I’m not going to bury the lede in this review. Playing games on the GamerCard (£149) is mostly a miserable experience. That’s a pity, because for quite a few old farts, the Sinclair name remains synonymous with gaming.

Fortunately, they’ve in recent years been blessed with ambitious, successful projects like the ZX Next that have pulled the Sinclair legacy into the present. The GamerCard? Well, it’s at least ambitious.

The device is the brainchild of Grant Sinclair, nephew of Sir Clive. Without doubt, the GamerCard is the weirdest retro handheld I’ve ever held, and it does a few things really well.

Alas, it does others really badly, and that ruins everything.

GamerCard Review: Design

The first thing you notice when holding the GamerCard is that it’s disarmingly light. It’s easy to be seduced by the 105g not-heft – about the same as two portable Samsung SSDs glued together, or half an iPhone. The GamerCard’s skinnier than my Apple blower too, at just 6.5mm thick.

However, unlike Apple gear – or, for that matter, most mobile retro handhelds – the GamerCard feels hostile to the presence of hands. Its thinness counts against it when you play games, largely because of the unit’s sharp edges. The power, Start and Select buttons are comically small, and there’s no space for tactile volume controls.

But what most concerned me when the news of the GamerCard first landed were its two silicone discs, masquerading as game controls. I was right to be worried. They are stiff, inaccurate, and devoid of labelling. I also question their long-term durability. Hardcore Sinclair fans might squee at the prospect of rubber-clad controls in place of something sensible, but I’d have preferred a low-profile D-pad and buttons.

The oddness continues with two smaller discs around the back (ostensibly shoulder buttons) that I can safely say you’ll never use. On the plus side, the right-hand edge houses mini-HDMI, two micro-USB ports, and a Qwiic connector.

Less positively, the unit has a big hole above the display, because the creator dreams of the GamerCard being an off-the-peg impulse purchase in stores. Hmm.

GamerCard Review: Display and Battery Life

You’d have to be a heartless monster to not make cooing noises at the display. It’s a 4-inch square number with a 720×720px resolution. It’s bright and pin-sharp when games are optimised for it. The snag: not many are. And because the GamerCard has a Raspberry Pi Zero 2W sandwiched within, it lacks the clout to fully overcome that limitation.

These days, I’ll run shaders on handhelds when a screen doesn’t offer precise integer scaling, which makes uneven pixels go away. In the unit sent for review, Pico-8 runs full-screen regardless of settings, while a nerfed version of RetroArch forced me to manually faff about installing shaders over FTP.

I eventually got a couple of CRT efforts working well, but the hassle involved irked me. And the fancy high-end shaders I favour elsewhere were beyond the GamerCard’s power, turning games into stop-motion animation.

As a skinny unit, audio unsurprisingly lacks oomph, but the front-facing speakers are still OK. There’s no headphone port, though, and so you’ll need to argue with Bluetooth or pretend you never liked bass anyway.

The device’s form is more of an issue when it comes to battery life – which for me ran to about 90 minutes of play – and heat management, with the back of the unit quickly becoming unreasonably warm.

GamerCard Review: UI and Emulation

The user interface feels more 0.1 than 1.0. Its big, colourful icons are nice, but you can’t rearrange them. Worse, button configs are bizarre. You click the right-hand one on the right-hand silicone disc to access the settings menu. But once inside, that button has you exit; you instead press the bottom button to confirm something. It’s maddening.

Elsewhere, a ‘store’ exists in beta, housing a selection of so-so games, along with RetroPie. The latter came preinstalled on my review unit, as did six games that Sinclair calls “Nintendo Switch quality” on his website. That description is doing heavy lifting.

One of the games is Bloo Kid 2 – a perfectly adequate but unremarkable 2D platformer from 2014. The others are mostly remakes of Saboteur. Note that you can opt to omit a microSD card and save yourself some cash, but then you’ll need to set everything up yourself.

When I ventured into RetroPie, it was a lottery. A half dozen systems were ostensibly pre-configured, but they didn’t all work. Those that did took their sweet time to load games. Emulation was, as expected, fine up to PlayStation and started to struggle with N64.

However, even on working platforms, the default setups were horrible, stretching content to fill the square display. So if you do grab a GamerCard and aren’t familiar with the intricacies and idiosyncrasies of RetroArch, you’d best learn. (Also: have fun guessing how to access the RetroArch menu and return to the GamerCard’s home screen – the setup I had didn’t make either remotely obvious.)

As noted earlier, the RetroPie install also seemed stripped down. I tried to fix this, but eventually gave up on manually loading new cores. Spending time buried in Terminal SSH commands and FTP clients isn’t my idea of fun.

GamerCard Review: Controls and Connectivity

Software can be fixed. A GamerCard update could, in one fell swoop, make app launching, controller mapping and RetroPie configuration vastly better. Short of a magic wand, though, nothing will help the controls.

Initially, I disliked the silicone discs, but I did slowly warm to them and mulled that they weren’t as bad as I’d feared. Long-term play, though, knocked that opinion right out of me.

Each disc covers four buttons. For what would usually be A/B/X/Y, that shouldn’t be a concern, but the buttons don’t reliably fire every time they’re pressed, and they’re fatiguing to use. It’s worse on the 'not-a-D-pad' side, where even the shortest interaction resulted in the equivalent of two presses. The result was that I’d comically move back and forth past a ladder in a platformer without being able to climb it, drive like I’d quaffed half a pub in a racer, and not be able to place a cursor over buttons in menus.

Wanting to give the GamerCard every opportunity to surprise, I connected other gear. Bluetooth controllers worked in the RetroPie menu but not RetroArch. That wasn’t a great loss, though, since the former flashed on and off on external displays while the latter glitched to the degree that games were unplayable.

Elsewhere, Pico-8 sulked in the top-left corner of a widescreen display, but Celeste and Bloo Kid 2 looked nice. Still, ‘consolising’ this unit isn’t (yet) really an option.

Grant Sinclair GamerCard Review: Specifications

Grant Sinclair GamerCard Review: Conclusion

This doesn’t leave GamerCard in a good place. And it gives me no pleasure to write such a review.

GamerCard is a labour of love, made by someone with their heart in the right place, trying to create something innovative and inventive. In terms of ambition, it aligns with the mindset of Sir Clive. But whereas the ZX Spectrum overcame its limitations, the GamerCard does not.

People might point to its form factor and extensibility, with there being a Raspberry Pi inside. But Time Extension is a site about playing old games. Moreover, this product has the word ‘gamer’ in its name. If the GamerCard can’t let you play games well, what is the point?

What’s frustrating is that with conventional (or merely better) controls and some – any – thought given to ergonomics, GamerCard could have at least been interesting. You’d still get less bang for your buck than with similarly priced contemporaries, but as a pocket-friendly, lightweight Pico-8 machine and ‘up to PlayStation’ emulation device, where you could convince yourself that one day you’ll totally take advantage of its tinkering potential, it might have been worth a go.

As it stands, I can only review what I have, not what I hoped something would be. And even for people who want to bask in the Sinclair name or fancy a handheld Pi console, better options exist. Because no amount of clever engineering, quirky design and well-meaning sentiment can compensate when the experience of using a device is so deeply flawed.

Thanks to Grant Sinclair for sending the GamerCard used in this review.