First, my personal favorite NGPC games are The Last Blade and the two Metal Slug games. Yeah, I know SNK vs. Capcom is the most popular of the fighting games, and it's fantastic, but The Last Blade is just as good or better! Absolutely outstanding game, it's unfortunate that it wasn't quite released during the system's actual life thanks to SNK's quick death... but at least it was made available in the blister-pack releases, so the US version is out there and I have it. It's one of the best handheld fighting games around! As for the Metal Slug games, the NGPC Metal Slug games are really action-platformers, not straight run & gun games like the main Neo-Geo games are, but the different style works great on a handheld, and the results are fantastic. Plus, given the severe paucity of platformers on the NGPC, it's great that the Metal Slug games are that! Those two and Sonic are the only platformers on the system, but at least all three are quite good.
Yeah, the NGPC is a pretty good system. The graphics are mostly good, it's clearly more powerful than the Game Boy Color, it has some great games, and that mini digital stick is really fantastic and is the best handheld "d-pad" ever. The system really only has one drawback, design-wise, but it is a somewhat annoying one: the 3-colors-per-sprite limit is an unfortunate design flaw. Sure, the GBC has a similar limit, but NGPC backgrounds can have a lot of colors on them, many more than the GBC can in in-game images, which really makes the sprites stand out in their limited color variety. Even if the NGPC hadn't died when it did in the US (last game, Metal Slug: 2nd Mission, released in the US in May or June '00, right after SNK's bankruptcy and purchase by Aruze), I can't see it getting more than another year and a half. The GBA's much greater power would have defeated it, like it did to the WonderSwan Color/SwanCrystal in Japan.
The NGPC was off to a good start in the US though, and could have had another solid year before the GBA's release would have doomed it, followed by a fadeout unless SNK released yet another handheld. As it is though, the system has a tragically short lifespan, only 9 months from first to last game release here. In Japan it lasted longer of course, but Aruze immediately killed off almost all internal game development there too right after the purchase, so the games in the rest of '00 were mostly outside developments. But yeah, I think everyone who knows SNK history knows how disastrously badly the Aruze purchase thing went...
Even as it is, the NGPC is a pretty nice system with some very good games. Some good ones are import-only, and Europe got a few more games than the US did, but they're out there... a lot of the library is quality stuff. It's just sad that that library is so small, and the system lasted for such a short amount of time.
On another note, the story of the original B&W system is a kind of odd one. SNK released the B&W Neo-Geo Pocket in October '98 in Japan, along with a few games. But after the GBC's release around that same time, SNK quickly realized that they needed a color model, so in March '99 they had the NGPC. I have to think that the 3-color limit is a holdover from some bad design choice made in the B&W system, or something, because given how many colors you can put it backgrounds, I can't quite see why someone would design a system like that if it'd been designed for color all along... but anyway, after just 5 months, they had the new color system out. It's basically the same thing as the B&W system, but with color. As with the GBC, some games are B&W compatible, mostly earlier titles (releases from '99), while others, mostly '00 and '01 releases, are color-only. This difference isn't usually marked on US packaging though, sine the B&W system was never officially released here. The B&W NGP was released in Europe though, I believe, so there you will see some games saying "color only" or "black and white compatible" on the box (even though, oddly, "Europe", or "World", or whatever, the not-US-or-Japan region, NGP/C packaging is still English-only).
In the US, apparently, you could get it via mail/internet order I believe, but there are no official releases here, those people got the "World" versions of games that were released in Europe. You can tell the difference since only official US releases have ESRB ratings on them. None of the relative few B&W-only NGP games have ESRB ratings, all are Japan-only or Japan/'Europe' only. You will find some 'Europe' NGPC carts in the US, since many were included in the ~2004 blister-pack re-release of the system, but those weren't originally meant for US release, I'm pretty sure -- to me at least, the lack of ESRB ratings makes that clear. They released them in those packs anyway because they had them on hand after the system's death, and just put the ratings on the packaging.
Anyway, I'm saying all that because some people have said that the NGP and some of the games with 'Europe' but not US releases maybe should be considered as US-released because you could mail order/online order them and get them delivered to you here, but because there is a clearly separate US region with ESRB-rated carts, and those games are not that, I don't think they count. I'd consider that importing, myself -- you're getting stuff meant for a different region really.
But anyway, yeah, I like the NGPC. I just wish it'd lived longer and allowed for more colorful sprites.
US Packaging at Launch (Bundled with Sonic Pocket Adventure)
No, this was definitely not the US packaging at launch. Sonic Pocket Adventure released in December 1999, while the NGPC released in the US back in August of '99, or maybe earlier, if the etoys.com-exclusive period started before then and that's actually the retail date? I'm not sure offhand which of those is right. Yes, NGPC release data is a bit fuzzy! But either way on that, it's quite impossible for that to be the launch box, since that game wasn't out until months later. I don't think the system initially had a packin.
I didn't know about that. I assumed that the battery life in the Lynx would've been comparable to the Game Gear. I had a Game Gear near the middle of elementary school, and I was lucky enough to get over 2 hours with rechargeable batteries. the AC adapter was pretty much essential. But then again, the Game Gear was just a modified Master System shoveled into a handheld.
No, Lynx and Game Gear battery life really isn't that different -- both improved over time. I have a Majesco Game Gear from their 2000 relaunch of the system, and its manual claims 7 hour battery life. That number seems to hold up in real-world testing, for later-model Game Gears. Early GGs do seem to have had worse battery life, I guess, but some of that also could have been battery quality? I mean, haven't batteries improved too? I don't know if I've ever seen a test comparing an early and a late Game Gear, with the same type of batteries used on both systems. But later GGs, with modern batteries, can indeed get up to 7 hours of battery life, which is about the same as the Virtual Boy gets on the same number of batteries (6xAA).
As for the Lynx, the first model gets horrendous battery life, but model 2 did improve things, yeah. I've heard several ranges for each model, but model 2 is an improvement over model 1 and might get 4-6 hours, yeah.
Honestly though, with either system an AC adapter really is essential. Virtual Boy, too. 7 hours is not enough! Even if you have rechargeables, having to have multiple sets of 6 rechargeables would be expensive and kind of annoying... I just use my GG on an AC adapter, and the same with the VB ever since I finally got an AC adapter tap for it. I don't have a Lynx yet, but if I get one, I'll definitely need an AC adapter for that too.
And yes, this is one reason why systems like the original ('brick') Game Boy, which got up to 35 hours on 4 AAs, or the WonderSwan/WS Color, or Neo-Geo Pocket/NGP Color, are so great -- they realized that for a handheld, good battery life is really important. Those systems aren't as impressive in some ways as the Lynx or Game Gear are -- not much more hardware power despite releasing many years later, no backlit screens as both of those systems have, no hardware scaling and probably rotation as the Lynx has, and such -- but they are much more portable, and for a portable system that is very important.
I didn't know that the Lynx could not do rotation. It does have a math co-processor, so I assumed it could. It's still impressive hardware that could do things the the stock Genesis and SNES could not. Modders are still doing neat things with the hardware:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nqdrsSp08JE
I've heard mixed stories on whether the Lynx could do rotation... I thought it could, just not very well. It's better at scaling, yes, but I think it can do SOME rotation...
