Evercade Alpha review: A beautiful bartop arcade that brings hot-swap to coin-op, with caveats
The world of bartop arcade machines can be a pretty expensive one if you want more than a couple of games to choose from.
Most of the popular products available these days offer either a single game or a small collection of games from the same series, in the hope that players will buy a bunch of different ones to create their own mini arcade.
Of course, not everybody has the disposable income or the space in their house to buy multiple arcade cabinets, even if they are much smaller than the originals, meaning the hobby is an extremely niche one.
Blaze Entertainment, maker of the Evercade line of retro gaming systems, may have come up with the solution, and by and large we love the result, even though it’s not entirely without its own issues.
Evercade Alpha is a bartop arcade cabinet which not only offers a selection of games like some of its competitors, but also features support for Evercade’s growing line of retro multi-game cartridges (of which there are currently more than 60, offering more than 550 games in total).
In this way, players theoretically only need to buy one Evercade Alpha, safe in the knowledge that they can continue to add new games to it as new cartridges are released. That’s the theory, at least.
The Alpha itself is an impressive piece of kit. Standing at just under a foot and a half tall, it’s made of sturdy materials and has a great glossy finish (though good luck peeling the protective film off yours when you first get it – we had to get the screwdriver out and loosen the cabinet to get the bits of film that had been lodged in the folds).
We were sent the Deluxe Edition to review, which upgrades the standard edition’s controls with a Sanwa arcade stick and buttons. We therefore can’t comment on the quality of the standard edition, but the Deluxe sticks and buttons feel superb to use (and the cabinet can be opened up fairly easily to install your own controls should you so desire).
The 8” IPS screen is also nice and bright, with a sharp image. Given
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