Weekend Gamer: Mini Arcades

Evercade
evercade.co.uk

I really want to get into the Evercade ecosystem, but the Evercade Alpha Street Fighter Bartop Arcade is out of stock, and I really don’t want to pay double the price on the secondary market. The reason why it has to specifically be the Street Fighter bartop, is because you cannot get Capcom’s Street Fighter games on an Evercade cartridge. Let me repeat: the only way to legally play Street Fighter on an Evercade on a bartop is through this Capcom Evercade edition.

It just means I’ll probably never get into the Evercade system. If you didn’t know, unlike Arcade1Up, you can upgrade your existing Evercade bartop by inserting various physical licensed cartridges. What a cool idea, and I wish Arcade1Up would implement a similar solution.

You know what sucks is that I previously had a lot of interests in the Street Fighter Evercade in January 2025, but I was in transition of moving to a different state and had always meant to buy it when I fully settled in Jacksonville. The Alpha proved to be too popular and it quickly sold out. I’ll just have to be a little patience and see if they’ll restock, or perhaps, introduce a new Street Fighter option (a bigger arcade? Yes, please!)

Blaze, the creator of Evercade, currently makes three hardware: the Alpha (bartop arcade), the VS-R (a console for the TV), and EXP-R (a handheld that will play various Evercade cartridges). What is really neat about the EXP-R is that you can play in Tate Mode, if the game supports it. Tate is the Japanese word for vertical… games like Galaga and Pac-Man uses Tate Mode.

P.S. The Evercade Alpha Taito (aka Bubble Bobble) is coming out November 26, 2025, for $280.

Gamestation Retro Mega
myarcade.com

MyArcade unveiled this GameStation Retro Mega product at CES in January 2025, but have yet to make it to market. As of this writing, I believe only the Atari GameStation Go is available.

Based on the side artwork of the Retro Mega, games will include Street Fighter II, Final Fight, MegaMan, and other Bandai Namco (Pac-Man) and Capcom games. The spinner also makes me think we could be adding or it comes with Tempest… maybe even Gyrus? I think it’s cool, not a lot of games uses the spinner. I think the only thing missing is a trackball (for Centipede).

Gamestation Retro Mega:

Legends Pinball Micro
atgames.us

As part of AtGame’s pre-Black Friday sale, they are discounting the Legends Pinball Micro to $325 (normally $600). That’s a great price, but I wonder if I waited a little longer, like Black Friday day, that I can get a deal on their 4k Pinball, which is a full-sized digital pinball. I’m really keen on that Star Trek one, but I don’t want to pay $1,699.99 for it. I’ve always wanted a digital pinball, and this might be the best deal I am going to get – so I bought it. I was hoping to get it for my birthday, but unfortunately AtGame will take at least 10 days to ship anything out. I will report back once I have the Pinball in hand!

Legends Pinball Micro

Yours,