Galaga

As a longtime MAME enthusiast and custom arcade cabinet modder and builder, I was pleasantly surprised with the My Arcade Data East Hits Micro Player with 308 games. The games are all playable, it has a usb-c port for power without batteries, using four AA batteries lasts a LONG time, it has volume buttons and a headphone jack. It's also tough. We got this three years ago for our at the time four-year-old and it's withstood dropping and rough use (he did peel off the marquee sticker at some point). The packaging is very nice and if you are purchasing as a collectable and want to keep it NIB, it will look nice on your shelf with rest of your sadly non-played My Arcade units. The game selection isn't an all-star lineup of arcade greats, with a lot of weird titles mixed in, but it was interesting to play games I've never seen and my kids didn't care if they were big in the 80's or not. Pro-tip: To power on the arcade, PUSH IN the little fake coin insert box below the control panel. You may want to also apply a tiny bit of Loctite to the joystick screw or just take it off...or superglue it in, if you really want it to stay. Due to size, I found some of the games more playable without the joystick and just using the D-Pad, but YMMV. At $30, it's well worth the price for potentially thousands of hours of gameplay for gamers young and old.

My arcade is making some of the best retro gaming systems out especially this one I keep this one on my coffee table and it gets played Non-Stop exactly like when you played it as a youth

As an old school arcade game player, I really appreciate and am grateful for all the hard work the My Arcade team put into this premium edition of their Space Invaders handheld! It duplicates the original Space Invaders experience so very well. Even the semi-reflective space background effect is well replicated here. They also use the original arcade ROM so the play experience is spot on. While the speaker is a little soft, that does not detract from a fantastic experience. This is highly recommended for its build and design quality, original arcade playability, and overall attention to detail. I really hope My Arcade will continue to produce more premium units as they are really great. Sure, the cabinet design is not exactly perfect. You can look into the Numskull's premium effort...and pay 5 times the price for it. But, this is such a great value for what you pay for. Again, highly recommended!

Lots of fun, good graphics, good for smaller kids, a little to small for adults

I really love it! The classic shape and how accurate the game is. And I really don't mind the small screen, I think it works just fine. I appreciate the little rubber bumpers on the bottom to keep it from moving around on a flat surface. The sound is clear and can be turned down or put headphones in. I plan to get an actual game console in bigger form down the line but for now this reasonably priced game is working great for me until then.

I've seen complaints that the game won't work on batteries. Mine works on micro USB or batteries. I tried it on micro USB (no batteries installed), and it worked fine. I installed 3 AA Alkaline batteries, and it worked on batteries alone. Then, I plugged in the micro USB, without removing the batteries, and had no problem. But honestly, I think if you're going to use micro USB power, I'd remove the batteries, just to make sure there's no problem down the road. Many times electronics like one way or the other. The game is as I remember from 40+ years ago, including the sound. My playing definitely has not improved with age! But, it's a lot of fun. I plan to order the Galaga next. It's such a cool game, and a nice miniaturized size.

As a big fan of myarcade and the micro arcade cabinets they have been making, I was looking forward to the release of the premium street fighter cabinet ever since it was first announced. It looks and sounds great, and re-creates an authentic experience from my youth when I would hang out at arcades for hours playing any and all challengers. However, it suffers from a flaw; one that might not be a significant issue in most other games, but is extremely serious in a game like streetfighter which relies on responsive input and the ability to execute precise directional commands: the joystick. After my initial frustration with unresponsive/inconsistent input I opened it up to see if I could determine the problem. The joystick is a + shaped piece of plastic that has 4 arms that extend outwards towards the 4 directional input switches. Unlike a regular joystick which can only tilt from the center, this one sits on top of a small vertically aligned spring; this is what re-centers the stick after movement. Consequently, it only takes a very light nudge to push it in any direction. Motions that involve pulling the stick in a single direction easily result in the stick tilting towards an unwanted direction because the spring offers little directional resistance and only functions to re-center the stick. The largest problem with this design is that there is nothing that prevents the user from pushing down on the stick from above which can result in pressing all 4 directional switches simultaneously. Since the game's rom does not register more than 2 directional inputs at once (ex. up + forward), triggering one of the other 4 inputs by accidentally pressing on the stick results in only the 2 most recent inputs counting while the rest are discarded. This can be observed when trying to perform an input with a rotation: pressing too hard during this motion can trigger one or more extra switches unintentionally, resulting in a portion of the final input being discarded. This is most noticeable when trying to perform a move such as [F->D->D+F] as it will frequently discard the "down" portion of the final input and instead treat your input as though you had pressed [D->D+F->F]. A similar problem occurs when trying to move from [back->forward] or [down->up] quickly, quite often the stick's spring offers too little resistance to prevent nearby inputs from being pressed. Having built my own full-sized arcade stick controllers before, I was familiar with a few different stick designs, but I've yet to see one like this. Given the obvious inherent flaws it doesn't make much sense why they went with this particular design, either. The directional-pad "stick" found on all other myarcade cabinets would have been a lot more responsive. The alternate design was probably supposed to give it a more "authentic" arcade feel, but unfortunately, it greatly limits the playability of the game. Considering the $60-70 price tag attached to it as a premium model, this is kind of unacceptable. I managed to resolve this design flaw for my own micro cabinet by replacing the original spring with one that is slightly longer and considerably stiffer as well as by padding the interior of the stick-base with some soft foam to add extra resistance directly under the stick. I still get the rare unwanted 4-button-stick-press, but it is now much easier to pull the stick in a single direction without accidentally pressing the nearby directions. Without the kind of custom-modifications I made; the bare minimum of which would be replacing the very weak stock spring with a stronger spring, the device is good for little more than indulging nostalgia once or twice before collecting dust on a shelf. Post-modification I consider it well worth the money, but I expect most people won't be interested in tinkering with it the same way. A final thought - I have not observed the kind of frame skips or stuttering that other users have described apart from the slowdowns that occur after chaining multiple hits together in sequence, which is a quirk of the original hit-cancel combo system that was also present in every port of SF-II world warriors or champion edition I can remember. _-Overall recommendations-_ If you are a vintage gaming enthusiast who primarily wants it as a display piece or a collectible: although it's pricey, it looks quite nice and sounds great, and is worth buying. If you are also a serious gamer who wants something that is just as 'playable' as it is 'displayable': you should probably be prepared to make your own modifications. If the gameplay matters to you, but you aren't comfortable with the idea of opening the cabinet and messing with the internal parts: I would strongly advise you to reconsider your purchase.

I wish I hadn’t put this one off for so long. I have been collecting MyArcade micro players for years and this one was in my list for a while now but after getting it and playing it, a game I NEVER played in an arcade or growing up, that I am actually pretty good at it and have grown to love playing this more than others. Very well constructed and the design is classic like the original, with an illuminated background with a two way mirror in front for the rear facing screen to project off. It’s visually stunning for such an early arcade machine. This little thing is by far the best and most accurate MyArcade player to date. This actually has me wanting to give the real thing a shot the next time I go to my local arcade. Simply put it’s simply fun. *If you’re wondering, YES this game is programmed like the og with a possible 300 pts shot on the first UFO of every level if hit on the 23rd shot from start of level, then every following 15th shot in that same level. You can rack up some quick points if you get good at that.