where you fly to for each stage and battles in a similar way to Star Fox Command on the Nintendo DS, so who knows if that’s just common on these type of space simulation games.
Gameplay wise you have two phases to the action. The first is where you choose a location on your on-screen map to fly to, and once you are there you then look above the map to the view of space where you shoot at enemies.
Considering the age of the game, it has to be said that the effect of it being 3D when all that happens is that dots representing stars are stretched out as lines to give a sense of movement is all very impressive. The gameplay and controls feel great, and it was one of my favourite experiences on the collection.
Conclusion
Overall the Namco Museum Collection 1 is a fun and varied collection of retro classics and is exactly what the Evercade was designed for. As a cheap cartridge that many Evercade owners who got the premium or 10 cartridge bundle editions of the machine will already have, it is a great collection that is highly recommended for retro fans. If you’re not into retro classics from this era this collection is unlikely to win you over, and there are other carts for the Evercade which have a more modern flavour, but with Pac Man and Galaxian alone this is a must have for the retro inspired handheld.
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