Most of the negative comments seem to be people with little to no experience with emulation and custom firmware, and are just basing the product on the stock firmware and pre-installed games. This is not however, how it's meant to be used, and for legal reasons they can't include many games. That is up to you.
It doesn't take a lot of research or work though, and a couple youtube videos and google searches can turn this into something much better.
The stock firmware isn't BAD by any means, compared to some others, but it is a bit limited. I went through it just to see what it had to offer, but I already knew it wasn't going to stay on there.
After watching a few videos I decided to buy this with the intent to install mustardOS immediately. All this requires is Raspberry Pi Imager and an SD/MicroSD card reader. I already had one on hand but if you don't you'll need one, I got one made by Anker that works great.
My main reason for choosing mustardOS is that I really liked the themes that are out there. There are other options for custom firmware that you can choose as well.
I already had an extensive collection of legally obtained ROMs (😉 up to you to find your own) ranging from NES and Gameboy to PS1 and Gamecube. They were easy to flash, and a program called Skraper can grab the cover art for you. This is all just drag and drop.
This device, for obvious reasons, works better with games whose original console had a similar control scheme, but if it doesn't require a second analog stick, it should work fine. The default DS emulator has controls available to toggle between top and bottom screen and stylus mode on/off. This took a bit of digging and fiddling around for me to figure out how to do, but again, just a couple web searches and accidentally finding the settings menu hotkey.
The screen is a beautiful resolution, and pretty much every game I've thrown at it has looked wonderful. It is a little stuttery at times with the newer consoles, but I didn't expect much from them. This is the ideal device to play games from NES/SNES/Genesis/Gameboy/Color/Advance and that was my intended use. Pokemon games and ROMhacks, things of that nature.
The extra money for the metal version is very much worth it in my opinion, this thing feels solid and premium and is just nice to look at. I'm pretty much in love with it.\
Battery life has been surprisingly amazing. Buttons are good, not 100/100 quality but they feel nice and are responsive.
Time will tell if the SD card that came with it is quality or not, but so far so good, and mustardOS has the ability to back up your files just to be safe.
tl;dr do your research on how to source your own games and put different firmware on it. The nature of this kind of device requires it.
