The Super Pocket Rare Edition is arriving on doorsteps

The Hyper Mega Tech Super Pocket Rare Edition has officially started arriving on doorsteps this week. The $70 handheld brings 14 built-in classic titles to a pocket-sized form factor. Rare shared photos of the final hardware this week and noted that the device includes an optimized version of Banjo-Kazooie alongside full support for the Evercade cartridge ecosystem.

Blaze Entertainment originally opened pre-orders for the device months ago. The physical hardware has a distinct color scheme: a red body with bright yellow face buttons and a blue rear panel. It uses the same vertical Game Boy-style shell as previous Super Pockets. It includes four rear shoulder buttons and a 2.8-inch IPS display. The main draw of the Super Pocket line is its Evercade compatibility. You get the built-in games, but the cartridge slot on the back accepts any of the 60-plus physical releases Blaze has published over the last few years. This means you can swap out the Rare titles for collections from publishers like Data East, Jaleco, or indie developers making new games for retro hardware.

14 games on a budget handheld

The built-in library spans Rare's entire history. The list stretches from their early days as Ultimate Play the Game up through the late 1990s. Banjo-Kazooie is the obvious headliner, but the rest of the lineup is a solid cross-section of the developer's output. You get the notoriously punishing 8-bit beat-'em-up Battletoads and its 16-bit sequel Battletoads in Battlemaniacs. Racing fans get R.C. Pro-Am II and Cobra Triangle. Early UK microcomputer history is represented by ZX Spectrum classics like Jetpac, Lunar Jetman, Atic Atac, and Knight Lore. These isometric and single-screen arcade titles laid the groundwork for the studio's later success.

Blaze even threw in Conker's Pocket Tales, the 8-bit handheld game that released before the squirrel was rebooted into a foul-mouthed heavy drinker. Seeing Rare's catalog on a third-party device is unusual. Since Microsoft acquired the British studio in 2002, their older games have largely been restricted to Xbox compilations like Rare Replay or Nintendo's Switch Online service. Getting a 64-bit platformer running on a budget emulation handheld required Blaze to heavily optimize the game for the Super Pocket's low-power chipset.

The analogue stick problem

The unfortunate part is that the Super Pocket has no analogue stick for Banjo-Kazooie. The original game was fundamentally designed around the Nintendo 64's analog thumbstick. It requires precise 3D movement to navigate narrow ledges and collect jiggies. Trying to map that fluid 3D movement onto a digital D-pad is a compromised experience. You can play it, but you are constantly fighting the hardware to make minor directional adjustments.

Soon after this pre-order went live, Blaze announced the Evercade Nexus, a larger premium handheld with full analogue sticks. That left a bad taste in my mouth. Customers who locked in their $70 pre-orders for the Super Pocket in February under the promise of portable Banjo-Kazooie were suddenly shown a $200 device a month later that was actually equipped to play the game properly. The Nexus even launched alongside a standalone Banjo-Kazooie Double Pack cartridge. That separate cartridge release meant buyers didn't even need the Super Pocket to get the game on Evercade hardware.

If you just want to play Snake Rattle 'n' Roll or Solar Jetman on a bus, the Super Pocket handles those digital-first games perfectly. The 8-bit and 16-bit titles feel right at home on the D-pad and the bright IPS screen. Treating a 3D platformer as the main selling point for a device that lacks the hardware to control it makes the Rare Edition feel a bit disjointed compared to the Capcom and Taito models that came before it.