Title: Piko Arcade 1
System: Evercade
Price: $19.99
Release Date: Mid 2023

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Prelude

In this collection from Piko Interactive we have a bunch of Arcade games from obscure publishers of varying quality. Huge variations in quality.

For those unaware, Piko is a company more known for buying up a bunch of old IP and then pumping out their games to literally anyone who takes them in; Antstream is flooded with their titles and so are a lot of cheaper system licenses. My first exposure to them was the Retro-Bit Generations, where most of the games on the darn thing were junk titles from the company. The downside to owning so much IP and random games is that a lot of them are utter shit.

The good news is on Evercade for the most part, Blaze’s curation means we usually get some really darn fun obscure gems, and instances where even the worst games on a cart are usually pretty decent titles, with some games on Piko carts being very average to outright poor in comparison. These guys put out seven carts for Evercade, and this was the second to last one before their owner had a public falling out with Blaze, seemingly because he wanted to pump out even more cartridges too quickly.

So is this set of obscure Arcade titles worth a buy, or is there a reason I’m starting with this one first for our Piko collection reviews, before moving onto the more popular carts?

Presentation

One thing I’ll give Blaze and Piko credit on here; as much as I’ll soon rip into these games, they’re emulated pretty well, and some of these are honestly pretty miraculous when it comes to having them running properly. A lot of these games were undumped or very obscure for years, so having them out in an official way is decent enough, I guess. Anything you hear and see is pretty accurate to the games themselves.

Sadly, most of the games here aren’t that impressive, and a lot of them are just ugly or weird with the presentation. A bunch of the games, particularly the Unico ones, give off a gross bootleg vibe I just do not like at all, with a bunch of em using sounds ripped right out of other games, or having sprites dangerously close to other titles. The music in games like the two fighters are outright abysmal, while most of the others are pretty darn forgettable.

Thankfully, Unico gets one decent looking game later on, and the non-Unico games hold up a bit better. Less stolen assets in Steel Force and Diver Boy, but still some that you may notice. There’s also a pretty good tennis game that looks rather crisp, and was nice to see run well. I hope you like weird games, as we’re about to dive into quite a few of them!

Gameplay

Yeah let’s just rip the bandaid off and jump into these; we have a range in quality so wide I’ll be going from praise to agony in the span of several paragraphs, so buckle in. I really want to talk about this collection just to rant, really. Most of these are from one developer, Unico, and you’ll see me ripping into a lot of those games. But there are a few non-unico games here, so is there hope?

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Diver Boy– Not a Unico game! But this one is just Bomb Jack, but upside down and underwater. It literally is Bomb Jack almost 1:1, as the goal here is to avoid enemies while diving and collecting all the clams you can. Get a bonus for collecting clams in a certain order. Some speculate that Diver Boy reverse engineered Bomb Jack outright, and the jumping just feels odd enough to make me think that’s possible. Overall a fine game, but very unoriginal and way less fun to play than the real deal.

The Legend of Silk Road– Let’s start the Unico train with their best game here; this is a belt scrolling action game, with local co-op and a variety of characters. Mostly typical stuff, but you have a pre-rendered art style that works better than you’d think, and the combos in the game are surprisingly fun to pull off. Otherwise, this is a very typical brawler that won’t excite you, but compared to most on this cart it’s certainly worth a full clear with a friend.

Masters Fury- Known mostly for having an abysmal PS1 port that ripped off a bunch of SNK sprites, this Arcade original is somehow better, but still not a good fighter at all. Typical Street Fighter clone with weird characters, cheap difficulty, and awful music. I at least don’t feel like my controller is imploding while playing it, and I did get some minor enjoyment subjecting a friend to this, but I honestly feel the other fighter was a bit better.

Magic Purple– One of two elimination platformers here, and both are very similar to the point some of the assets are the darn same. A very generic game where you play as a duck with boxing gloves and beat up enemies while taking on bosses every now and then. Local Co-op is here but otherwise this is as generic as you can get and this game has some unoriginal assets present.

Fancy World– The other elimination platformer, and this one feels a bit better to play. There’s a nonsense intro, but once you get past that, you’re thrown into more elimination platforming and attack throwing action, with local co-op returning once again to go along with another boring, forgettable Arcade adventure. I at least had an OK time fully playing this with my friend, but afterward both of us hardly wanted to think about this ever again.

Burglar X- This very odd maze-ish game has you taking control of one of two people who set out to steal money, beat up baddies and make a great escape. Also for some bizarre reason, you can fart on command, way before Deviantart rose out of the fires of Hell.

Definitely one of the more original games from Unico’s lineup, and something that could be decent with a friend, but I really didn’t find the gameplay loop here that engaging at all, even if I do like how later stages at least shift objectives a bit so you don’t just do the same thing over and over again. Otherwise besides the very strange secondary attack, this game is just fine. Not one that’s replayable for score much at all.

Steel Force– This one is just Alien Breed, for crying out loud! Still, this does a decent job at bringing that concept to the Arcade, and has some OKish level design to go along with it. You and a friend can team up to blast enemies as you infiltrate a base of enemies, and I had a lot of fun trying to score chase this one. The score thresholds are pretty high for the in-game leaderboard though, but that didn’t stop me from trying to see how far I could go on a 1CC. Possibly the third best game on the cart?

Ultimate Tennis– Sit down for a moment, this may shock you, but Ultimate Tennis is easily the best game on the cartridge. It’s a simple Tennis game, but it controls really darn well, is pretty darn fun VS the CPU or a friend, and is perfect for pick up and play. Out of all the unoriginal garbage in this collection, this game at least sets out to do tennis, and it does tennis pretty darn well. Has a great set of animation to it as well! Not much else to say, but at least the game doesn’t fix what isn’t broken.

Dragon Master– The other fighting game, and this one is slightly better than Master’s Fury despite coming out before it. The game is still a very unoriginal clone of Street Fighter II mind you, and controls like absolute shit still, but at least I was able to make some progress and somewhat parse what to do in this game.

None of the characters stand out much at all, just like in Masters Fury, but at least I was getting somewhere and had more fun playing this one with a friend. Being less horrid doesn’t prevent you from being horrid, but at least maybe if you’re bored to death this would somehow be OK to play?

Conclusion

Honestly, Piko Arcade 1 is currently what I consider to be the worst Evercade cart on the system. The value isn’t great, a lot of these games are borderline bootleg quality, and not many of the games hold interests for that long. Even the ones that do, are pretty similar to other, better games on other platforms, including some already on Evercade. The elimination platformers suck and are cookie cutter, the fighters are abysmal, and Burglar X is… Whatever the hell that game is.

The non Unico games are fine, but nothing above that quality, and even the best Unico game, a decent brawler, is still cut from identical cloth of better games. None of the games here will last you that long, nor stick in your memory all that long (unless you play with a friend and just go nuts poking fun of it like me and my bestie did), and even the other Piko owned Arcade sets we did get, have way higher quality games thrown in to make up for the bad ones, and I’d argue even a bad Galeco game like Maniac Square or Thunder Hoop is a million times better than whatever the hell Burglar X is. Depressingly, this was the final Arcade cart for over a year, but at least our long, national drought is over soon.

If this is the rock bottom for an Evercade cart though, that’s at least good for my scoring system, and a good sign for you that there’s at least one good/great game on every cart!

I give Piko Arcade 1 a 4 out of 10.