The folks over at Retro-Bit sent us one of their new RES Plus consoles to take for a spin. Did it make our old school Nintendo easier on the eyes, or are they as pixelated as ever?
Read on to find out
Da da dah, d-da-dah dah….. duh……
One of my favorite sounds when it comes to video games will always be the opening music to Super Mario Brothers. Whether I was a teenager playing at the arcade or sitting at home on my NES, hearing that music made me want to grab a controller and start busting blocks and kicking turtles. When it was released for the Wii as a classic title a few years ago, I had to have it and tried playing through it several times. The draw of the game was still there but the graphics were way too pixelated and hard on the eyes. That made me hook up my old NES to my HD TV and try it that way, but that too was hard on the old eyes. I resigned to leaving it in the past as it just didn’t age well enough to be playable for me in this age of big screen HDTVs.
Then came the promise of playing at 720p with the RES Plus from Retro-Bit.
The folks over at Retro-Bit were nice enough to send us a unit for review, so we dug out our boxes labeled ‘NES Stuff’ and dusted off our old cartridges and opened the RES Plus box.
Set up with the RES Plus is pretty simple as all you have to do is plug the provided HDMI cable into an open port on your TV or receiver, plug in the provided power source to the console itself (our TV’s USB plug worked as a power source as well), plug in the two controllers, insert your cartridge, and power the machine up. Super Mario Brothers never looked so good.
We were playing on an LG 55″ 4K TV in 720p and it looked great. Gone were the pixels we suffered through while using our old NES or the Wii and what we have now is a totally playable and easy on the eyes Mario and Luigi looking as good as ever. We dusted off our Mega Man collection (some of those games are really hard), Galaga, Donkey Kong and even Dr. Mario. Everything ran smooth with zero blowing on cartridges (which was surprising given their age).
If you’re longing for some old school fun and still have your NES cartridges, this little machine is the perfect way to play on your HDTV. Amazon currently has an NES collection cartridge that holds 150 NES games that is compatible with the RES Plus, so even if you don’t have your collection any more, no need to hit the thrift stores looking for something to play.
If you are looking for a great way to play NES games in HD, look no further.
Click here to view the video on YouTube.
