Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past god knows how many years you’ll already know that Sega sold the rights to a lot of its hardware to other manufacturers when it gave up on the games console market. This means that 3rd party companies are now able to manufacture the Mega Drive (Genesis for you yanks) with the original Sega specification (i.e. not an emulation machine and not a reverse engineering attempt either).
Well one company named Blaze (www.blazeeurope.com) have been churning out handheld Mega Drives for a few years now and whilst I’ve always been tempted, the major drawback for me was that you are limited to the games that Blaze decide to preload onto the machine. In other words, you made do with the selection of games it came with and that’s it. Bummer.
Thankfully though, they’ve come to their senses and released a new model for 2011 with full SD card support for your own ROMs.
The machine still comes with 20 games preloaded:
1. Alex Kidd
2. Alien Storm
3. Altered Beast
4. Arrow Flash
5. Crack Down
6. Columns III
7. Decap Attack
8. Ecco
9. Ecco Jr
10. Eswat
11. Mean Bean Machine
12. Flicky
13. Gain Ground
14. Golden Axe
15. Jewel Master
16. Kid Chameleon
17. Shadow Dancer
18. Sonic & Knuckles
19. Sonic Spinball
20. Shinobi
But you are no longer limited to these, which is just great. It also comes with a composite cable for plugging it into your TV and a new rechargeable battery (charges via USB or USB wall charger). Unfortunately, I don’t think it supports a second pad for multiplayer games, but you can’t have it all eh?
Check it out on amazon for the princely sum of £30.
//Edit. Unfortunately it doesn’t look as though the device supports any kind of game saves, whether it be the proper saves on games that support it like Shining Force, or even DIY style save states. That is a major turn off in my books… how hard would it be to implement? Not that hard I wouldn’t have thought.
It’s funny or ironic that these megadrive handhelds with limited games became so popular here and I can found in regular stores, and I have friends of mine who weren’t into homebrew handhelds yet I was ranting about the homebrew consoles I got but didn’t listen. At least two friends of mine bought the mega drive thing for 50 euros here and found it cool, but with 10euros or little more you could get a dingoo a320 (or even a380 with the wireless controllers) and just have everything and with tv-out like a regular console. Even the sound of this megadrive console seemed wrong to me 😛
Ah, that’s too bad. I was hoping that some of those Megadrive handhelds would have a savegame feature, but it looks like I’ll have to wait for a proper Dingoo successor (can’t wait for the first A-380 reviews) or something similar.