If you’re a fan of handheld gaming, you may have noticed that you’ve had a lot more options lately. There’s the Switch, the Steam Deck, and a whole bunch of Chinese companies like Aya Neo, Anbernic, and — my personal favourite — Retroid. Apart from the Switch, however, nearly all of them are download-only, which means if you’re a fan of collecting physical games, you’re out of luck.
One exception to this has been Evercade, the British handheld that came out in 2020 and has since featured physical cartridges from publishers like Bandai Namco, Atari, and others. They recently announced the Evercade’s successor, the Evercade EXP — and today they made it the EXP even more intruguing with the announcement that the system will come bundled with a number of Capcom classics, including:
- 1942 (Arcade version)
- 1943 (Arcade version)
- 1944 : The Loop Master (Arcade version)
- Bionic Commando™ (Arcade version)
- Captain Commando™ (Arcade version)
- Commando™ (Arcade version)
- Final Fight™ (Arcade version)
- Forgotten Worlds™ (Arcade version)
- Ghouls ?n Ghosts™ (Arcade version)
- Legendary Wings™ (Arcade version)
- MERCS (Arcade version)
- Street Fighter II?: Hyper Fighting (Arcade version)
- Strider (Arcade version)
- Vulgus™ (Arcade version)
- Mega Man (8-bit)
- Mega Man 2 (8-bit)
- Mega Man X (16-bit)
- Breath of Fire (16-bit)
Ironically, the games will all be pre-loaded onto the system, which means no cartridge — but they also won’t be available for download, either, so even if it’s a slight departure from what the system has become known for, it’s still not about to branch out into download codes.
There’s a full trailer for the Capcom collection below, as well as the Evercade EXP’s reveal trailer from earlier this summer. Pre-orders foor the EXP open next week on September 6th (according to their site “from all Evercade retailers”, so check out your local independent game store), and it’ll be priced at ?129.99/$149.99/?149.99, with the system slated to come out November 24th 2022.
