Smach Z – Backerjack

The RetroEngine Sigma is a door to generations of classic gaming

The debacle of the sold-out and impossible-to-find NES Classic Edition illuminates how popular retro gaming truly is. Of course, a Nintendo-branded retro gaming product is bound to fly off the shelves, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t a wide swath of other, popular systems people would love to spend an afternoon with.

Enter the RetroEngine Sigma. The team at Doyodo understands the desire for a proper retro gaming experience and wants to expand the Nintendo Classic’s target demographic from the mainstream to everyone else. To do so, the petite, palm-sized console sports an HDMI connection along with the possibility of two or more USB controllers to play the 15 pre-installed games its comes with or titles from over two dozen gaming systems from the past 40 years.

The Smach Z portable gaming PC is the chosen one

The dream of any hardcore game: A handheld gaming PC powerful enough to play AAA titles. With the Smach Z, that elusive dream has finally come true.

The lightweight portable device looks like a cross between a laptop and an old-school Sega Game Gear, but with all the functionality and power of a gaming PC. The Smach Z comes in two versions: A regular version and a Pro version. Both share an AMD Merlin Falcon CPU clocked at 2.1GHz, a Radeon R7 GOU clocked at 800MHz, a 6″ 1080p touch screen, an accelerometer, gyroscope, a Wi-Fi module and five hour battery life, but differ on RAM, internal memory, and the presence of a front-facing camera for Twitch streaming and a 4G LTE connection. (The regular version sports 4GB of RAM and 16GB of storage, while the PRO ups its to 8GB and 128GB.) All together, this unassuming device can play almost any game on Steam at high to medium settings, including the latest AAA titles.