Blow the dust off your old NES/Famicom games with a top quality, wallet friendly, brand new 8-bit console.

If I had to log only one complaint with the modern games industry, it’d be the distinct lack of “quick play” games. Sometimes I long for the consoles of yesteryear so I can enjoy a great game for just five minutes before rushing off to work or while waiting for the kettle to boil, but dabbling in a feature length Xbox 360 epic between checkpoints seems somehow unfulfilling. Therefore, my interest immediately piqued when the Generation:NEX console suddenly appeared amidst a battlefield of 7th generation warlords, armed only with a few thousand 8-bit titles in its arsenal.

This is a brand new machine from 8 and 16-bit classic console accessory manufacturers, Messiah Entertainment, which plays all your old Nintendo Entertainment System and Japanese Famicom games. Although a cynic may immediately sniff an upturned nose at such a technological retreat into the past, anyone whose childhood memories ring with the wonderful monotone sounds of Donkey Kong and Zelda will undoubtedly find the NEX to be a bottomless well of nostalgic intrigue.

What with the burgeoning retro gaming scene (and its lifelong bedfellow, eBay) helping to maintain surprisingly high prices for collectable consoles, it actually comes as something of a wonder why we aren’t seeing more old systems being revived with new and, let’s face it, far cheaper and more competent electronics. While it’s true that hunting down and buying an original NES won’t result in a personal phone call from your bank manager, Messiah have ensured their new console offers additional options and a similar price tag to any eBay bidding war.

The first thing any games connoisseur will notice is the system’s distinctly recognizable visage. The NEX simply screams early Nintendo, while the casing has also been kept to a compact, easy-to-store size, mainly dictated by the substantial cartridges. Herein lays the real strength of the NEX over its great grandfather: compatibility with all cartridge formats. The NEX features dual cartridge slots for both the Japanese Famicom games and world versions for the NES system (back then, Nintendo attempted to stem the flow of imports by simply ensuring the cartridges wouldn’t fit in a foreign machine). As a lot of retro gamers will be aware, some of the finest Famicom games never left their native shores, so any retro-heads out there will already be calculating the benefits of a machine which will play those Japanese-only gems straight out of the box.