When Blaze announced a third category of Evercade cartridges – following on from their red box, original console range and purple box, arcade line – I was very excited.

The possibilities are just wide open for the Evercade now, which is able to cover old and new console titles (seemingly right up to at least 32-bit consoles with ease), classic 80s and 90s arcade games and a wide spectrum (pun unintentional there) of old school computer games too.

I was even incredibly excited about getting hold of the first cartridge in the blue box, home computer cartridge library – which features 14 games from Commodore’s classic C64 computer.

Having never owned a Commodore 64, I’d never played most of the games on this cartridge, so I was really looking forward to getting stuck into them.

However, shorn of any nostalgia or prior memories of most of these titles, unfortunately they mostly just feel incredibly dated and unsatisfying to play.

Though many old console games have stood the test of time, Commodore 64 games – often produced by mostly bedroom coders, rushed out for budget labels – haven’t fared so well.

Of the 14 games on this cartridge, only a few really grabbed my attention – most of them just bored or annoyed me, or even became frustrating to just get into because of the need for a virtual keyboard (I’m sure Blaze could have done a bit more button mapping to make these games more accessible).

There’s also an issue affecting Impossible Mission, which stops it from randomly generating its stages when you start a new game; it’s another aspect which makes it feel like this was phoned in a bit by Blaze.

Several games feel slow and unresponsive, as well as just plain badly designed, though that isn’t a fault of Blaze – unless you count the curation of these games in the first place.

That said, there’s a very good mix of genres here – and 14 games on one cartridge for the Evercade feels like a definite treat, after the last several months of releases have seen the number of games on any given collection drop significantly.

I found platformer Jumpman to be pretty fun, along with the unusual ground/air shooter Battle Valley.

Not all of the other games are bad or unplayable, but there really isn’t anything else here that made me want to return after a few games.

Your mileage may vary, particularly if you actually know what you’re doing in the other games here, or if you owned a C64 and fondly remember playing any of these titles.

However, for me this cartridge was a rare misfire – it’s certainly not one I’d recommend to anyone but the most nostalgic of Commodore 64 fans.

You can buy THEC64 Collection 1 cartridge from Amazon here.

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