I haven’t been keeping up with Blaze Entertainment, the makers of the Evercade retro emulator consoles which officially licenses older ROMs and indie games and bundles them on cartridges. I like the idea, but it looks like things have been wild. They launched a newer handheld unit, the Evercade EXP, with extra buttons for TATE mode (a bit like a WonderSwan) and got Capcom to commit to additional games built-in (still no cartridge). Before delivery to a warehouse, they had a truck/lorry of its limited edition stolen in December. Their blog shows they were still reporting eBay sales of those in March. In June, they announced new cartridges with Duke Nukem and the generated art wasn’t caught until after the announcement.
Now, they’ve started a new line of Evercade cartridge compatible handhelds under HyperMegaTech, but I guess they couldn’t/wouldn’t get Capcom and Taito (currently a subsidiary of Square Enix) to share their games on the same hardware. The Super Pocket will have two versions with games by those companies exclusively pre-installed. The Verge claims the Super Pocket still has a headphone jack, but I haven’t spotted it on the specs or in the photos. The Capcom-branded (kinda? it’s their colors but without a logo) Super Pocket also has 6 fewer games built-in compared to the Evercade EXP; it misses Breath of Fire, Commando, Legendary Wings, Mega Man 2, Mega Man X, and Vulgus. Street Fighter II: Hyper Fighting will be on there, but I don’t know how comfortable the rear buttons will be. The Evercade firmware still seems to be beta testing per-game button mapping since firmware 3.0.7 (3.0.9 actually disables it in a few cases, like virtual keyboards), so I would prefer to see how that progresses.
ETA: I missed that the Capcom and Taito trademarks are below the screen on their respective version of the Super Pocket. It also seems there was a statement from Blaze that Gaming Age republished.
One big feature of the Super Pocket UI is the ability to activate “Easy Mode”. A new feature that lowers the difficulty of games so that you can get past hard to master levels with ease, or so that a younger person can play without a challenging difficulty spike in the games.
I had been wondering who these were for. Like any hobby, if you don’t bring in new blood it will die out. Trying to be more appealing to a younger and more general audience would line up with the lower price point and removing features like HDMI output. That statement (and the reveal video) seems to focus on arcade games. I’m guessing Easy Mode will mean enabling infinite credits/lives. They also wrote that there will be a limited edition of each with a translucent shell, which brings to mind a number of Game Boy models and the funtastic N64.
