The Analogue Pocket comes in white and black variants.
After all the delays and pre-order shortages, the Analogue Pocket is finally here. So does it live up to all the hype and its lofty promises? In short, absolutely.
Over the years I’ve reviewed previous Analogue gaming hardware releases, from the Super Nt to the Mega Sg. While those were beautifully done, the Pocket is something else entirely.
Like the Super Nt and Mega Sg before it, the Pocket also uses frame-programmable gate arrays (or FPGAs for short). These effectively allow the chipsets to be recreated as per the original device.
Put simply, this means that these devices are not emulating the games they run but are actually running them natively.
This is a big deal in terms of maintaining the historical fidelity of the games these systems play, so from a cultural standpoint you are actually playing the games how they were functionally intended.
What separates the Pocket apart from its other Analogue brethren is down to the sheer number of systems it handles. From the original Game Boy to the Game Boy Advance. With an adapter you can also play Game Gear games and future adapters will allow you to play Atari Lynx, Neo Geo Pocket and PC Engine games.
This makes the Pocket the go to system to cover off almost all the major gaming handhelds from the halcyon years of the medium.
The Analogue Pocket is a thoughtfully crafted gaming handheld.
From my standpoint being a Game Boy aficionado and collector, I mostly worked my way through my Game Boy games and did a full-playthrough on the original version of Zelda: Link’s Awakening.
For starters, Analogue has gone to a great amount of effort to recreate each of the various versions of the Game Boy in terms of the display. The original green screen for the Game Boy is spot-on brilliant but it can switch on the fly to different display settings for different Game Boy systems. You can also customize how the games are displayed to an almost insane degree.
Then I loaded up a bunch of Game Boy Advance games, namely Metroid Fusion and Metroid: Zero Mission, and again I could switch around the display to various versions of the system.
All the games I tested played beautifully and as I remembered them on the original handhelds.
In addition to the Pocket itself, there is also a Dock (sold separately) and a bunch of other accessories, such as the Game Gear adapter. The Dock is pretty handy, as it acts as a charging station and allows you to play your games on a bigger display, as it has an HDMI output.
The Dock is not all that necessary though, as you can easily charge the Pocket itself via the USB-C port at the base.
Following that, you have an enormous amount of support for chiptune composers with MIDI and other musical aspects covered very thoroughly.
The Analogue Pocket has a wide variety of accessories available for it.
All that aside, the Pocket also has a few quality-of-life additions that are worth mentioning. The first is the sleep/wake setup, which you initiate by touching the power button on the side of the Pocket. The other major feature is that of save states, which on games like Gargoyle’s Quest, which lacked a proper in-game save option, are a much-needed addition.
Considering that much of the older gaming handhelds are increasingly harder to come by these days, and those pieces of gaming hardware are also failing due to their age, the Analogue Pocket could not have come soon enough.
It not only allows you to play a wonderful array of classic handheld games as they were originally intended but also does so in a pristine and beautiful way.
The design of the Pocket is also worth mentioning here, as it’s obviously based on the original Game Boy but it also feels very much crafted in its own right. A lot of thought and care clearly went into the creation of the Pocket, and that much is made obvious in a refreshingly tactile way.
The only real downside to the Pocket is its limited availability. While Analogue and doing their best to meet demand for the handheld, I feel that this will be an elusive purchase for many a gamer, and that makes me somewhat sad.
The Analogue Pocket has also had a minor price bump due to the chip shortage that is pretty much affecting everything these days. The current price is now $219.99 for the Pocket and the Dock costs $99.99.
Overall, the Analogue Pocket is the ultimate retro gaming handheld and is an essential purchase for any gamer that values the rich history of handheld gaming systems.
Disclosure: Analogue sent me a Pocket and Dock, as well as other accessories, for the purposes of this review.
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