Just got back from Funcoland. My poor wallet...

What started out as an innocent trip to pick up Castlevania quickly turned into a massive attack against both my wallet and my pile of shame. Turns out the E Card Reader and Gungrave were also both released today, so I picked those up as well.

I gave the E Reader a shot, and I have to say it is the best idea I've seen in quite a while. With the current trading card craze, Nintendo is going to make millions off of this thing. The cards I got include Pinball, Excitebike, a Game and Watch game called Manhole, some stuff that looked Pokemon related, and Animal Crossing furniture. I wanted Balloon Fight, but they didn't have it.

If anybody is wondering about the NES emulator they are using, I am happy to report it plays just fine. The only problem I have is how the display is handled. The GBA has less resolution than the NES. The freeware GBA emu out there scrolls the screen to fit everything. The official Nintendo emu just throws lines out. It makes the screen seem blocky and causes a bit of shimmer when things move. I only tried pinball, and I can see how manual scrolling would not work at all for that game, so maybe the official emu is different from game to game. When I try more I'll let you know. Overall I'm very impressed with the E Reader. I see big things for it. Now, if only the NES 3rd partys would start making games for it.... I want Techmo Superbowl on the road! :)

Thanks for the impressions man.

The cards just unlock games already stored in the reader's ROM, thouh, right?

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Originally posted by Frogacuda
The cards just unlock games already stored in the reader's ROM, thouh, right?

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Nope, the games are stored on the cards. It's pretty funny that you can put all the data of a NES game on 10 barcodes.

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Originally posted by Frogacuda
The cards just unlock games already stored in the reader's ROM, thouh, right?

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Nope. How sick is this: The games are actually encoded right on the card. It's not even magnets. There are strips of dots printed along the top and bottom edges of the cards. Really tiny dots. You have to strain to see them individually. Those dots apparently mean something to the reader. It's actuall game data. Or furniture data or texture data or whatever.

Wow, spooky, yet cool. The Big N fucking rules for all this fan-friendly goodness.

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Originally posted by Jay
Wow, spooky, yet cool.

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Just like your avatar. :D

What exactly is an e-card reader? I only just started hearing about this today...I assume it's some kind of NES emulator for the GBA?

It is like a bar code reader that plugs into your GBA's cartridge and link ports. You scan in cards that contain data. In some cases, the data is an NES game with an emulator. In other cases, the data is extra items, characters, or textures for a Gamecube game (GBA link cable). In other cases, the data is a Game and Watch game. All sorts of cool stuff, basically. They sell in random 5 packs, or NES specific game packs.

How much are card packs?