The A500 Mini console review – all 25 Amiga games reviewed from Alien Breed to Speedball 2

metro.co.uk:

GameCentral reviews the new Amiga 500 mini-console and its games, including retro classics such as Kick Off 2 and Stunt Car Racer.

We’ve reviewed a lot of mini-consoles over the last few years. From the original Classic Mini NES and SNES to the subsequent Mega Drive and PlayStation analogues, plus more obscure releases like the PC Engine and arcade equivalents such as the Capcom Home Arcade and Taito Egret II. These are all Japanese and American systems though, intended primarily for their home audiences. The truth is that for many British gamers in the 80s and early 90s, video games were played on home computers, not consoles.

There’ve already been multiple Sinclair Spectrum and Commodore 64 mini-consoles but until now nobody has attempted to make one for 16-bit successor the Amiga 500 (or its rival at the time, the Atari ST). Although Commodore was an American company, by the time the Amiga 500 was released in 1987 Europe had already become their primary market, with most of the format’s games created locally – dominated by a variety of British publishers and developers, none of which still exist as independent companies.

TheA500 Mini, as it’s officially known, is by Retro Games, who made the previous two versions of TheC64. It works in a similar way to the first of those two devices, in that it’s a shrunken down version of the Amiga 500 computer that you can plug a real keyboard into if you want. It does come with a mouse though, as well as a joypad – but not a joystick. Although you can use the Competition Pro looking one from TheC64 Maxi if you have that.

At this point the mini-console concept is so well understood that there’s relatively little we can say about the hardware itself, except to confirm that the software