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REVIEW: NEO GEO MINI

17/10/2018

12 Comments

 
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Back in the day, I always lived in hope that Digitiser would eventually start reviewing Neo Geo games.

Unfortunately, that would've required a) Having a Neo Geo on which to review said games, and - at £600-plus (the games alone could be several hundred quid) - it was unlikely that either Teletext or myself was going to buy one, and b) It was only really available in the UK via import, an offering for lunatics who didn't have anything better to do with their money. 

The most alluring aspect of SNK's Neo Geo - apart from it being sternum-disruptingly expensive - is that it offered true arcade-quality graphics in your own pantry. 

Yeah, the Super NES and Mega Drive may have intermittently claimed the same, but the Neo Geo really was an arcade machine; its innards were designed for something called the Multi Video System - a multi-game arcade Jonesy, which used cartridges that could be swapped around by arcade owners.

SNK later released a rental-only version for home users, thinking nobody in their right mind would've been stupid enough to pay the astronomical asking price to own one. Ultimately, though, the company caved to pressure from stupid people who were clearly not in the right minds, reconfigured it - in the process making it the first home console with removable memory cards - and flogged it to consumers as a high-end, luxury, proposition.

You know: like the console equivalent of a Heston Blumenthal-branded prawn cocktail from Waitrose (it's just like a normal prawn cocktail, except that it costs forty quid, and the secret whimsical ingredient is a dugong's cortex).

Unfortunately, it arrived in homes just in time to have a brief window where it strutted supreme as the console with the best graphics, before its cheaper rivals started offering 3D visuals which the sprite-laden Neo Geo didn't have a hope in Hot Hairy Heck of displaying. 

​And now? Now, in celebration of SNK's 40th birthday, it is back as the Neo Geo Mini! Although, there have been Neo Geo machines released steadily since the system's 1991 debut, most recently in 2012 with a Neo Geo handheld.

But anyway....

Thrrrrrrppppp-pp-p-p!
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BUCK'S SAKE
The Neo Geo Mini bucks the current retro console trend of being a shrivelled-up version of the original home hardware - no great loss given that the Neo Geo isn't particularly iconic - in favour of doffing a frond towards the system's roots.

In short, it looks like a tiny SNK arcade machine, complete with built-in screen and interchangeable marquee artwork. There are 40 games thrust into its guts - one for every time SNK's chairman has suffered a bout of diarrhoea.

The hardware is... a mixed bag. The screen is bright and crisp, but the in-built speaker has about as much bass as a penny whistle in an underpass (you can play through headphones at least). Annoyingly, however, there's no physical volume control - you have to go into the settings to change it, and - as I learned to the distress of my ears - the default is set to LOUD.

You can plug the thing into a TV via a HDMI cable (which costs extra; SNK also offer joypads for an additional fee), but the resolution is, for some reason, terrible. There's an option to apply a filter, but one that, for inexplicable reasons, makes it look like SNK's chairman has done his diarrhoea all over your TV screen. 

The arcade cabinet-like design is cute and solid, but they made the odd decision to go with an analogue joystick - which, when playing the Neo Geo's 2D games, makes them challenging for all the wrong reasons.

Lastly, the International version of the machine (there's also an Asia-only one with a different selection of games) has grey buttons atop a dark grey base, which is neither as attractive as the Asia edition's rainbow-hued controlss, nor as practical. Making matters worse, the four buttons are arranged in a rough cross-hair (like on most joypads). On what is essentially a tabletop machine, this makes them awkward and counterintuitive.

I was surprised by how light and easy it was to hold, but any hope of it being properly portable is beasted by the lack of an internal battery. The only way to play the Neo Geo Mini is by plugging it into the wall or an external battery pack.
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MEAT BAG
The real meat of any retro system is the games, and... as with the hardware, it's a mixed bag - at least on the International Mini that I have.

If you like Metal Slug games or King of Fighters games, or beat 'em ups which are pretty much interchangeable with King of Fighters, then you're well served. Admittedly, that's to be expected, given SNK's long history of producing quality, Capcom-baiting, beat 'em ups.

In addition, there are some scrolling shoot 'em ups, a few sports games, and a couple of platformers, but variety is not a big selling point here. What might also be an issue for some is that all of these games have for years been readily available - with varying levels of legality - elsewhere.

It's hard to know exactly who the Neo Geo Mini is aimed at. It doesn't do enough right to appeal to the hardcore, while the brand itself is possibly too obscure to appeal to a more casual audience - despite looking and feeling like one of those cheap-and-cheerful consoles you find in Menkind next to the nose-hair trimmers shaped like erections, and Only Fools And Horses-branded drones (it isn't cheap and cheerful, though; it'll set you back £129.99). 

For all that, I didn't dislike the Neo Geo Mini. There are no real duffers in terms of the selection of games, but the stark reality is... if I wanted to play, say, Metal Slug 5, there are more convenient and more comfortable ways to do so without hunching over a tiny arcade cabinet, with a tiny stick, looking like I'm... I dunno... Hagrid trying to retrieve a fowl from a cranny.

SCORE: 22 out of 40 Glorious Years 
12 Comments
Bob Trousers
17/10/2018 11:43:21 am

I remember gazing longingly at the ads for Neo Geo games, in CVG and the like, and being baffled at who could possibly afford them. It was like some kind of fever dream to imagine having that kind of quality in your home (I had a NES at the time). And I also remember that ,yes, not too far down the line they would’ve looked unimpressive, limited, in comparison to the stuff that actually was in people’s homes. It sure was a time of fast progress; consoles coming every few years, big leaps in graphics each time.

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Grembot
17/10/2018 12:36:30 pm

It’s a shame this isn’t the right ratio of price:quality, if only it’d had either been slightly better or slightly cheaper I’d have surely wasted my money on it. I guess I’ll wait and see what games end up on the SNK 40th Anniversary Collection and not buy that either.

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Col. Asdasd
17/10/2018 12:47:33 pm

I'd argue that the neogeo represented the apex of the 2D pixel-art aesthetic. From pallette to sprite to animation, these games were sumptuously rendered in a way that an unartistic pleb such as myself can hardly begin to articulate.

It's a shame then that there wasn't a tremendous variety to the sort of games they made. I imagine given the lavish production value a neo geo game was quite an expensive thing to make, which rather locked them into a pattern of making more of what was selling because the risk of releasing a turkey was severe. Not that other companies weren't (and aren't today) lumbered with the same millstone of course.

Add this to the hardware issues and I think I'll stick to buying titles piecemeal on the Switch. But if I were a rich man (yadda yadda yadda ya) I would certainly be picking one of these up.

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DEAN
17/10/2018 02:18:15 pm

Absolutely - I too used to pine for a Neo-Geo!

I'm kind of glad I never had one - not trying to be overly philosophical or nothing - but it WOULD have been disappointing. I know that with the benefit of hindsight because the game that always lured me in was 'Magician Lord' - and having played it in recent times I can offer with precision that I had better times with my NES and what followed.

Fuck SNK.

Now the PC engine..... That's a whole other thing, man - it looked utterly brilliant and had the games.

Don't fuck NEC.

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Retro Prof
17/10/2018 02:27:29 pm

Like a lot of people have said...

As a youngster reading mags I always wanted a NeoGeo, but had to settle for the cheaper SNES and Mega Drive.

And I am glad that I did.

About a year back I downloaded the entire NeoGeo ROM set on to my original Xbox for some emulation. I got the screen ratio just perfect on my SD CRT TV, and I was playing using a Saturn controller through adapter.

And...

The games almost all sucked. I just do not like fighters or sports games. Several of the shmups, like Ghost Pilots, are just cheap and crappy looking.

I enjoyed the couple of platformers it had. And that Super Spy RPG. But in the end, there was literally no more than 10 games I even remotely liked. And even then, none of them were anything which I could not find on a different cheaper system.

The NeoGeo is the definition of the term "emperor's clothes".

The SNES or MD now, I could name at least 50 games for each that I still adore playing to this day! The SNES Mini proved this to me quite startlingly!

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lemonapple
31/10/2018 09:28:49 pm

You are a fool if you played a Neo Geo but don't like fighting games!

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colincidence link
17/10/2018 05:19:06 pm

What a strangely curtailed selection of games - 40's a big number, but the Japanese one had a decade of KoFs, and both host some incomplete series when the missing games were also Neo Geo titles. I wonder if they buy the rights game-by-game; from a MAME perspective it's hard to fathom.
And what an awkward-to-use-lookin' device.
But for reals: Garou's available on the Switch, and Metal Slug Anthology got a few releases. So this one's hard to justify.

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taizou
17/10/2018 08:21:31 pm

It's made by SNK themselves, they own the rights to all the games on both versions. Most Neo Geo games by smaller companies like ADK and Nazca have been absorbed under the SNK veranda in the intervening years, it's only really the stuff by major third-parties like Taito and Data East that they would have to license separately. So it really is baffling that they've limited it like this - I can only guess they didn't want to give away *everything* on this machine so they don't cannibalise sales of the individual releases on Switch etc too much?

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Lummox60N
17/10/2018 09:09:38 pm

Yes, I'd have happily sold my grandmother's kidneys for a Neo Geo back in the day.
If she'd still been around, and the Mini Neo Geo had shipped with proper Neo Geo controllers...well, we've got eBay now, haven't we? AND she'd have been significantly enfeebled by her advancing years. I reckon those kidneys would've covered the cost of both versions easily.
But she's not, and it didn't.

I really can't understand how SNK could even consider releasing this with sub-par control options and the shoddy big-screen output, though?
Other than just cynically jumping on the currently lucrative retro bandwagon that is.

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Penyrolewen
17/10/2018 09:21:28 pm

When I was in my early twenties, a mate’s younger brother had either a PC engine or a NeoGeo in an arcade cabinet in his bedroom. It only had ghosts and goblins on it but, man it was cool. He was also an amazing dj and had 2 technics decks and loads of ace electro records. We hung out there A LOT. I could never get far on the game and couldn’t mix or scratch for shit, but hey, I had friends who could. So that made ME cool. Right?

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Marro
17/10/2018 11:06:31 pm

£130?! You can get a second hand Xbox One for that (almost).
Plus it looks like a gnat's queef would demolish it. I hereby proclaim that anyone who buys a Neo Geo Mini is a tool.

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Mark
18/10/2018 09:14:41 pm

I really wanted this to be great and I was ready to pre order as soon as it went live but I’m put off by the cheap looks it’s so not like SNK I thought they might approach the mini console scene with a bit of class. The game selection on both available versions does not put me off I would be happy with either version . What has put me off is I realised I have around 20 Neo Geo games on my switch and they look and play absolutely superb in handheld or on the tv . Just wish SNK had made a mini version of the AES would have looked great next to the SNES mini and the ps1 mini.

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