Neo Geo Pocket Color Review

Everything good about the Neo Geo Pocket Color sits under your left thumb. SNK fitted a microswitched stick that clicks into eight directions, and once you have used it you cannot go back to a mushy rubber pad: quarter circles land, charge moves land, and the fighting games that fill the library are playable in a way no other handheld of the era managed. SNK vs. Capcom: The Match of the Millennium is the proof, a full crossover fighter with an absurd amount of single player around it, running at a real pace on 16 bit hardware.

King of Fighters R-2, Samurai Shodown 2 and Card Fighters Clash all earn their cartridge, and Sonic Pocket Adventure is a better Sonic game than the Game Gear ever got. The machine is sensible everywhere else too. Two AA batteries last about forty hours because the screen is reflective rather than lit, there is a clock and a calendar built in that games actually read, and a link cable ties it to a Dreamcast.

Then SNK sold itself to a pachinko company, Western distribution stopped in 2000 after barely a year on sale, and the library froze at roughly eighty titles. Almost all of them are good, which is a strange and sad thing to be able to say about a console. It launched at $69.99 and was being cleared at a fraction of that within months. It remains one of the cheapest ways to own a genuinely great piece of hardware.