Evercade’s new carts bring 4-player fun, retro roguelikes and more

We’re a big fan of the Evercade retro gaming systems from our friends at Blaze, and the two new upcoming cartridges for the platform promise a variety of highly enjoyable experiences, whatever you might be into. Cartridge 25, Morphcat Games Collection 1, brings us a selection of new games specifically designed for the NES, while cartridge 26, Intellivision Collection 2, brings us 12 retro classics from the 1980s.

Let’s take a look at what’s contained in both of these collections!

Evercade 25: Morphcat Games Collection 1

Star of the show in the Morphcat Games Collection 1 cartridge for Evercade is, without a doubt, Micro Mages. This is a noteworthy game for a number of reasons: firstly, it’s a great multiplayer game, which will fit well with the 4-player compatibility offered by the Evercade VS hardware; and secondly, it’s the game that put Morphcat Games on the map for many people.

About three years ago, Morphcat Games made a YouTube video called “how we fit an NES game into 40 kilobytes“, explaining the technical procedures behind squeezing a game as substantial as Micro Mages into a relatively tiny size. It’s well worth a watch — and indeed, many people have already, with the video comfortably sitting just shy of 3 million total views since its original publication. Not bad for what you might expect to be a fairly niche-interest, techie video!

Micro Mages is a straightforward platform game at heart. You and up to three friends must climb a series of towers, blasting enemies with magic along the way and collecting treasures. When playing solo, the game is an enjoyable challenge — but when playing with one or more other people, it becomes highly competitive as you race to steal all the treasure and attain the highest scores.

Alongside Micro Mages, the Morphcat Games Collection 1 cartridge also includes Micro Mages: Second Quest, a standalone expansion for the original game that features a challenging set of extra levels to take on once you’ve mastered the original game. Designed around the philosophy of the “second quest” found in NES classics like The Legend of Zelda and Super Mario Bros, Micro Mages: Second Quest is super-tough but rewarding, and will test all your skills on the original game to the maximum!

Elsewhere in the Morphcat Games Collection 1 Evercade cartridge, we have Böbl, which is a physics-based platformer with a bit of a twist: you play a rather fragile bubble, and as such you can’t land on any hard surfaces. Instead, you must hop from one body of water to another in order to keep safe.

As you progress through the world of Böbl, you’ll unlock a number of upgrades that make getting around a bit easier, and discover a series of rubber ducks that have been hidden around the environment. Your ultimate aim is to escape the maze in which you find yourself — with as many rubber ducks in tow as possible. And there are a variety of ways to enjoy the game, too, including a time trial ghost facility for perfecting speedruns, a no-death mode for those who just want to explore and a randomiser for those who want the ducks to be hidden in new places.

It’s a really fun game that, while not terribly difficult to beat, will keep you coming back for more thanks to its excellent presentation and satisfying gameplay.

Also in the Morphcat Games Collection 1 Evercade cartridge, we have Spacegulls, which is Morphcat’s most recent release at the time of writing. Best described as a blend of Capcom’s Mega Man and Williams’ Joust, the game sees you exploring a map, defeating enemies, rescuing baby birds and eventually defeating an evil villain.

The Joust angle comes in by the fact you’re controlling a bird, and as such you don’t jump — you flap your wings and fly! This really adds an interesting angle to this type of game, particularly when combined with the Joust-style combat — hit your enemies from above in order to deal damage.

It’s another short-form game — earlier this year, a player named Oopla speedran it in 8:16 — but one you’ll find yourself coming back to, particularly if you bring a second player along for the ride.

Finally, the Morphcat Games Collection 1 cartridge for Evercade also plays host to the Super Bat Puncher Demo, a short, unfinished game that has become a bit of a meme in the Morphcat Games community. It was one of the first things developed by programmer Julius Riecke, is genuinely really, really good — and is seemingly doomed to never be finished.

That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t check it out though; what is there is genuinely excellent. And who knows — perhaps if the Morphcat Games Collection 1 cart for Evercade sells well enough, it might convince Riecke to give it another look?

Evercade 26: Intellivision Collection 2

The Intellivision Collection 2 cartridge for Evercade might be a harder sell to some younger gamers thanks to the relatively primitive tech that the original Intellivision platform ran on, coupled with the unusual control schemes provided by its… distinctive controller. But this bundle of games has some absolute gems among it — many of which will still be of interest to a modern audience.

Star of the show this time around is Tower of Doom, an RPG with some strong roguelike tendencies. Choosing from a number of different character classes, your quest is to challenge one of seven quests, each of which has between six and 32 floors to explore, and many of which feature completely randomly generated maps. Along the way, you’ll need to gather treasure, beat monsters and outwit some fiendish traps.

Compared to some recent roguelikes, Tower of Doom might initially appear fairly simplistic, but that’s part of its beauty; once you understand the basic controls, it’s a very “pick up and play” sort of game, and its randomised aspects make it massively replayable.

A natural companion to Tower of Doom is Cloudy Mountain, which was originally released as a licensed Advanced Dungeons & Dragons game back in the ’80s, despite it having absolutely nothing in common with the mechanics of the famous tabletop roleplaying system. This title challenges you to negotiate a perilous overworld map, delve into dungeons to find items that will help you progress through various terrain, and ultimately find the Crown of Kings in the eponymous Cloudy Mountain.

Featuring real-time combat, stealth elements, randomly generated dungeons and a surprisingly advanced system of monster awareness, Cloudy Mountain might seem like a tough nut to crack initially, but worth spending some time with.

Next up is Hover Force, a top-down helicopter shoot ’em up that tasks you with flying around an open-world city, tracking down terrorist helicopters and putting out fires.

It’s an ambitious game that actually holds up surprisingly well — and will doubtless appeal to fans of classics like Desert Strike for its relatively “freeform” structure.

Then we have Star Strike, a shameless attempt to adapt Star Wars’ famous Trench Run sequence for the Intellivision hardware.

The game itself is pretty simple, challenging you to shoot down enemy ships and bomb exhaust ports, but it’s noteworthy from a historical perspective for being one of the best-selling Intellivision games of all time.

Next up is Vectron, an exceedingly weird game that involves shooting a target cursor in order to build bases and blast enemies.

It might initially seem completely indecipherable, but once you get your head around this one, its blend of shoot ’em up and puzzle-style action is enormously addictive.

Auto Racing is, as the name suggests, a racing game — a top-down one, in this case, where one or two players can challenge one another across a series of courses.

The two-player mode features an early implementation of what many would come to think of as “Micro Machines”-style scoring — push your opponent off the screen by getting far enough ahead and you get a point!

Stadium Mud Buggies is an isometric perspective racer from the latter years of the Intellivision, featuring some rollercoaster courses and ridiculous stunts.

This is a great game for one or two players, and the varied events make this a consistent hoot, even if its visuals might look rather primitive by modern standards!

Then we have Stadium Mud Buggies spiritual predecessor Motocross, which is another isometric racing game. While a little slow-paced by modern standards, this is still good fun for one or two players — particularly as a course editor allows you to create racetracks themed after, say, giant knobs or whatever. And, unlike on the original Intellivision, the Evercade’s save feature allows you to save these for later retrieval!

Motocross is also noteworthy for being one of the first games that made an attempt to simulate realistic physics. Supposedly the programmer enjoyed messing around with this side of things to such a degree that he frequently switched the game’s gravity off to freak out playtesters.

Next up is Mountain Madness Super Pro Skiing which, as the name suggests, is a skiing game in the tradition of many other similar titles from the era. You and up to five friends can compete (one at a time) to make it to the bottom of the mountain in the fastest time, either taking as direct a route as possible, or following gated courses.

Mountain Madness Super Pro Skiing features 32 built-in courses, a random course generator and a course designer. Lucky it’s good fun, too, then, as there’s plenty of longevity here.

Then we have Super Pro Decathlon which, like many other sports games from the period, involves abusing your D-pad and occasionally smashing a button to do something.

Games like this are inevitably simple but highly competitive — so bring up to three friends for the best experience.

The penultimate title in the Intellivision Collection 2 cartridge for Evercade is Sharp Shot, a game that was originally marketed as being for children, but which makes a pretty enjoyable casual game for one or two players today.

There are four minigames in Sharp Shot, and they’re all controlled with just one button. Your aim is simple: score the most points possible! Exactly how you do that depends on the game, but given the simple controls, this is a great game to introduce to those who don’t play a lot of video games.

And finally, rounding out the collection we have the Intellivision adaptation of the popular board game Reversi, also known as Othello or Renegade depending on who you talk to.

The Intellivision version allows you to compete against three difficulty levels of computerised opponent or a friend, allows you to preview moves before making them, and even features a “suggest move” feature to help out those who are learning the game.

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These two new Evercade collections look set to bring plenty more fun to an already immensely solid platform — and provide plenty of evidence that the Evercade ecosystem is thriving in a highly competitive market thanks to the fact it’s doing something completely different to everyone else out there.

The Morphcat Games Collection 1 and Intellivision Collection 2 cartridges are set for release later in 2022. You can find out more about Morphcat Games Collection 1 here, and Intellivision Collection 2 here. Pre-orders will open soon.

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