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| My own Neo Geo Pocket Color. Loves. |
SNK's Neo Geo Pocket Color was released in March 1999 in Japan, then in August and October across North America and Europe respectively. It enjoyed greater success then any Game Boy competitor since the Sega Game Gear- but was discontinued due to poor sales in 2001. Sadly, it was a failure, doomed by the fact that it was released in a time where Nintendo's Game Boy handhelds- couple with Pokemon, no less- were doing a number on handheld games consoles sales, and that the NGPC basically had little to no marketing or advertisement.
Do you remember ever seeing a commercial for the NGPC in the UK? No me neither.
It's not a bad piece of kit- the graphics were mostly superior compared to it's Nintendo adversary, the Game Boy Color, and it had a joystick rather than a D-pad, which was pretty revolutionary for a handheld games console back then. It uses cartridges of a similar shape to the Game Boy Advance, and it could be connected to a Sega Dreamcast (for what reason, I have no idea- and I have never owned a Dreamcast).
It runs on two AA batteries- which gives what I feel is an impressive forty hours of gameplay- and a lithium cell battery which stores the device memory and clock. Another thing which set it aside from the Game Boy was that it could be booted up without a game cartridge inserted, and instead took you to a menu which gave you access to the device's time, date and display settings, a calendar and even a horrorscope.
There were eighty-five games released for the Neo Geo Pocket Color- of which I own six:
Every one of the six games I have for it are great and I don't really have any complaints about any of them. I had the console and the six games all given to me used (in basically new condition), and as a Sonic fan I was elated that I could play Sonic on a handheld, as I'd not yet had that experience.
I was going to record myself showing you the Neo Geo Pocket Color, including some gameplay, but sadly the lithium cell battery is about to die and it won't let me play it. Hopefully I'll get that replaced soon and then I'll be able to show it off properly!
3 comments:
You can still play without the 2032 battery. The NGPC will just complain every time you turn it on. Just run through the setup, and it'll work after that.
You ought to try Card Fighters Clash (and its sequel in English http://cfc2english.blogspot.com/ ) when you get a chance.
Thanks for the comment, I wasn't entirely sure whether it'd work or not, I was just worried about save data. Last time it died I lost all of my Match of the Millenium data. I'm not really sure if the data is stored on the cart or on the device?
I hear Card Fighters Clash is good- might have to find it.
The savegame data is stored on the cart. The battery is only for keeping time, setting an alarm, and other (mostly useless) junk.
Card Fighters Clash (CFC) 1 is pretty easy to find on eBay or whatever. CFC2 is very hard to find, and it's Japanese only unless you get the translation hack.
If you like homebrew stuff or whatever, there's also the NGPC Flash Cartridges.
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