Retro Gaming Australia

I was just fishing around the GameGadget site, since I had remebered it was meant to be out on Friday, but hadn’t heard anything about it. Turns out it has been delayed until April 6. For the last week running up the release of the system, there’s a £20 discount and 30 free games if you use the code “gamegadget20” (sans the inverted commas) at the checkout.

Little had been said about what games would be available for the system, but they’ve announced at least those 30 that they’ll have on day one, which are Alex Kidd in the Enchanted Castle, Alien Storm, Altered Beast, Bio-hazard Battle, Bonanza Bros., Columns III, Columns, Comix Zone, Crack Down, Decap Attack, Ecco the Dolphin, Ecco II: Tides of Time, Ecco Jr., ESWAT: City Under Siege, Eternal Champions, Fatal Labyrinth, Flicky, Gain Ground, Galaxy Force II, Golden Axe, Golden Axe II, Kid Chameleon, Ristar, Shinobi III: Return of the Ninja Master, Space Harrier II, Super Thunder Blade, Sword of Vermillion, Vectorman, Virtua Fighter 2, Shadow Dancer: The Secret of Shinobi, Sonic Spinball, Sonic 3D Blast and Dr. Robotnik’s Mean Bean Machine.

What do these titles all have in common? They’re all Sega published Mega Drive games.

And the price? £4.99 a pop. Think of that what you will.

Blaze’s GameGadget, an open-source retro gaming handheld with a download service often compared to iTunes, will be on sale on March 30 for £99.99.

You can pre-order it from the Blaze website now.

Very little has been said about what games the GameGadget is going to run (the website claims “100,000s”), or how much those games are going to cost. Guess we’ll find out on March 30.

GameGadget is a UK-developed, open-source handheld that plays “a variety” of classic games which are downloadable from an online store. Details of those games are currently scarce, but what we can tell you is that the GameGadget handheld will be going on sale in the UK in March through distributor Blaze Europe.

For £99.99, you get a handheld with a 3.5″ LCD screen (320×240), four face buttons, two shoulder buttons and a D-pad. Under the hood, the machine is packing a 433mHz dual core CPU, 64MB of RAM and 2GB of flash memory, with expandable storage through SD cards.

An interesting little device, if a little pricey. One would think that the price of the software and the quality of the emulation will make or break the system.