Amiga games are officially coming to the Evercade with the recently announced Team17 Collection. There will be ten games on this cartridge collection, and it won’t be long before players are able to get their hands on the cart to be able to play on the original Evercade handheld, the Evercade EXP and the Evercade VS home console.
I recently did a video taking a look at the games on the also currently unreleased C64 Collection 2, and was able to check out most of the games that will be on that collection as they are also available currently on the C64 Mini from Retro Games LTD. Well, in that same spirit today I will be checking out most of the games will be coming to the Amiga Team17 Collection 1 as they are likewise available elsewhere.
The A500 Mini launched in 2022 and included Alien Breed Special Edition 92, Arcade Pool, ATR All Terrain Racing, Project X, and Qwak.
Full Contact, Body Blows, Alien Breed Tower Assault, Alien Breed 2 The Horror Continues, and Kingpin meanwhile are all available on Antstream Arcade and so I was able to play them on my Atari VCS.
Now, like I said in my last video being able to check these games out on other systems just gives us a preview of the games that will be coming to the Evercade, but doesn’t at this stage tell us how the games will run on Evercade. So don’t see this as a review.
Also, even though I’m playing these games elsewhere I’d still say there are a bunch of reasons to be excited for the games on Evercade. The Evercade is the only option to get all these games released in physical form on a cart in one neat little package. You also can’t play your A500 Mini or Atari VCS on the go, but can on Evercade handheld systems. Now, if you don’t know AntStream Arcade it’s a game streaming service for retro games and you can access the library of games on Android devices, but at the time of writing you can’t access them on iOS. But again, this is a streaming service, so there is the possibility that in the future the license for some or all of these games could see them removed from the streaming service.
But let’s get onto the games now.
Alien Breed Special Edition, Tower Assault and Alien Breed 2 The Horror Continues
The Alien Breed games are a fun and sometimes tense top down games where you shoot aliens that look more than a little like the xenomorphs from the Alien movie franchise. These will come at you thick and fast and you’ll have to navigate to find your way away from the aliens whilst collecting keys and weapon upgrades.
There are three games from the Alien Breed series on this cart which means that they dominate nearly one third of the cart. Luckily these are enjoyable games, and thanks to the Evercade’s handy save state feature I may actually get all the way through each campaign which is better than I did back in the day on the Amiga.
I hope that when we get the Team17 Collection 2 that they give us the Alien Breed 3D games. I had thought that these may have proved to be the first first person shooters on the Evercade, but launching at the same time as the Team 17 Collection will be the Piko Collection 3 which features the classic Mega Drive era FPS Zero Tolerance.
Arcade Pool
Arcade Pool is a very fun pool game which was a favourite of mine back in the day on the Amiga when I wanted a quick dose of the table sport and didn’t want the more complex Archer Maclean’s Pool or Jimmy White’s Whirlwind Snooker. One thing that will be interesting about this is that I always played it with a mouse on the Amiga and even on the A500 Mini, so it will be interesting to see how the game translates to being played with a DPad. Maybe it can be played this way on the A500 Mini, but as that console comes with a mouse I didn’t even try that.
Qwak
Qwak is a fun enough 2D puzzle platformer where you collect gems, fruits, keys and such like as you seemed to do on all the Amiga platformers of the era. It features simple, but charming graphics, and is very easy to get into so I’m sure you’ll be sure to have some fun throwing eggs at baddies and then dodging obstacles as you try to get the keys and get to the exits on each stage. You won’t think this is the greatest platformer on the Evercade, but if you’ve played the rest or just want to try something different between rounds of Alien Breed then Qwak is a good choice.
ATR All Terrain Racing
ATR All Terrain Racing is a enjoyable top down racing game that gave me the vibes of Micro Machines. It feels a little dated as racing games don’t really come in this style anymore, but once you get into it, it certainly can be addictive. My feelings on this were once again the same as in my A500 Mini review and that was you have to put in some time to learn the tracks to get the most out of it all as the turns can appear on screen with a seconds notice so even if you master the pretty simple controls you will need the knowledge of the tracks to win.
Project X
Project X is a game I hadn’t played until I got the A500 Mini and it’s a enjoyable space shooter. Obviously at this stage there are many of these that can be played on the Evercade, and again this probably won’t be your first choice for shooter on the Evercade, but if shooters are your jam then you’ll probably enjoy this a lot. The backgrounds don’t have any parallax scrolling and are just a flat image that scrolls, but the animation on some of the enemies give this a visual boost. It’s also fun that you can switch auto-fire on for some pretty hectic action from the get go.
Body Blows
Full Contact and Body Blows and both fighting games in this collection, and whilst Body Blows was a game I really enjoyed back in the day on the Amiga, I don’t think I’d even heard of Full Contact. In practice however I think I had a better time with Full Contact on Antstream Arcade than I did with Body Blows. Ant Stream Arcade gives you some special moves already programmed into shoulder buttons on Body Blows and I don’t know if the game was glitching, but the controls seemed to constantly battle me.
I’d find that my character was jumping backwards when I hit the kick button and even though I won a couple of rounds I was mostly getting my butt kicked throughout. I wasn’t sure if this was me being bad so I loaded up the rom on the A500 mini and it ran at a pace that would make Street Fighter 2 Turbo look pedestrian. Hopefully when it comes to Evercade it will run better than what I found I could play it today.
Full Contact
Full Contact is an interesting game. It’s a one on one fighter and from what I can tell you can only play as one character who looks like an out of shape Terry Silver from Cobra Kai. Being based around a one action button set up on Amiga is a challenge for fighting games and this game relied on you holding a direction at the same time as button presses to do different kicks or punches. The game played ok, but quickly I found my best strategy was to go in for the low kicks and run approach I think most fighting game fans have jumped to when losing repeatedly.
It was amusing to play this game where your opponent could just go off the screen and stay there so you’d have to hunt them down, but over all I was definitely interested to play this one some more. The animation on the title screen was super impressive and the way the story reacted to if you lost a round was cool.
Kingpin: Arcade Sports Series Bowling
Lastly, we come to Kingpin which is a pretty decent bowling game. If you’re a fan of bowling I’m sure you’ll find this to be good experience to jump into. Along with Arcade Pool as the other sports game on the collection I found this to be a fun and relaxing game. I was terrible in my first go, but when I figured out the timing and the best ways to tweak your position and power of the throws I found I was getting some spares. Never managed a strike, but will aim for that when it releases on Evercade.
So, there we have it. All the games that will be on the Evercade’s first Amiga collection given a little run through, and I have to say that I’m pretty excited for this one. I imagine that in a second collection we will get Superfrog, Alien Breed 3D 1 and 2, and the Amiga version of Worms as well as Body Blows Galatic, and a few others, but this is certainly I good collection of Amiga titles from Team17 to look forward to.
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