Retro Freak will play Mega Drive, SNES, Game Boy and TurboGrafx games
The unicorn of cartridge gaming has appeared on the horizon. Somebody catch it!
Good ideas are hard to come by, but Retro Freak, at least on paper, looks like a pretty fantastic one.
The basic premise is simple: 11 consoles in one, each format afforded its own unique slot on the Retro Freak’s exterior.
The full list of ye olde platforms supported includes the NES, SNES, Mega Drive, TurboGrafx, SuperGrafx, Game Boy, Game Boy Advance, and Game Boy Colour. It’s an utterly ludicrous list that doesn’t quite stretch to 11 because we’ve omitted localised versions of individual consoles, such as the Mega Drive’s North American equivalent, the Genesis.
Beyond the Retro Freak’s omni-platform compatibility there are so many other details to fawn over, so we did, in detail, in Japanese, in the name of journalism.
Probably the biggest labour-saving element is the install function. Games only need be plugged into the console once and can then be run from memory, which comes in the form of an SD card you provide yourself.
Needless to say, you can store your save data here, but the gazillion catridge ports also accommodate the reciprocal data movement, so you can throw savegames on each cartidge if you feel like taking one over to a mate’s house.
The list of goodies just keeps on coming: you can use the standard Retro Freak controller (above), connect any usb controller such as that from a PS3 or PS4, or you can even buy a conversion adaptor to use your the controllers that God intended for each device.
Of course the package wouldn’t be complete without modernising the visual jiggerpokery too. Retro Freak is 720p HDMI compatible, so it’s possible to watch gargantuan pixels hurtle across the screen in shapes that you might, if you’ve got your glasses on, recognise as a Pikachu.
Now for the bad news. No need to act surprised about it, you knew that a vision of the future this sweet would be attached to a Titanic sized but.
Retro Freak is currently in development by Cyber Gadget, which currently shows no intention of releasing the product outside of Japan. It could sell exceedingly well and swim its way European shores but if we were you we wouldn’t hold our breath.
Sorry about that. Bye!
[Source: Kotaku]
Justin Mahboubian-Jones
Contributor 
