Hardware Review – Blazetab

Villordsutch reviews the Blazetab…

As a fan of Retrogaming or as a mature gamer I like to call them “proper games”, I currently have a cupboard that is bordering on a midlife crisis, along with a loft which holds the remains of my childhood carefully wrapped away for nobody to touch.  I often get these odd machines out, stick a few cables into the T.V. and try to coax my daughters into stepping away from their next-gen wizardry, perhaps spend a few minutes enjoying the past wonder with a bit Streets of Rage or a few rounds of Batty.  It’s brilliant, well it is if they’re okay with me blowing on the cartridge if it didn’t load straight away, or when they don’t look at me like I’m an idiot as the pre-polygon graphics stride across the screen and I’m grinning like a Cheshire Cat with glee.

Playing on the both computers and consoles of the past is rather fantastic, however there are those times where you don’t have the opportunity to break out the N64, PlayStation, Dreamcast or ZX Spectrum and give yourself a well-deserved game of whatever.  You could be out and about, on the train, in the car, at the back of the bus, bored at work or even just sat down in your home and you fancy a game of Zero Wing or Crazy Taxi, but time isn’t on your side; this is where the Blazetab comes in and it comes in rather brilliantly.

The Blazetab is currently available to buy from Funstockretro.co.uk priced at £99.99 and it is a portable retro gaming machine which is advertised as covering all of these machines:-  PS1, MAME, Dreamcast, N64, NeoGeo, Atari, NES, SNES, Gameboy, Gameboy Colour, Gameboy Advance, SEGA Master System, SEGA Mega Drive, CPS1, CPS2, Amiga, Commodore 64, ZX Spectrum.  I can tell you after a weeks’ worth of putting this machine through its paces it sings when it comes to delivering a large number of emulated games for these machine.

GTA – Vice City

On day one you will need no experience what-so-ever in being able to convert roms from your games you already own to drag and drop to the Blazetab as once you turn on the machine you are instantly greeted with the emulator called Happy Chick.  Before you launch I recommend that set up your Wifi details, then take a few minutes to update any software on the tablet, for which you’ll be prompted.  Then launch Happy Chick, and here you will straight away see a search box type in the name of a game you’re looking for – which you already own of course. I went for a favourite Streets of Rage 2 and you’ll see a few appear, hit download and in a few seconds it will be in your library.  That’s it!  There’s truly nothing more taxing to filling this machine up with your games collection than that.  To return to the games on you system you’ll see a small yellow one-eyed chick in the centre of the bar at the bottom, all of your games are there.

Streets of Rage 2 – Where no inanimate object is safe!

The size of the game depends on the speed it will download of course; for example a friend of mine paid a visit during my week of putting the Blazetab through its paces, and he asked me to put Micro Machines on the device. I’d not placed this on the library as I’d not really had anyone to link up with so it had seemed rather pointless to place this multiplayer on the Blazetab. Still to show the machine off I downloaded it and it took less than twenty seconds, compared to Ridge Racer Revolution with took around 20 minutes.

You don’t just have to stick to the Happy Chick emulator though, as a massive ZX Spectrum fan I wanted to see how the Blazetab handled a few of the Speccy classics.  Talking to the Retro Games Forever Facebook page I asked which was the best Spectrum Emulator for the Android tablets – as the Blazetab is an Android tablet –and  they responded with ZXDroid, however I also installed Marvin to trial that.  I actually found that Marvin was more suitable for the Blazetab for a number of games, there was a bit of fiddling around within the options to sort the controls out for each game, however the games look quite brilliant – when they are running – also you can switch easily to portrait for an instant full Spectrum keyboard to use for adventure games.

Rolling Thunder – ZX Spectrum

As mentioned above the Blazetab is a full 7 inch, touchscreen, Android tablet and the screen looks nice and clear. It doesn’t appear to be as vibrant as a Nexus 7 screen – which is my main tablet – however the colours on Rainbow Islands still shone and the games still look great upon it. With this being an Android tablet it can be connected to a Google Play account and you can download numerous apps; pre-installed is Facebook, Skype, BBC News and YouTube.  It also has a front-facing camera – useful for Skype – though the resolution is a mere 0.3M. Still you can easily make out your face and so could a user on the other end, it would however struggle in a dark room.  Not only this the internal storage space – before you insert a SD Card – is 16gb, so there’s room for a number of games straight away if you’ve not had time to pick an SD Card up beforehand.  Along with this you have two charge ports a standard micro-usb and a 5v wall adaptor and a rather fantastic HDMI connector so you can link your tablet upto your television to play the games even bigger making you Blazetab a controller.

Metal Slug 2 – Helping Middle East Peace treaty since 1998 (not)

There a few in-game features that come with the Blazetab, one which is a blessing and without I still wouldn’t be seeing the end of Metal Slug 2: at any time in a game you can you can save your current progress and then you can return to that exact second.  You can also take screenshots of the game, which can be shared at a later date, though it would be nice if I could miss the virtual keys off some of the screenshots.  One of the most interesting features I really thought was great was the ability to manipulate the NDS screens.  So for example Mario Kart, I compressed the track screen whilst enlarging the gameplay screen.

Mario Kart – Note the compressed map screen on the right.

There are a few issues I picked up on whilst playing through the week, the main one seemed to be attached to the PlayStation emulation on certain games like Ridge Race Type 4, the FMV moments of FF7 or Wipeout there is an odd lag pull every few seconds, however in other PS games like Crash Bandicoot: Warped or Ridge Race Revolution this issue isn’t there at all.  I could find nothing like this within any other emulated game on the device.  Games can become sometimes manic due to the amount of controls given to you especially when it comes to N64 games, it was due to this I slowly started to shy away from these.  Another minor problem, if you intend on buying this for anyone but you, is that my youngest daughter found that the d-pad & “1,2,3,4 buttons” – on the Blazetab – are too far away from the shoulder buttons to pull off her powerslides on Mario Kart, though myself as an adult had no issue with the shoulder buttons.

Wipeout – Looks good but suffers with an odd pull.

Surprisingly I found the battery life wasn’t too bad, I looked at the Blazetab as I would if I was travelling.  Using an example of a journey by train, I found that from where I lived to London takes approximately 1hr and 30mins so I set myself a goal of sitting down and to do some non-stop playing constantly for that amount of time, with the alarm bleeping I saved the game to see what damage had been done to the battery life, with WiFi still on, all that had been eaten was 24% taking the battery to 76% from 100%.

With the ability to hold hundreds of Retro Classics inside the device, the Blazetab is clearly an impressive machine for its price.  The Blazetab is amazingly simple to use also it’s a fully working Android tablet, why wouldn’t you want to buy this!?

The Blazetab is available to buy now from FunstockRetro.co.uk priced £99.99 here.

Villordsutch likes his sci-fi and looks like a tubby Viking according to his children. Visit his website and follow him on Twitter.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?list=PL18yMRIfoszEaHYNDTy5C-cH9Oa2gN5ng&v=jWc-DNbd-pM