My Retro Life
Did SNK’S Neo Geo Pocket Color have the best launch year ever?
Nick talks about a cherished underrated console from 1998, and amazingly, it’s not the Dreamcast |
There’s a console that I adore, released here in the autumn of 1999 by a wellknown arcade manufacturer. It was a capable piece of hardware released at a relatively low price, it had a great initial run of software, and then was cruelly cut down before it truly had a chance to shine. I could be talking about the Dreamcast here, but there’s another machine that fits that description – SNK’S Neo Geo Pocket Color.
Frankly, it’s criminal that the Neo
Geo Pocket Color didn’t dethrone the Game Boy Color as the world’s favourite handheld. Apart from being £10 cheaper, it was more powerful and had a brilliant clicky thumbstick that made controlling games a doddle. The battery life of 40 hours on a pair of AAS was frankly ludicrous, and you could even connect it to my other favourite lost cause, the Dreamcast.
The games were all brilliant, too. If you had any love of classic arcade games, you’d have been occupied with expertly miniaturised versions of hits from SNK and other developers, while original titles developed for the system offered slower, more considered experiences that were no less enjoyable.
The Neo Geo Pocket Color is a joy to collect for, too. There are quite a few heavy hitters to track down such as Cotton, Dive Alert and Pocket Reversi, but plenty of great games can be had on the cheap if you’re willing to settle for loose cartridges. If you do opt for complete games though, you’ll get a lovely premium experience as European games were packaged in plastic cases with full-colour manuals, rather than the rubbish cardboard boxes Game
Boy games used. Based on all of that, I think it’s fair to say that it was the single greatest gaming system ever created.
Fine, I’ll admit to being a little facetious there. As much as I adore SNK’S machine, its short life and limited library mean that it can’t really be in the conversation for the greatest system ever. That would be true even if all the games were brilliant, which they definitely weren’t. But I was recently looking back over the reception that the system received from the UK’S multiformat magazines, Gamesmaster, CVG and Arcade (Edge wasn’t reviewing handheld games). Based on what I read, I do think it’s a dark horse candidate for having the greatest launch year of any console ever.
In the nine months before it recalled the console, SNK released a variety of games that were of a consistently high quality. Just look at the list of games to receive 5/5 or 90%+ in those magazines – Fatal Fury: First Contact, The King Of Fighters R-2, Metal Slug 1st Mission and its sequel Metal Slug 2nd Mission, Neo Turf Masters, Pac-man, Puzzle Bobble Mini, SNK Vs Capcom: Card Fighters Clash and Sonic Pocket Adventure. That’s a top-scoring game every month, and it’s likely that there could have been more, as SNK Vs Capcom: Match Of The Millennium slipped past all three magazines.
What’s more, there were no games that were unanimously considered to be duds. CVG reviewed 18 Neo Geo Pocket Color games, and not a single one scored less than 3/5.
Gamesmaster’s 20 reviews average out to 83.1%, which is quite impressive indeed – and it’s worth noting that two of the games scoring less than 80%, The King Of Fighters R-2 and Neo Turf Masters, both received top scores elsewhere. Likewise, all four games that Arcade scored 2/5 or lower scored 4/5 or 80%+ in the other magazines. The consensus ‘worst’ game was
Baseball Stars, scoring 59% in Gamesmaster and 3/5 in both CVG and
Arcade, which is hardly a disaster.
Of course, it’s worth adding the caveat that plenty of games weren’t reviewed in these magazines, despite being released in our region. For whatever reason, the likes of Cool Boarders Pocket, Evolution: Eternal Dungeons and Shanghai Mini didn’t receive any coverage. But if you pick up a random Neo Geo Pocket Color game from the European release line-up, broadly speaking the bare minimum you’ll end up with is a competently developed game that will entertain you for the duration of a train journey. You certainly can’t say that of every gaming platform.
I’m unlikely to buy any more Neo Geo Pocket Color games in the near future as I have amassed almost all of the ones I’m interested in. But
I’ll always have fond memories of buying random batches of games and discovering quirky new favourites like Puzzle Link 2 and SNK Gals’ Fighters, as well as the hundreds of hours I spent on SNK Vs Capcom: Card Fighters Clash and my rare chances to use the link cable for a race on Sonic Pocket Adventure. Though I’ve since let them go, I’ve even been fortunate enough to own and complete Faselei! and The Last Blade: Beyond The Destiny.
These days, I don’t even have to worry so much about the games
I’ve sold on. The Last Blade has now appeared on Switch as part of SNK’S Neo Geo Pocket Color Selection, and I’m hoping that many more games will follow because a library of that quality shouldn’t be confined to the original hardware, even if those Joycons will never replicate that magnificent thumbstick. If you’re not ready to dive into the increasingly expensive world of Neo Geo Pocket Color collecting, I’d highly recommend you check these releases out if you get the chance – it’s not often a relatively obscure platform gets this kind of love, and it’s rare for any short-lived system to have so many great games.