Aside from everything being officially licensed, which is obviously always my number one concern when playing old video games, I’d like to begin here with a top five rather than a top ten, and that would be my top five best things about the various Evercade consoles I now own… At number five, it’s being able to play old favourites on a big new TV with the Evercade VS. Number four is being able to play old favourites on the go with the handheld Evercade EXP. Number three is the sheer wonder of 15-year old me being able to play actual arcade Operation Wolf in my hands on the Super Pocket! At number two is the curation, meaning I’m likely to actually play the games on the thirty-plus cartridges I now own because someone else has already done a (mostly) fine job of choosing them for me. And in top spot, number one reason for being an Evercade fanboy (several failed cartridges and (likely related) incessant firmware tinkering aside!) is also my number one thrill from retro gaming as a whole – the discovery!

That discovery is what I want to celebrate today, although this particular top ten did actually start out as a plain old top ten favourite games on Evercade! I might still do that sometime too, but as I was listing out obvious stuff like Winter Games, Speedball 2 and P-47 in preparation, they just weren’t capturing the real joy I look for every time I open a new Evercade cartridge, which comes with finding something new that might also become an all-time favourite as a result! What I’ll do then is a reverse order top ten countdown, with a paragraph on each game, and I’m going to stick to games I’d never played before they turned up on an Evercade cartridge, which I’ll also reference so you know where each one has come from. Then we can round off with some honourable mentions I’ve also come up with that just missed out. One last thing before we dive in, and that’s a note to say I’ve tried to get images of the games covered on the Evercade systems they’re running on wherever possible but apologies in advance for any dodgy, wonky or otherwise low quality photos – nightmare to get decent action shots when your setup involves an iPhone in one hand and a controller in the other! And with that, we’re good to go!

10. Block Out (Arcade)

Not for the last time here, it turns out I may have been doing Block Out, by California Dreams in 1989, a disservice ever since! You see, I’d always dismissed this (and several other similar games) as a totally unnecessary 3D spin on the gaming perfection that is Tetris, straight from a time when everything apparently needed one, but while it still is that, its inclusion on the Technos Arcade 1 collection gave me a new-found appreciation too! You’re looking down a square-shaped pit with a 3D grid for walls, into which are dropping a series of Tetris-inspired polycubes that you need to rotate and flip and manipulate in three axes until they hit the bottom, using said grid as a guide for what starts out as a wireframe shape but will become a solid colour when it lands, merging with any other shapes surrounding it at the same height. The resulting multicoloured, vertical playfield becomes more significant as you progress to higher levels, demanding a second layer of strategy for block placement on top of the regular Tetris one. Add to this its demands on your spatial awareness and suddenly you’ve got way more than a mere clone – a literal whole new dimension, in fact , and something I’ve really grown to enjoy! There’s a bit of quirky sci-fi to add interest to the basic but very polished presentation but this one’s all about the gameplay, just like it’s flatter predecessor, and while few things will ever reach those heights, it gives it a good go!

9. Thunder Castle (Intellivision)

I’m not sure there really needs to be two Intellivision collections for Evercade, based on the games they’ve included in each, but that’s not to say there aren’t a bunch of all-time classics spread across them too, such as Cloudy Mountain, Tower of Doom, Night Stalker, Shark! Shark! and, of course, Thunder Castle! It’s originally from 1986, and is a game I really want to come back to and cover in more depth here sometime, but for now, it’s a fantasy maze game with a brave knight, powered-up by a load of magical objects he needs to keep an eye out for while he’s battling his way through the constantly moving and changing layouts of the enchanted forest, wizard’s castle and demon’s dungeon he finds himself in… Together with the not insignificant matter of slaying an increasing number of the level’s evil guardians, starting with three fire-breathing dragons, then six sorcerers, and finally nine demons. Those magical objects, together with magical creatures flying about, are key to equipping yourself to do so, creating a very compelling and strategic game of cat and mouse, where that maze-changing mechanic really ramps up the tension! I reckon we’ve got the best graphics on the system right here too, full of detail and drama, plus some great music that all combines to a really atmospheric good time!

8. The Sword of Ianna (MSX)

This wasn’t just the first MSX game on Evercade but also my own first time playing with it too, and it’s quite the showcase for the machine – far more so than my rubbish photo of it was, so credit to Blaze Entertainment for this promo shot! It’s a recent port of the ZX Spectrum homebrew fantasy platform adventure from 2017, and appeared on Evercade on Home Computer Heroes Collection 1. I mostly played handheld and it mostly plays great that way too, except when there’s story text, which only comes between the very lengthy, metroidvania-type levels, so not very often, but all the same, the font they’ve used is horrendous and simply impossible to read on that small screen! To compensate, I was then bizarrely saving and switching to Evercade VS, connected to the big TV, as and when needed (where it also plays great)! Aside from that, the game itself is superb, with wonderfully animated characters in colourful and very atmospheric sword and sorcery environments that house some fun, thoughtful and almost Dizzy-like back and forth puzzling, but with more sword fights against walking skeletons! The controls are initially a bit daunting but they soon click and then you wouldn’t change them for anything, and there’s a slick weapon and inventory system too, all mapped to single face buttons. And the music is excellent, rounding off what’s an essential, modern retro classic!

7. Sensible Soccer (Sega Mega Drive / Genesis)

I know, I know, but I was a Kick Off guy, okay! And having spent more hours playing that game than any other game ever to be specific, Sensible Soccer never really registered with me at the time, and it was only getting the Codemasters Collection 1 that led to my first proper taste of it, as I dabbled my way through all the games on there, and without any great expectation for much play beyond doing so. As I soon discovered though, you don’t dabble with something as good as this for long, and I’ve absolutely rinsed the thing since, mainly playing as “Highbury” through a 20-team European league I built, then similarly scaled cup competitions, then repeat! It will never sit in my top three games of all time like Kick-Off does, but I can definitely see the attraction now! Easy to pick up, with simple, arcade-like controls covering everything but there’s real depth, character and even a bit of humour on top of all the various modes too, with their unofficial but perfectly recognisable team selections. The zoomed-in, zoomed-out top-down presentation was so simple at the time that it hasn’t aged in the slightest either. It really is a masterpiece, and while it might play most authentically elsewhere, and there might be better games in the series that followed it, this one from 1992 is exactly why I love these collections!

6. Street Sports Baseball (Commodore 64)

I’m a huge (borderline obsessive) baseball fan but also only a recent convert, which was genuinely entirely down to covering Namco Gallery Vol. 2 on Game Boy here a while back! Since then, I’ve explored over forty years worth of pretty much every baseball game of note on every system but while I’ve developed a few far more sophisticated and realistic favourites (including on Evercade), Street Sports Baseball for the Commodore 64, on The C64 Collection 1, is one I keep coming back to. This is from 1987, and was part of the Street Sports series by Epyx, where you took the regular game out of the stadium and onto the streets, with gangs of teenagers using dustbin lids for home plates, jumpers for goal posts and so on. It’s very C64 in its presentation but full of character and atmosphere, with plenty of depth to the classic kids taking turns team selection from a choice of local oiks (or just take your chances with a random selection) and just the right amount of automation to support the one-button plus directional controls. It does take a bit of getting used to all the same, but once it clicks it’s a great time for one player and I’m sure really comes alive with two, especially when you’re trying to beat each other to the best players! Thank goodness for the Evercade’s save states though – one game can go on for ages!

5. Saint Dragon (Arcade)

If humanity is being attacked by a seemingly invincible cyborg army, then it needs to build a big cyborg dragon to fight back with! Saint Dragon belongs to the Jaleco Collection 1, originally coming from them in 1989, and the gameplay is mostly as straightforward as the plot – shoot stuff and collect tokens to upgrade your weapons through five levels and their big bosses. There is a literal sting in the tail though because you can control the placement of your own tail through the movement of your ship, and with a bit of practice you’ll not only be using it as a shield, but also to dish out a bit of damage too. On top of that, there’s tokens to grab that let you beef up your offence with pulse torpedoes, lasers, bombs and turrets, as well as upgrade your speed and firepower. Cool hyper mode too! A beautiful game that’s another I knew about at the time but chose to ignore, with great variety in settings and enemies from the outset, including a lovely new gaming sunset for me to swoon over and a vivid cosmic forest. All of that is full of subtle animated life and fantastic parallax scrolling too, and it’s backed by a superb, vaguely gothic, vaguely industrial eighties synth rock soundtrack that’s about the best we’ll see here! And even without that unique tail mechanic, it’s a hell of a shoot ‘em up, but once you master that on top then it’s out of this world. I’m almost as blown away every time I play it now as I am by having passed it by for more than three decades! Oh yeah, quick mention of the actual instruction manual you get with every cartridge, as pictured above, albeit because my own action shots were once again particularly dreadful for this one!

4. Glass (Arcade)

If this was a countdown of favourite Evercade cartridges, then Gaelco Arcade 1 would probably top the list! Now there’s an idea… Not that the inclusion of 1993’s Glass on there in such a censored state doesn’t bother me but had it not been I’d never have found the original and it plays the same regardless so who cares! Well, I still do but at least they kept the most bizarre, breathlessly “sexy” speech you’ll ever hear in a game, introducing each world you’re about to try and rid of invading aliens and restore to its former glory! And to do that, you’ll be travelling to each one and carefully flying your spaceship over single-screen levels covered in tiles, which will uncover them and reveal the exotic landscape beneath, before then revealing a bit of the “reward” you’ll get once you’ve beaten each world’s three levels and the very unique boss fights that follow. This is where the censorship then comes in – remember the Big D peanut cardboard displays you’d get behind the bar in pubs, where each bag bought revealed a bit more of the scantily-clad model beneath? It’s exactly that! Except now you get a sketch of a cat instead. Spoilsports! What’s left is superb though, with so much attention to detail behind superficially simple (but pretty) presentation, with this incredibly varied lineup of brilliantly animated aliens out to stop you, bonkers bosses (including a sloshing, giant chalice full of blood), and those very odd, bikini space-women, with all their unforgettably husky (to the point of suffocation) sampled speech! The gameplay is so addictive too, playing like a very methodical, multidirectional shooter built on such a simple concept that gets fiendish fast! And in whether censored or not, that’s what it’s really all about!

3. Twin Hawk (Arcade)

There are two shoot ‘em up focussed Toaplan collections for Evercade, with a third on the way as I write, and this is on the second, published by Taito in 1989, and dumping us in an alternate World War II timeline, although specifics seem to be dependent on which version you’re playing as well as where you’re playing it! Can safely say it will be a load of nonsense regardless, and, if you’ve ever played stuff like Flying Shark, Twin Cobra or other Toaplan stuff from around then, it’s going to start out familiar too – fighter plane flying over a surprisingly tropical landscape, considering it’s supposed to be set in Europe, with lots of other planes, gun emplacements and increasingly large tanks to shoot before they shoot you, with the latter the more likely scenario until you learn where they’re coming from! All the usual power-ups too, but the bomb button is where it starts to do it’s own thing, with it calling in six support planes to fight alongside you until they’re shot down, at which point they’ll go kamikaze on the nearest enemy! Disturbingly, you can also command the whole lot to do exactly that before they get a shot away, or you can replace them with a regular bomb instead before they get into formation. It’s set over four seamless levels separated only by bosses and a change in background music, which starts out like nothing you’ve heard in one of these games before – like an even more mellow take on the Out Run high score table! Soon becomes a bit livelier though, as your plane and its helpers take off across a stunning, almost volcanic (but definitely tropical!) landscape, full of burnt reds and oranges that give way to seas and beaches and militarised zones. Best of Toaplan in all respects, I reckon!

2. Snowboard Championship (Arcade)

We’re back with the fantastic Gaelco Arcade 1 collection for this one, which first hit the arcades in 1997, and I’m not sure ever appeared anywhere else until this cartridge came along. It’s fast, super-smooth, isometrically-scrolling (and pretty much on-rails) racing, where you’re mostly just reacting to turns and obstacles with a left or a right and occasionally pumping a button for a bit of speed. If you know Gaelco’s World Rally (also on this collection), or stuff like 1000 Miglia, it’s like that but colder, against the clock to progress to the next stage. And it’s so much fun! Not quite SSX 3 levels of tactility and friction but you can really feel the edges of the board on the snow, and the more you feel them the more likely you are to beat the increasingly vicious timer! Really bold and very detailed cartoon style with some impressive snowy textures and strong contrasting colours on all the ramps and vegetation and spectators, as well as your choice of rider, who is so well animated, especially when they pull out the tricks, which will add a couple of seconds to the timer for successfully hitting a ramp or loop-the-loop or something. Lots more animation and personality in the crowds than you generally see in this kind of thing too. The music is functional synth-rock but there’s plenty of it and loads of sampled speech and effects on top. You’ve got a choice of difficulties, with both regular races and giant slaloms offering more than enough variety, but while there’s probably not a great deal to it overall, what’s there is an absolute delight!

1. Duke Nukem Remastered (Evercade)

It took a bit of self-convincing to get the two Duke Nukem collections for Evercade but I can honestly say I’ve not had as much fun with any game for a long time as I did with Duke Nukem Remastered on the first of them! This is a complete rebuild of the MS-DOS action-platformer from 1991, with the most welcome enhancement without doubt the super smooth scrolling versus the 8×8 block scrolling of the original, which a press of Select will revert back to in real-time if you need a reminder of quite how jarring it is! It all fills the screen now too, and Duke has had a pixel-art facelift, as well as a lot more animation, while a new soundtrack plays in the background, and there’s save states and loads of stats encouraging speed runs, although all of the modernisation is customisable so you can play however you want. And however you play, it’s a joy, as you try to foil the dastardly Dr. Proton across three episodes of ten levels each, beginning in a post-apocalyptic Los Angeles, then a secret moonbase, and finally onwards through time into the future. This mostly involves exploring the danger-filled, enemy-filled, maze-like (but relatively straightforward) stages to find keys to unlock doors, eventually leading to the exit to the next, although there’s loads of secrets to discover on top, similar to its better known 3D successors. I’m totally smitten with this and its slick, 16-bit styled gameplay – it’s genuinely on its way to becoming an all-time favourite, and the sequel on the same cartridge isn’t bad either! Credit once again to Blaze Entertainment for the screenshot – I just couldn’t do it justice with my iPhone!

That’s my lot but I’m not sure I’ve ever been so indecisive about what to include in a top ten before, or what order they should be in, so it would be unfair of me not to mention a handful that didn’t quite make it because on any other given day they might have! I’m going to limit myself to five though, so in no particular order… Super Skweek (pictured here) on Atari Lynx Collection 1,which is an adorable painting the tiles pink action-puzzler; Squash is on Gaelco Arcade 2 and is the racquet sport of the same name but way more fun; Fighter’s History is the marvellous SNES port of the cult classic arcade fighting game (which I’m very fond of) and comes on Data East Collection 1; Big Karnak is another one from Gaelco Arcade 2 and is a really atmospheric Ancient Egyptian platformer; and finally, Arcade Pool is exactly that for the Amiga, and it’s very polished, and is included on Team17 Collection 1. I could go on and on with these because I really have discovered so much on all these Evercade cartridges I’ve amassed but I’ll engage some self-control and maybe think about doing an update when we’re a few more new releases down the line!

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