Speedball (Reboot)

They are going to ruin it aren't they

Too slow.

The screenshots are not promising.

Speed looked pretty fine to me, they say they're doing 12 months of EA which seems quite a lot and I imagine it'll be all platforms when it does.

The lack of ice cream was disappointing though.

I was actually thinking last week that I'd like to play something simple and couch-coop along the lines of Speedball 2 or Sensible Soccer... to the point where I was looking for modern clones on the e-shop, and then wondering about emulating the originals.

So I'd actually be really up for a modern version of Speedball. (ideally on Switch not Steam though).

That said, they've tried to remake Speedball or Sensi a dozen times, and never quite managed it.
But maybe it doesn't need to be great, it just needs to be simple and fun.

And cheap, because I don't see it being the kind of game I'd spend a lot on. F2P might work, except then it'd be dependent on having enough players to keep it going.

I could see that happening if it was only me.

But having a quick pick-up-and-play couch-coop game to play with the family would probably give it a longer shelf-life for me now.

Ahem, there's always the Evercade option:

evercade.co.uk/cartridges/bitmap-brothers-collection-1/

One of my most played systems of the past few years and they've just refreshed the whole console range - the VS-R (under the telly box with multi controller support) is £90, the EXP-R (handheld which can also be used as a wired controller for the VS-R) is £100, and the Super Pocket range (Diddy handhelds that each feature a collection of built-in games but also have an Evercade cart slot) are £49!

New carts are (usually) sub-£20 and they generally trickle out at two releases every three months. Downside is that many of the older carts have now been discontinued, but there's a potential way around this (*cough* eversd.com/ ).

Yes, this sounds like an ad, but if you want no-fuss classic gaming for platforms that generally get completely overlooked, then this is your system. Plus, I'll take any opportunity to bore people to death about it

Yeah, it's definitely a niche product and many of the cartridge releases are pretty average overall, but my EXP probably gets played as much as my Switch as I'm a sucker for the older games of my youth. The carts also come with actual booklets (don't get too excited though, they're only a few pages thick) that briefly describe the history of each game and give you a run down of the controls - can't say that about any other modern releases these days

I've got to hand it to Blaze for taking an idea that should have fallen flat on its arse and made a moderate success out of it. They know who their audience is and they've managed to secure a very specific corner of the market.

I've got the Bitmap Bros collection for my Super Pocket. It's great. It's not ideal for the three Speedball games if I'm honest but to be fair the games weren't exactly easy to control anyway. But yes. it's well worth picking a SP up and the Bitmap bros collection. In fact, there's a second Bitmap Bros collection out now with the other games (Magic Pockets, Cadaver, Chaos Engine 2 etc) that I need to get around to buying.

Looks alright but it's never going to be as good as the amiga version.