Evercade Amiga Team 17 Collection Review

We finally have Amiga games on the Evercade, and starting things off for representation on the retro themed console we have Team 17 Collection 1, which isn’t to be confused with the Worms Collection which was also from Team 17.

The cart, which I previously previewed a couple of months ago as most of the games appeared on the A500 Mini or can be played on Antstream Arcade is a solid line up. Featuring ATR: All Terrain Racing, a trilogy of Alien Breed Special Edition 92, Alien Breed 2 and Alien Breed Tower Assault, Arcade Pool, Body Blows, Full Contact, Kingpin, Project X Special Edition 93 and Qwak.

I didn’t find that there were any bonus games with this cart available on the Evercade VS as yet, as you can sometimes find a bonus game if you insert two cartridges into the VS at once. I tested the collection with the Worms Collection hoping the Amiga Worms games may appear, but alas they did not.

As with a lot of Evercade Collections some games are good and some are less so.

Probably the game I will end up playing the most within time will be Arcade Pool. This is a fun top down pool game, and is very easy to pick up and play. Like the actual game pool, you can keep coming back to it again and again just to challenge yourself to have a good game. It features not only UK 8 Ball, but US 8 Ball, 9 Ball, 15 Ball which I’ll be honest I didn’t fully understand and also things like trick shot mode.

Arcade Pool is one of those games that is easy to keep playing just one more game on. It’s a shame that it doesn’t feature snooker on there as well, but due to the lengthy nature of how long a frame of that actual sport can take it perhaps wouldn’t have the same pick up and play feel. Arcade Pool plays well enough with the dpad, but truthfully, having played this back in the day and on the A500 mini with a mouse, a mouse is the better way to play the game.

I’m gonna kinda cheat and lump all three Alien Breed games in together here. Yeah yeah, I know they all have their individual merits, but they’re all pretty much the same deal. They’re top down action games where you go around shooting aliens that look like they were ripped straight outta Ripley. See what I did there. You go around picking up ammo, and finding keys and escaping to the next area. If you love these games you’ll have a blast with this cartridge as there are three of the series on here.

It’s a shame that we don’t have the two Alien Breed 3D games, but I’m sure they’re being saved for a later collection. The whole series has enough games that it could have been it’s own collection though, although as is usually the case outside of Team 17’s own Worms Collection, mostly we don’t get franchise based collections on Evercade.

I always loved the Alien Breed games back in the day although found them pretty challenging. I played the first one last year on the A500 Mini and from my playing of it so far on the Evercade it seems they all work correctly, so although I’ve not ploughed all the way through these versions to test for bugs I can say that these are great games and well worth your time.

Speaking of bugs, I noted that the Collection had a slip of paper that warned you to update your system if you wanted to play this Amiga Collection and although I’ve been playing and reviewing it on my Evercade VS, I cannot currently get the cartridge to be recognised by my Evercade EXP. I was actually super surprised by this as the EXP was updated only a month ago when the Game of the Month was Donut Dodo. It may be that I need to update the firmware to the absolute latest update to get it to be recognised, but it is a bit worrying. It also wouldn’t load in my original Evercade handheld either. I’ll be honest I don’t really want to delete Donut Dodo just yet as Thunder Paw was kinda terrible, so I can’t test if it’s my cart, or the lack of update that is the issue.

Moving on, next up we have Qwak. Qwak is a charming 2D platformer where you control this Ed the Duck looking green duck who collects all sorts of random fruits and gems as was very typical of platformers back in the day. You can shoot enemies and collect keys and you need to do this to get to the exit before the spiked balls you see on maces start to fall down on you. As a single screen platformer it’s a lot of fun, but very basic, and there’s about a hundred levels which should take a few hours to get through.

Qwak is far from the best 2D platformer available on the Evercade, but it’s inoffensive fun which can make a nice change of pace if you have limited carts to choose between with you on those train journeys or on holiday.

ATR: All Terrain Racing is a decent top down racer. I’ve never been super great at these, and although I felt I was getting pretty good after playing this on the A500 Mini and also playing it more to do the preview a couple of months back, I found that I’d lost all my knowledge of the tracks and had to re-find the feel for the controls. The good news is that it is easy enough to pick up and play and once you’ve got a sense of where the twists and turns are coming up in each race the game starts to open up as a lot more fun. Probably won’t be one I’ll return to very often, but again it adds to the variety of the games on the cart.

Project X Special edition 93 is quite a fun scrolling shoot em up. The game gives you the choice of a few different ships with different attributes and there are a variety of power ups which can make you feel over powered as you blast through all the enemies that come at you. As an arcade style shooter you should be able to get through the game fairly quickly, especially if you use a cheeky save state or two. The good thing is that by using the save state feature you can learn more of the game quickly so then you can challenge yourself to go back and do an old school top to tail run if you’re feeling daring.

There are a good variety of enemies and the boss fights are against big and imaginative looking enemies. There are some sections where you can crash into the scenery of things that look like they should be background objects which can be a pain as it feels a cheap death, but this is all part of learning the game.

Kingpin is a surprisingly addictive bowling sim. The game gives you a bunch of ways to set up leagues and sessions with multiple games and players and you can change the competency of the opponents to match your skill level. For me Kingpin, much like the actual sport/activity of ten pin bowling is mostly about me having a solo game to challenge myself to get the maximum score I can.

The game allows you to adjust the power of your swing, as well as your footing before you roll and you have to master the timing of the aim. It’s all quite good, and there are some other conditions which can keep you on your toes such as info they give you about the lanes being waxed normally or not. These mean you have to learn the controls a bit more in and out to make any adjustments as you play.

Lastly on the cart are two fighting games. Body Blows and Full Contact.

Full Contact is a 1991 one on one fighter which you can tell doesn’t have the same benefit of Body Blows of coming out long after Street Fighter 2. In the game I played as a guy who looks like a jacked up Joe Biden, topless and doing karate. You can thank me for that visual image.

You have limited moves you can do such a straight kicks, low kicks and jumping around. I’ll be honest I really didn’t enjoy this game much and don’t see myself going back to it often. There is some variety to the opponents such as fighting someone with a weapon and fighting a straight up bulldog. Yup this game has you battle to the death with the dog off the Churchill advert. Oh yes. Pro tip, the dog can only attack in one direction and that is whichever way it’s mouth is facing, so just jump behind it and low kick.  

Lastly we come to Body Blows. I loved this game on the Amiga back in the day. When I did my preview of the games I found that I couldn’t get Body Blows to run at a playable speed on the A500 Mini and also had issues with it on Antstream Arcade, but I am happy to report that I had no issues on the Evercade edition….except one. During a vs screen I found the game completely froze up and I couldn’t even access the Evercade home screen menu. I get the sense that the Amiga emulation on the Evercade may be a slightly trickier beast to handle, so players may run into issues here or there, but after this one off issue it all worked fine.

After a little while of refamiliarizing myself with the game that I haven’t properly played in about 27 years I found it was really fun. It does a really good job of being an Amiga take on Street Fighter and does a decent job of giving each character a surprising amount of unique and special moves considering you only have one action button.

For my playthrough I played as Nik, which is like this game’s Ken from Street Fighter and also really reminds me of Terry from King of Fighters with his fight style and that he wears a baseball cap through the fights.

With ten characters to choose from there is a decent amount to come back to play through as each fighter. The final boss of the game is very cool and is one of those hilarious 1990s video game situations where the developers just didn’t care that they were ripping off a movie. I thought Max seemed an unusual final boss until his skin melted off and he became the T17 which in every way is a Terminator. Funny that Team17 (who the T17 is named after) used the T800 from Terminator and also used the Xenomorph from Alien like they were public domain. I don’t think any big game could get away with this today.

To wrap things up here I’d say my pics for the best games on the cart are Body Blows, the Alien Breed games, and Arcade Pool. Qwak and Project X are both decent, but there are lots of better examples of their genre on the Evercade. Kingpin and ATR are also fun enough, but may be ones I go to only if I’m particularly in the mood for them. I do really like Kingpin, but it’s not the reason to buy the cart for me. Lastly we have Full Contact which I really didn’t get much joy from.

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