I was in my local Staples, looking for office supplies for totally business reasons, when I decided to check out the Clearance section. They had the usual stuff: day planners for last year, expired coffee, a notepad that fell underneath a cart and got the cover crinkled up, and so on. But they also had a portable video game player in among the Martha Stewart report covers and the fancy-pants ballpoint pens.
I have no idea why this would have been on clearance, because when I think of 'video games' I think 'office supply store'. And, look! It's got real legitimate games from Data East! Bad Dudes! Joe & Mac! Burgertime! And 300 more! I didn't even know Data East made 300 games (spoiler alert, they didn't).
So, obviously, I picked it up.
When I got it home and opened the box, the first thing I noticed was how light this thing is. My scale says that it weighs 3.7 ounces, but it's also pretty big, about the size of my 5'' cell phone.
You also might notice that this is similar in layout to the classic NES controller layout: cross pad, A and B buttons, Start and Reset (no, there's no 'Select' button). There's also A/V out if you want to use a cable (not included) to plug it into your TV (not included). There's also a port for headphones (not included), volume control, a power switch, and backlight for the buttons. Eagle-eyed viewers might also notice that the placement of the A and B buttons is reversed from what you would normally find on an original NES, so, if you've ever played any of these games before, screw you, muscle memory!
The thing is powered either by 4 AAA batteries (not included) or a micro USB cable (not included). None of my remote controls have died in the last five years so I haven't bought any AAA batteries in a long time. I did, however, have a micro-USB cable and a power brick to power this thing on, and, well, it's certainly something.
The thing starts up pretty much instantly, and you're greeted with one of those menu screens like you would see on a bootleg multicart boasting that this is a 308-in-1. The first eight games being the Data East games featured on the cover of the box (including some others like Heavy Barrel and Championship Karate). These are the NES versions of these arcade games, which, actually, look and sound reasonably good. There are some oddities (like your guy doesn't scream a garbled "I'm Bad!" at the end of a level in Bad Dudes, for example), but the games are more or less presented like I remember them on Real Actual Hardware. The only real complaint I had was that the A and B buttons are reversed and that the D-pad sometimes seemed to forget that I was pressing it.
But what about the other 300 games promised on the front of the box? When you open the flap on the front, the Fine Print(tm) tells you that the other 300 games are 'retro inspired', which apparently means that the games are all of the quality that you might find in the back of one of the programming magazines of the 1980's, and the names don't really help you figure out what they are, either.
Most of them are 'games' in the sense that they have you doing the same thing over and over and over again forever. Others aren't more than a demo of a game that would probably be pretty awesome if it was ever finished. Still others are old board and card games (like Crazy Eights or Dots or Checkers). Some of them are actually clones of other games in the collection, but they have different graphics.
One of the things I noticed was that a lot of the games present you with a thing to do or a guy walking around or whatever, and you need to press the A or B buttons to make something happen on the right or the left of the screen, respectively. This made sense on the NES because the A button was on the right, and the B button was on the left. But on this thing, the buttons are reversed, so pressing the left button makes the action happen on the right and vice versa. It's nothing that can't be worked around, but if these games moved much faster, that might be a problem.
Some of the games are obviously higher quality than you would ever find on an '8-Bit' console, which says to me that the phrase '8-Bit' has lost its meaning to a lot of manufacturers. '8-Bit' has kind of become a catch-all for 'chunky pixel art' or 'video games older than 10 years', which is a little bit annoying. '8-Bit' is turning into the latest 'Kleenex', 'Xerox', 'Tylenol', or 'hand-made small-batch' (don't look at the URL in the address bar of your browser).
But, minor gripes aside, this was a neat little toy for $9. A lot of the games on it are complete garbage, but some are halfway decent, and there are eight actual good games, somehow.
However. The actual retail price of this thing is $34.95(!) That's way too much for a bootleg multicart in a chunky shell, and I'd feel ripped off if I actually spent that much on this thing. But at $9, I'll probably play with it for a while, and then I may turn into a birthday present for someone's kid sometime down the road this year.