Title: Data East Collection 1
System: Evercade
Price: $19.99
Release Date: Early 2020
Prelude
Did you know out of all the Evercade carts, this is the earliest one still in production? I’m unsure as to why, but I’m glad for it, as you’ll realize shortly. I do plan to cover the other legacy carts, of course, but I figured this was also the earliest of the carts I could cover in a simpler fashion that also would be accessible for newcomers to the Evercade ecosystem, rather than something you have to go to Ebay for.
Do note that generally due to tariffs and other price hikes, the current US rate for this cart is around $30, but I labeled the price as $20 due to that being what this cart originally went for, as I noted in prior reviews.
Presentation
NES, SNES, and Genesis games here, all emulating well as they should! A bit of a bummer we didn’t have Game Boy at this point in time, since Lock N Chase and Burgertime Deluxe would have been some great gets. This was one of the carts to come with the original Evercade, and was also a partial instigator for why I bought one due to a certain Puzzle game.
Needless to say, I was surprised how well these all emulated even back in 2021, and now in 2025 they’re still well performing, great emulations that are as they should be. That’s a good thing too in the case of Midnight Resistance, which has one of best OSTs on the entire Genesis, and it was reproduced perfectly here.
Gameplay
You know the drill by now. We start from the early days of the NES, to near the end of the SNES’s life! A good variety at that.
BurgerTime (NES)- This early NES-era port of Burgertime is just as you’d expect. The Arcade game, brought home, approximated in a similar fashion. You move around, walk over layers of burgers to drop them down and complete the various burgers of each level, and repeat with different formations until you lose all your lives.
There’s not much to this one, just like how the Arcade game was pretty much all about score chasing. The game is in the horizontal ratio being a NES title, but that doesn’t really impact anything here. Really the only downsides are the controls being a bit more finicky than the arcade original and the visuals looking worse, but otherwise this is still a competent version of Burgertime that did what it set out to do back in the 80s. I do wish we got Burgertime Deluxe as well considering that expanded what we see here by quite a bit, but alas, we just have this original port.
Karate Champ (NES)- A very, very, very early fighting game, which plays as good as you’d expect an early one to. While the arcade version used a neat two stick system for attacking, this NES port uses the buttons and your D-Pad direction, and has you fighting an opponent over and over again across various backdrops. Simplistic concept, but worse than the arcade version mainly due to the hitboxes being abhorrently bad.
The arcade wasn’t the greatest with the hitboxes either, but something about this NES port has always irked me with how janky the hitboxes are, and I really do not like it that much in the slightest. The game just loops, so you play this for score, and if you aren’t up for score chasing in a game where your attacks might just go through the opponent and not hit them, then this one is an easy pass.
Burnin Rubber (NES)- Yet another early NES scorechaser port, but this one actually feels like a slight improvement over the Arcade original. Renamed here to Burnin Rubber due to trademark reasons, Bump N Jump tasks you with going across several different landmarks while trying to jump on top of as many cars as possible for points.
The Arcade version was decent fun, but this NES port feels a touch easier to control, and is just as fun, if not a bit moreso than that original version. It also helps it looks much better too, even if the music is rather grating. Of all the NES titles included on this cart, I like this one the best and it’s by far the second best scorechaser here, and has been a favorite from the cart since I got my original Evercade.
Bad Dudes (NES)- A famous game that spawned some memes over its ridiculous intro, this is a port of the Arcade original, and has taken many downgrades in coming home to the NES. No local co-op, uglier visuals, worse music, and a lot more jank with the playability. However, despite all those presentational downgrades, this one is slightly preferable from me over the Arcade original mainly for not being absolutely evil with the difficulty.
The Arcade version just did not care to balance the game at all, and would pretty much spam you with enemies after only a couple of stages to the point of becoming rather unfun. While this NES game still puts up a good challenge, I at least can memorize what’s going on and can feasibly see myself trying to 1CC this in a way I just cannot with the Arcade original. It still ain’t a great game though, but this one at least feels like they tried to give it a balance that wasn’t just “give us more quarters”.
Two Crude Dudes (Genesis)- The first of two Genesis ports from Opera House, this game was the spiritual sequel to Bad Dudes, and likewise has a similar Arcade-Console downgrade, though in the case of Two Crude Dudes, I find this home port to be the far superior version.
If you thought Arcade Bad Dudes was the epitome of unfair design, then Arcade Two Crude was just pure evil. A near impossible high score threshold to beat, sadistic level design and overpowered enemies, and very dull levels made for a miserable experience even when trying to slog through it with a co-op partner, so it’s honestly a miracle this Genesis version fixed a lot of those issues, albeit at the expense of the co-op.
The difficulty is much more fair and balanced here, the combat and new throwing mechanic actually feel rather satisfying, and the stages aren’t as much of a nightmare as in the Arcade. (though the final stage is still ridiculous) Nostalgia might make you think Bad Dudes is a good brawler, but Two Crude Dudes is really the one that nails the feeling of a good belt scroller. Definitely worth a play!
Midnight Resistance (Genesis)- When I first played this game upon getting my original Evercade, I expected something a bit akin to Contra from the screenshots, maybe with a bit of decent Genesis sound to it, and nothing really remarkable. Little did I know that after getting used to the weird control setup of Midnight Resistance, I’d find one of my new favorite games on the entire Sega Genesis, with one of the best soundtracks ever created for the console.
How on earth is this possible? Well, the OST was composed by the man who’d later go on to create the soundtracks for games like Final Fantasy Tactics, and he had also made some other great OSTS on the console such as for the shooter Verytex. Thus, you have the Arcade game’s otherwise middling soundtrack transformed into a godly rendition taking full advantage of 16-bit FM sound, providing a great musical experience to go along with some pretty fun run and gun action.
Aiming and shooting in Midnight Resistance is a bit tricky to get used to at first, but by default you have a button that turns on your main shot, which just automatically fires and you can aim in any direction you like, along with your usual jump button. Holding the third button locks your aim so you can move around while aiming in that direction, which comes into play as you gain special weapons that are activated upon pressing up while firing. Since pressing up will constantly use up that ammo, locking your direction can help you save on that resource. Otherwise, it’s just up to you to go through many stages, collecting keys from enemies, defeating a wide array of foes and bosses, before eventually making your way to that final stage in order to free your family and take on that final boss.
Whether for scorechasing or just to enjoy the whole thing in one go, Midnight Resistance is an excellent action game, and easily the best game on the entire cartridge, bar none. I wasn’t surprised when Blaze highlighted this one for their Highlight of the Month program, because Midnight Resistance is just that awesome, and the ultimate transformation from otherwise decent Arcade game into excellent home port.
Side Pocket (SNES)- Data East’s pool game, ported a bajillion times to different systems. This one is the SNES version made by western developer Iguana, and it’s a pretty fun pool game. You have your typical pool and billiards modes to take up, along with a series of very tricky challenge shots to complete, tasking you with sinking a ball on the field in a single shot without breaking anything else on the field. These are very, very tough, but if you manage to work out how the shooting works, you can have a pretty decent time with this one. The SNES port is the best non Arcade one I can think of, so I’m not surprised it was the version chosen for the cart. You either like Billiards, or you don’t.
Fighter’s History (SNES)- Data East’s Street Fighter clone, which got them in legal trouble in the Arcades. The Arcade version was a very punishing, sloppy mess of a game, but this SNES port tones down the difficulty by quite a bit and makes the game a lot more fun as a result. You can even play as the two boss fighters via a code, which you couldn’t in Arcades.
For a Street Fighter clone, it’s pretty OK. The game’s main gimmick is being able to strike a character’s weakpoint enough times in order to make them dizzy, but otherwise it’s your typical fighting game of the 90’s. Decent fun and on the higher end of the Street Fighter clones from the time, and amusing with a friend. Do note you can only get an ending on the Hard difficulty, but even this setting isn’t as mean as the actual Arcade game. Better than some other Street Fighter clones like World Heroes, at the very least.
Joe and Mac 2: Lost in the Tropics (SNES)- This is actually the third Joe and Mac SNES game, but the other two just decided to take a vacation. Anyhow, you take control of the cavemen in either solo or co-op play, as you go around several stages defeating enemies and progressing in typical platformer stages. Unlike the previous games, there’s a shop mechanic here and even a password system for the sake of saving your progress, but save states make that redundant in this release.
Not as fun as the previous entry, Congo’s Caper, but a lot better than the janky SNES port of the original Joe and Mac, so I can see why Blaze picked this over that SNES port. (even though the Genesis one would have been a fine version of that original game) I’m not sure if I gel well with the very, very light RPG mechanics, but I guess it was a thing every series in the 90s had to try at some point. Still, a pretty decent time if you have a friend along for the ride.
Magical Drop II (SNES)- What I originally bought this cart to play almost exclusively, only to not really play it as much as I had hoped because there were plenty of other good games on the cart. Oops! Anyhow, this is a SNES port of the Neo Geo arcade game, which followed up a SFC port of the original Magical drop. This second game speeds things up quite a bit, as you now have a lot more of a tug of war style puzzle battle here due to the faster reactions you can pull off here.
See, you grab orbs of a certain color with the grab button, and can keep grabbing same colored orbs to drop them elsewhere on the board. Match three or more and you clear them, and get multiple matches done in a row before the prior one disappears, and you build up a chain. Thus, the faster you are at clearing columns of three, the more devastating your attacks against the opponent become. Quite a lot of fun when playing against the CPU on the hardest settings or a skilled friend! The original Magical Drop was a lot slower and made it trickier to pull this sort of thing off, so I think 2 was the better pick here, and they even included the fan translation Retro Bit licensed years ago, too, which is excellent, and I wish Blaze would do this more often with Japanese imports.
Still, as fun as the core gameplay is, my own nitpicks on this game and why I played it less than I had hoped was because of the whole scoring aspect. See, this one isn’t as much of a scorechaser in solo play outside of the endless mode, since you don’t get any point bonuses for clearing CPU rounds incredibly fast like in Magical Drop III. Now that just leads to pure addiction, which you won’t really find as much here. Still, that doesn’t make Magical Drop 2 a slouch, and this SNES port is still fun just to play through and beat the CPU. But if Blaze had PS1 games as a capability back then, I’d much prefer if the PS1 version of the third game was included instead. Nevertheless, this was the best they could have gotten back then, and is one heck of a puzzler to wrap up the cart.
Conclusion
For such an early cart, Data East Collection 1 is surprisingly solid, with a lot of pretty fun games. Some are great obscurities like Midnight Resistance, while others are fun scorechasers like Burnin Rubber, and others are just fun co-op/multiplayer games like Magical Drop, Joe & Mac and Fighters History. When the only duds I can really think of are the earlier NES games for being pretty simplistic or janky ports, that really stands to the testament of just how well this early cartridge has held up, and is also a reason why I’m a little bummed we have not seen a Collection 2 over five years later.
Data East has so many great console ports they can throw at a future volume, and I’d just love to see them in a second volume now that the Evercade has more console capabilities. Lock N Chase for Game Boy, High Seas Havoc, Fighter History Mizoguchi, Magical Drop F, Dashin Desperadoes, Congo’s Caper, and so, so much more. Of all the quirky console publishers from the 90s, I think Data East is a lot like Jaleco in that sense, offering a good variety of fun obscurities you probably passed up back in the day, but are well worth a play going back to them, and hey, maybe Midnight Resistance will catch you off guard just as much as it did to me.
I give Data East Collection 1 an 8 out of 10.