Retro-Bit Generations Console Review - Rerez

Let me get this out of the way right now. I'm a big fan of Retro-bit. I really like the company and they've sent us a bunch of items to review over the years. And to be honest one of my favorite consoles that has ever been sent into the show is the Super Retro Trio. It's a great system and I still stand by the review I did all that while ago. But today we're not talking about that system we're talking about something that Retro-bit just designed and released very recently. The Retro-bit Generations. This system is an emulation box and inside of it there's a tiny little processor working really hard to try and emulate a bunch of different platforms. There are over 90 games on here and that's all you're going to get on it. There's no way to expand the system to get more games and that means you're limited to whatever games have included in this box. When Nintendo announced the NES Classic system I have to say I was far more excited about the Retro-bit Generations. Simply because while we were limited to only Nintendo games on the NES Classic on this system there was no limitation. They had the ability to reach out to any company probably except Nintendo and put any games they wanted on here and that excited me a heck of a lot more. So when Retro-bit sent this in I was pretty anxious to play it.

The Retro-bit Generations is a very, very tiny console and I kind of like the design of it. It looks kind of like a Sega Genesis which I think is what the design was that they were going for on this. And the controller itself is also a six button Sega Genesis controller which is nice. I think for the price they're asking just to get those two controllers is worth it enough. But unfortunately we're not just talking about those really good controllers that are really solid. Actually we're talking about the system and the games that are on it and that's where this thing really fails. First up is a pretty decent collection of Game Boy games. There's a number of titles on here ranging from a whole bunch of different genres but a lot of them are very fun to play. One of the games called Avenging Spirit had me sucked in and I had a lot of fun with this game since I never actually played it on an original Game Boy. This is the kind of stuff I really like with these really large collections you may not recognize any of these titles but I promise you there's probably at least one game in the selection that you're going to like. As far as I can tell all of these Game Boy games run perfect and what's really cool is many of these games were titles that were just limited to a release in Japan. We didn't get them here so you can experience these games for the first time. You get them to be full screen resolution on your TV which as far as I'm aware was the only time that they've ever released these on a home console so that's really cool.

The Retro-bit Generations thankfully isn't just limited to Game Boy games there's a bunch of other platforms also emulated on here like the Sega Genesis, Super Nintendo, NES and a number of arcade systems as well which is kind of cool. Until you actually play them. But first off let's just talk about the controller that was included with the system. Now there's two of them but you really need to take a look at this when you're considering playing games like a Super Nintendo title. What are you missing? A select button, a left and right shoulder button and these are the things that you need to play certain Super Nintendo games. And although you can always change the controls in the options menu I would have just preferred to have them design the controller a little bit different. Maybe take the mode button and turn it into a select button in the center just above start and just add left and right shoulder buttons on this. I think that would have been fine but they didn't really want to go out and design a whole new controller so they just ended up sticking with the classic. The console gives you the ability to remap any of the controls on any game that you're playing which is really important because this system is trying to emulate not just one console but a whole different range of platforms altogether so having that ability is very important. And it works pretty well. That being said though the video output options on this thing kind of suck. The system offers two methods for output. AV for a standard definition television or HDMI which I'm pretty sure is the reason why you're buying this thing. Now over HDMI you're going to be getting a 720p image but unfortunately as far as I could tell the image just wasn't sharp enough. Some of the problems I was noting was that when you look at the emulation that's happening on these games it's just taking really older games, running at a very low resolution and kind of cropping them up instead of properly upscaling them with a pixel perfect ratio. So what you're getting is kind of blurry images here and there which is very unfortunate. These aren't the worst images I've ever seen come out of an emulation box but they're not all that great.

If a soft output image was the biggest problem I had with this console that wouldn't have been that big of a deal. The problem comes in when you actually go to play some of these games because the way they're presented just isn't correct. Aside from the Game Boy games which I think were being emulated correctly everything else just seemed to be emulating wrong. I know a lot of people that are watching this probably don't think it's a big deal if the emulation runs a little bit too slow or a little bit too fast but it actually affects the way you control these games. See the input timing can be wrong and when that happens you can't play the game correctly because the timing on everything is off. You're playing Super Mario Bros and you hit the jump button and he just doesn't jump exactly when you want him to jump maybe it's a couple of milliseconds off but it's enough to completely throw the flow of the game and this happens on pretty much every game that I played and there's just no avoiding it. I could take any one of these games off this system and basically show you something that was wrong with it but what really shocked me was when I turned on Mercs. Mercs doesn't run well at all. I've got no idea what's going on here but the game is quite literally running at half the framerate it should be running at and it is a mess. I am completely shocked that they missed this before they sent this out to public release. It is just crazy bad it doesn't run at all the way it should and a really good visual indicator that it's not running at the proper frame rate is taking a look at the shadow underneath the main character. It shouldn't be flickering like that but I guess they just didn't notice that this isn't how the game is supposed to look. Now this game here Apocalypse 2 is a game that was supposed to come out in 1997 on the Super Nintendo but never actually did so this should be a really cool way to try out the game to see what it's like. But unfortunately the emulation is completely off I mean just look at how fast this thing runs it's impossible to play and that's really unfortunate because there's very few ways to play this game in an official capacity. Now I'm no stranger to Kung-fu I used to play this game on the NES all the time but one of the biggest problems I found while playing this is once again the timing of the emulation is off so every time you punch or kick it just doesn't line up correctly because the emulation timing jumps all over the place you're never going to be able to really get the game working 100 per cent. And although the game is technically playable like this it never feels like a proper experience.

Ghouls and Ghosts is a very fun game from Capcom and the arcade version is a hallmark but there was also a Super Nintendo version made that kind of improved and altered some features of the game and believe it or not both versions are available on this console. However neither of them work well. The arcade version just doesn't time properly and the really big problem I found with the Super Nintendo version is whenever they used Mode 7 graphics, and it utilizes it quite a bit, the framerate totally drops on the game making it incredibly frustrating to play. Now this one really hurts. I love R-Type. I love these kind of games but this one here is not running properly. Now I can understand how people would have missed this. R-Type looks like it's running OK but check out the framerate at random points it goes up and it goes down especially when they're trying to emulate any kind of advanced graphics settings from the Super Nintendo. Now for folks who haven't played R-Type that much this might look normal but it's running a little bit too fast and then sometimes too slow and that can really mess with you when you're trying to shoot at a lot of characters on the screen at any given moment or really complex boss battles. The inclusion of this game on the Retro-bit Generations should have been a hallmark but to see it represented in this way it just hurts.

Now I'm a bit of a sucker for some good old classic shoot-'em-up games but when I started to play this I noticed there's a problem right away. Varth Operation Thunderstorm is a really fun game but unfortunately when they were making the emulation they didn't realize that the game is kind of in the wrong direction you see back with old shoot-'em-up games that were released in arcades they would actually have the monitor tilted on a different angle so that when you played it you kind of saw it from a different perspective. The reason they did this was because they want to give you more distance so there's more of a field for your character to shoot on and they just emulated it in the wrong direction. There's no way in the options to fix this so it's just kind of limited to looking like this.

Not only will you find actual licensed games that were released a long time ago but you're also going to find some games that are kind of ripoffs of modern titles and in some cases these games are not totally bad but they're never really solid experiences. A bulk of these games are just not as refined as the games they're trying to copy so it just ends up being a failed experiment and although my distaste for this next game is largely my own opinion I can't imagine that anybody really wanted this specific title being emulated in a sort of Sega Genesis or Super Nintendo method. Flappy Bird. You could have picked any game and you chose Flappy Bird. Really? And it's not just Flappy Bird there's a bunch of other games on this platform that are just taken from other sources and redistributed in this method but what's really bizarre is they're not using the actual architecture of this device. What they're doing is these games I believe were originally made for Sega Genesis or Super Nintendo in some weird pirated format and those roms are what exist on this console. Meaning that the number of games on this platform are really not that great when you take into consideration that such a huge chunk of them are these things.

For instance take this game as an example. Now this game here is called Night Defender but clearly it's just Donkey Kong. And what's really strange about it is that believe it or not for some really bizarre reason there are two hacked versions of Donkey Kong on here. I don't really understand why but I guess they just needed two versions of the same game. It's weird, it's bizarre and it doesn't play anywhere near as good as the original Donkey Kong releases from Nintendo. Honestly I would completely skip these if you're buying the system. After playing virtually every single game on the system I can basically say this. You're looking at some pretty solid Game Boy emulation, some okay but really not perfect NES emulation, some Genesis games that run from decent to unplayable and the arcade games are a minefield of inconsistency. Unlike the NES or the Super Nintendo or Sega Genesis which were pretty much standardized systems arcade games rarely ever used the same hardware. In some instances especially when it came to Capcom they were likely to use the same kind of hardware once in a while but that would have taken somebody at Capcom a little bit of time to identify what that was and properly emulate the machines and that's simply not what happened with the Retro-bit Generations.

A lot of people online have been complaining about the NES Classic console having the shortest controller wires imaginable and they are pretty damn ridiculous but one thing that Retro-bit did with the Generations system is that the controllers they gave you have massively long cables. I mean really, really, really long cables. I mean look at this these cables are as long as my car. Seriously I went out and I actually measured it. It was crazy plus these controllers are also USB and you can use them on your computer to emulate and play a whole bunch of games. They're really cool and because you get two of them it might just be worth buying this console just to get these controllers if you really wanted to do that. But do good controllers excuse the poor emulation of some of these games? Personally I think not. A really big problem a lot of people are going to have is never having played these original games in their original platforms so they might assume that these games naturally were this bad when they came out which is not the case for a majority of these titles. I feel like the Retro-bit Generations could have been something very special but instead it may misrepresent what some of these classic games were all about. So is the Retro-bit Generations worth a purchase? Now look if you want those two controllers yes this is worth buying just for those controllers alone. I know that seems a little bit crazy but I don't actually have any other six button Sega Genesis USB controllers so to see it like this is kind of nice. Plus they're new so they just feel like brand new controllers straight out of the packaging which is exactly what they are but the console itself just isn't that good unfortunately. When I contacted Retro-bit they told me that none of the games were going to be updated through the SD card slot so there's going to be no firmware update or anything along those lines that's going to make these games better in the future. But they did tell me that there's going to be some kind of console change or something in February and the newer models of the system might be that much better but we won't know until February. So as it stands right now I can't recommend you buy the system though if you really did like those Game Boy games I showed off there this is probably the best way to play those. But that's kind of it. Any other game this system is offering just isn't worth playing because it's just not running properly and that's one of the worst things I can say about the system. If it doesn't run the games properly it's probably not something you're going to want to play.

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