Here’s another pandora’s box that was opened innocently but has unleashed upon my world (well, my wallet’s world I should say) all kinds of calamity. Facebook is the culprit here, as I saw an innocent ad for a little device that allows you to play all kinds of retro games. It even came with 15000 games installed and it advertised having Pokémon as a few of that number. All for the low price of $35! Plus shipping and handling. Oh and eventually I also discovered import fees as well. But that $35 only amounted to $44 total so not a whole lot of out of pocket expense. That retro handheld was the R36H and for a first time device, I was enamored. I could put it in my pocket and pull it out whenever I felt the hankering for playing a game. It charged quickly, getting to full in 2 hours from one bar. Oh yeah this was amazing.
Two problems quickly arose, however. First it didn’t have any Pokémon games as advertised. And while I did find a ton of games to play, it was really Pokémon that caught my interest. So I fell down the rabbit hole of ROMs while trying to scratch that itch. I eventually found what I was looking for and a week after buying it, I had Pokémon Blue working on this thing. But that lead to the second problem: it looked… weird. Now I did go online to see if I could fix it, and I did try some suggestions, but ultimately, the screen ratio is not a perfect square and so I either had to stretch the screen to fit it all, or there would be black bars (grey in this case) on the sides. Both were distracting in their own way.
So the Facebook ai, always listening, just happened to put up an ad for the RG Cube XX on my feed. Perfect 4″ square, optimal for my Pokémon fix. I then gifted the R36H to my wife, who basically just plays Tetris and Dr. Wario and doesn’t care about the screen, and ordered the Cube. Another quick week and soon I had it in my hands.
Luckily I learned how to copy over my ROM folders and this had 2 slots so I was able to save all of the games onto one slot and then have the OS installed on a second SD card in the second slot. This comes in quite handy because one thing that I also found out over the course of the last few months is that the OS copy gets corrupted a ton. It’ll be working fine one minute then the next nothing. I’ve learned that if you plug it on and the charging light comes on, it’s the OS. I had my original Cube actually fail (plug in, no light) and returned it to pick up a replacement (which is also the same time I picked up the rubber case) since then, I’ve had the OS get corrupted 3 separate times. I’ve rebuilt the OS on the SD card and recovered every single time. So remember how I said all the games are on another card? Well that includes the save games. Thank my lucky stars because I probably would have lost it after the second fail. All this to say, these retro handhelds aren’t a perfect experience. Would I recommend this to someone who doesn’t have any skill or interest in troubleshooting electronic devices? No. No I would not.
Despite having over 15k games, I really only play three: Pokémon Blue, Tetris and Mike Tyson’s PunchOut. The fact that I have so many to choose from makes me drop into analysis paralysis. Scrolling through so many, I eventually give up looking. Eventually I’ll start working through more of them but this is it for now. Anyhow, if you read my previous post, you’ll remember how I complained about the “look” of the game on the R36H. Well, below is a pic of the game in native form. I set it to that just to show you another feature, and that’s the fineness of the screen. There are a few options including native where you can make it look blocky like the OG Gameboy. But I set it to HD along with full screen (the grey border goes away and the game perfectly fits the screen) so my old eyes can enjoy the game better.
I’ve had this device and I’ve enjoyed the last two months with it. There are so many different other versions of retro handhelds, some emulating old style hand helds (Gameboy shaped, GBA shaped, PS1 shaped oh my!) and others in some interesting form factors. But this is perfect for me and what I want to play at the moment. The only weakness is if I ever want to play a DS style game, I’d have to flip between screens. I imagine that it probably gets old after a while. So to get ahead of this, I ended up ordering an Ayn Thor which I’ll talk about when I get it. I don’t anticipate that replacing this for the older games and being much larger, won’t replace this as my carry around either. So barring any actual failure of this thing we’ll be together for a long long time. Do you play retro games? Have a handheld? If so which one(s) and why do you like them? #retro