The Evercade is a really neat retroconsole

The Evercade is a retro console, which exists in two versions - a portable one, something like a Nintendo Switch, and a proper console, which can only be attached to a TV.

Unlike most other retro consoles though, the Evercade is based on physical media, which it calls cartridges. It's something larger than a Switch game, but also smaller than the cartridges of classical videogames.

In each cartridge there is anywhere between 2 and about 20 games, gathered in collections. The collections focus on themes - publishers like Namco and Interplay, or Atari 2600 and Atari Lynx games.

The Evercade is a DRM'ed console and all cartridges are official, fully legal releases. There are no known ways to unlock the consoles, so nobody has created a cartridge full of thousands of unofficial ROMs or anything o fthe sort.

As a value proposition it is all a bit weird - it is very easy to buy a device that plays thousands upon thousands of ROMs which costs less than the Evercade. There are also the Mini consoles, like the Mega Drive Mini or the Super Nintendo Mini, which come with a lot of games. And the Evercade literally connects to the Internet, why not downloadable games? Why physical media?

It is all a very odd setup - but it works very well. The games are relatively cheap (around $20), and the physicality of having cartridges and their covers has incredible retro cred.

Compared to the cheaper, shock-full-of-ROM devices, the Evercade may look like a foolish proposition, but I found it to be the very opposite: it is incredibly respectful to the games that each cartridge contains. They are curated. You may or may not like each game in a cartridge, but it presents it to you as something valuable and to be taken seriously.

The console version of the Evercade comes with a Technos Arcade cartridge, and in it there is a game called Minky Monkey. I never played it before. It is something like a single-screen Donkey Kong-ear arcade game. If I had bumped into this in a downloadable collection of 9000 ROMs, I wouldn't spend more than a second on it. In fact, I would be paralyzed and not spend more than one second on anything. The particular setup of the Evercade makes me actually play it, to actually consider it. It's a fun mini-game, very absurd and abstract in what it asks you to do.

And this is how every game works. Because it is a piece of a small, curated collection - and one that costs real, hard money and is physical - it just somehow manages to become more valuable, more worthy of your time. It serves to counter paralysis.

It is a mind hack, perhaps - but it's one that works.

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