What I have here is a retro gaming handheld, released in May of 2025, that was sold exclusively in China by Starbucks. Yes, the coffee chain. How did we get here, you ask? Well, let me tell you.

Retro handhelds have seemingly become the latest advancement in gaming e-waste manufacture. It seems like every week companies like Anbernic are putting out a different flavor of the same handheld, ignoring basic quality control in favor of pumping out new toys for YouTubers to take a look at. At the same time, we’ve entered an era where bootleg-adjacent handhelds and plug & play consoles have somehow been re-legitimized after seemingly fizzling out in the 2010s, with fully licensed releases being pumped out by the very same companies that put out compilations of stolen games. What a time to be alive.

And one company that seems to be at the intersection of these two bustling markets is Subor. Yeah, they’re still kicking somehow. Following a joint venture with Waixing, Subor mostly coasted along with different plug & play trends over the years before trying to make it big in 2018 with the Subor Z+, a fully fledged modern gaming console. But that ended up shipping before its console operating system was ready, making it no more than a bizarre Windows PC. And then that team responsible for that product disbanded. Oh well.

Nowadays the newest iteration of Subor, Subor Intelligent Technology Development, seems to primarily focus on releasing customized versions of existing electronics from other companies, including gaming consoles and handhelds. But it’s tough to stand out from the crowd in an era everyone and their dog employs this exact same business strategy. And possibly due to their established history, Subor seems to have found the perfect solution to maintain relevance: brand collabs!

In 2022, Subor collaborated with the Chinese branches of auto maker Toyota and fast food giant McDonalds to put out Famiclones that were fully themed around their respective brands. The GTMC one wasn’t particularly remarkable, with it mostly being a generic Famiclone with a version of Adventure Island II that they converted into a GTMC history crash course.

The McDonalds collab is definitely the more notable release by far, with only 1,000 units being produced. And look! It’s packaged like it’s a Big Mac! I love burgers! In all seriousness, if you’re going to do a brand collab, this is the sort of attention to detail put toward presentation that I’d like to see.

This release was a little more special in that it included three games that were themed around McDonalds. But don’t set your expectations too high. The Subor of the 2020s is well immersed in the world of generic plug & play games, and the games included on this system are exactly what you’d expect with that background. But still, they went out of their way to make brand new burger-themed versions of these games that were pushing two decades old. It’s equal parts impressive and baffling.

And now here we are in the year 2025, and Subor’s doing it again. This time, they’ve announced a handheld in collaboration with Starbucks. So I bought it. I had to. I don’t particularly like Starbucks, either their coffee or their business practices, but it’s like they specifically targeted me with this stupid thing. And surprisingly, the reseller actually shipped it out.

So here it is, the Subor x Starbucks Game Console. I had the option to get green or pink, but I ended up going for green because that’s the color I associate with Starbucks. And I kind of wish I went for the pink, because damn this thing is kind of ugly. The main giveaway that this is a Special Coffee Handheld from the front are these weird slightly embossed sprites that have been printed on. They look pretty tacky. I’m not sure why they put an image of a controller on this thing either. It’s not like those Sup handhelds that come with a second player controller, you’re stuck with the controls that are built into the unit.

And some controls they are. The face buttons are in Xbox layout, which doesn’t really make sense for a console that, spoiler alert, strictly plays NES games. A and B are always going to be in the wrong order. And the shoulder buttons also aren’t any help, because someone had the wise idea to make R register A and B being pressed together, and L register the turbo buttons being pressed together. In what situation would that ever be useful?? But the d-pad is a real problem on my unit in particular. The down, left, and right directions are fine for the most part, but it feels like it’s grinding against something when you try to push the up direction, and it registers so unreliably. Let’s hope that none of the games make extensive use of the up button, I guess.

As for the rest of the device, the right side has your power switch and volume wheel, the bottom has a USB-C charging port and headphone jack, and the left has a microSD card slot, for which you have to provide your own card. My dreams of owning a Subor branded microSD card are crushed. And it’s just so surreal turning this thing over and seeing the actual Starbucks logo on the model sticker. This thing is cursed, it shouldn’t be real.

Also included in the box are an instruction manual, which is naturally completely in Chinese, a Subor seal of authenticity, and the world’s shortest USB-C charging cable. Unfortunately I think this thing only does charging over USB-C, no data transfer. That might sound weird, but this will be important later. And on the back of the box here is where the included Chinese Starbucks gift card is supposed to go, but the seller that I bought this from took it. I can’t have shit.

When you turn the system on, you get this really crusty voice sample. I’m sure someone will translate what this says in the comments. Get used to this clip, because you’ll hear it every single time you use the Reset button. That is, unless you know that you can hold Start and Select to exit a game without resetting the console, which I conveniently forgot while I was recording.

Past that lovely intro, you’re greeted with options for Favorite Games, Classic Games, and SD card games. I’ll get to that last one later, but for now, the most important option is Classic Games, because that’s where all of the games actually live. Favorites basically lets you save the ones that you like the most for quick access, which doesn’t seem particularly useful when there are only 12 games built in. And I don’t think any of them are going to be your favorites. The Games Super Bearista A hack of Pandamar; namely the version found on the Arcade Action 2, as indicated by the cover of Hello My Baby that plays on loop throughout the entire game. All they did was replace the panda sprites, mushrooms, coins, and question mark blocks. They’re the Bearista, a coffee cup, coffee beans, and star blocks respectively. This is such a surface level modification that they didn’t even replace the text that says “THANK YOU PANDA” at the end of the castle levels. Even for the uninitiated, you only need to play 4 levels into the game to see just how much of a rushjob this was.

Bearista are barista teddy bear toys that Starbucks sold at some point. It doesn’t seem to be a particularly relevant part of the brand anymore, but they seem to be more present in some regions than others. They seem to be all but gone in the United States though

Bearista Push Coffee Bean That title gives some serious “ShamShon try to eat the burger” energy. This is a hack of Nice Code Software’s Boxworld where the player sprite has been replaced with a Bearista, and the boxes have been replaced with coffee beans. It’s a clone of Sokoban, where the objective is to push all of the boxes onto the marked spaces. I talked more about this game in Day 1 of The Padvent Calendar if you really want to know more about this game.

Pac-Coffee Bean A hack of Waixing’s Edacity Snakes, which itself is a modified version of Hungry Worm, a game from an unknown developer that seems to have worked with JungleTac and got dropped before the company ever distributed their games. Edacity Snakes was also one of the games that was modified for the McDonald’s console. It’s a pretty standard clone of Snake, but it plays excruciatingly slowly if you don’t mash the direction that you want to move in. That’s particularly problematic when you need to move up, because as we’ve established, the up button doesn’t work good on my unit.

SD Card As I stated before, this console can be expanded with a microSD card, or TF Card as they’re still called in China. By creating a NesGame folder on the SD card, you can drop in standard NES roms and, as long as they aren’t anything weird, they’ll boot up just fine. For example, here’s an official NES port of Tetris that was made for My Arcade in 2023, and sure enough, it loads up just fine.

Now I’ll admit, when I see a handheld that’s capable of running NES games from an SD card, I’m far more interested to see if it can run obscure bootleg stuff as opposed to legitimate NES games. And my results were kind of hit and miss. Some games booted up fine. I’ve never met a device that can’t run Somari. But a lot of games just straight up do not run on this thing. Multicarts are a total no-go, unfortunately. And even in instances where they did run, the console would often struggle to run the games at a consistent speed. Sometimes it would slow down, and then it would suddenly speed up. I think it might be applying some sort of auto frameskipping. But like, it’s 2025. We’ve had NES emulation figured out for ages by this point. I know the stuff that I’m running is more obscure, but should it really be taxing enough that the hardware is struggling to keep up?

For fun, I tried tossing a couple VT03 ROMs on there - a headerless .bin file and one with an NES 2.0 header. The bin file didn’t run at all, but surprisingly the headered ROM did actually boot up. Naturally, this thing isn’t equipped to run VTxx games at all, so it didn’t display the graphics properly.

And that brings me to what I think is the biggest failing of this handheld. As you’ve probably gathered by now, this is running an emulator. Despite it only running NES games, it’s not a Famiclone at its core. And I know what you’re thinking. “Of course it isn’t a Famiclone, it has microSD expansion!” Well, when I first learned that this thing had that feature, I was under the impression that this was VT369-based handheld. And I promise you, this isn’t just wishful thinking. There’s a very small handful of VT-based consoles that support loading games with microSD cards, and this includes native VT-enhanced game compatibility. And Subor has put out a few of these themselves, such as the Subor Q8, a handheld that comes in the form of a MagSafe-compatible wireless charging battery bank Yes This Is Actually A Thing. I think it’d be fun to load up a handheld with stupid bullshit that it can run natively, but alas, Starbucks can’t provide that for me.

But, that leads me to wonder… why is this thing limited to playing NES games? Surely it wasn’t designed from the ground up for this purpose, right? Well, no, it wasn’t. This is a customized version of the Subor Q2, which along with 2000s-era MP4 player capabilities, also supports all sorts of systems. So no, this thing isn’t just so pathetically weak that it can’t run anything more advanced than the NES. I mean, it might be pathetically weak, but this limitation is entirely arbitrary. And I’ve tried putting folders for different games on this thing, but this custom frontend just isn’t designed to look for these games. I figure that the other emulators just straight up haven’t been included on this thing.

But unfortunately, I don’t think there’s really a way to determine whether that statement is true. As I stated before, the charging port seems to be purely for charging. I was really hoping that I’d just be able to plug this thing into my computer and pull the files off of it. But unfortunately, I didn’t bring you here today to say that I’ve preserved these obscure hacks. I even tried to take it apart to see if there were any secrets hiding inside, but they glued the damn battery to the case, and I’m not really interested in breaking this thing. For the time being, these games are trapped within this mediocre coffee-themed tomb.