Robot Claw

Neo Geo was well known for high-end and arcade quality home game consoles when it decided to enter the handheld market, and expectations were high for the Neo Geo Pocket Colour when it launched in mid 1999. I bought mine later that year with six of the launch games. I immediately fell in love with it.

That’s my original handheld – I chose the ‘anthracite’ color – in it’s box. I hadn’t played it for many years before preparing this post, and had forgotten just how much I loved it.

The system is smaller than the original gameboy, and very lightweight. Though entirely plastic it feels very solid and professionally built. Special mention must be made of the tiny 8-way joystick that utilizes microswitches than click when used. It’s extremely satisfying. Oh and if you wonder about the specs, they’re printed right under the screen!

The screen is reflective rather than backlit, which was fine in those days but is charmingly old fashioned now. The contrast however is excellent and there’s almost no blurring. Here’s a shot of the bioryhtym calculator included as part of the basic OS:

The games came in cardboard boxes (as did gameboy games in those days) with the cartridge itself in a tiny plastic box. Manuals were full colour.

The cartridges are on the small side. Of course compared to Switch and Vita games they’re not but in those days these were quite a bit smaller than the competitors games:

The Neo Geo Pocket Color failed as a system, due mostly to the financial woes of the parent company. It was demonstrably a better system than the Gameboy and was priced competitively but poor management coupled with competition from the juggernaut known as Pokemon helped seal it’s fate in less than a year. As the months passed games became increasingly difficult to find (this was before such things were easily purchased online) and I recall it was a bit of an effort to buy games into early 2000.

All in all I managed to obtain 14 games:

Most are boxed; some are not. All were purchased new. The reason for the lack of boxes is that there were games that had been produced but not distributed when the system was pulled from stores in early 2000 and boxes for those games were never made. I bought them online (for almost nothing) years later.

As you can see there are many Neo Geo arcade ‘ports’. These have been mostly redesigned to fit the different style of control and display, and are almost without exception excellent. The Metal Slug games in particular play very well, and Gal’s Fighters is probably the best handheld fighting game I have ever played. The standout game though is Card Fighters Clash, a strategic collectible card game with astonishingly good graphics. I loved this game to death, and am strongly considering (yet) another playthrough from scratch for old times sake

As with most of my games, my NGPC collection is in virtual mint condition and is complete with all boxes and manuals. I don’t think much about it though, and was surprised in preparing this post to see how much this once-clearanced and mostly forgotten system has appreciated. Consulting my database I see that I paid a total of $389.71 for the system and the 14 games I bought (the system cost $70, the games averaged $22 apiece). And yet these days the boxed system alone is ‘worth’ about $180 and one of the games (Evolution) may even fetch more than that! A brief tabulation at one of the internet price charting sites values my collection at just shy of $1000 so I’ll be sure to keep it safe and sound for many years to come