/vr/ - Retro Games

>>10664439
well to me it only had one game, I think it was called Biomotor Union, and one game doesn't sell a console.

No marketing, no third parties, no US interest in SNK fighters/characters.
Great games, just... very niche appeal.

>>10664439
"Arcade games... IN YOUR POCKET" is inherently a niche concept. I fucking love it, but I'm not delusional about its limited appeal.

>>10664439
It failed in every market.

That being said, I have one and unironically the best game is Sonic. The second best game is Rockman.

>>10664439
No Pokémon. That’s it.

Price too high, too niche

>>10664439
I remember the store that I pre-ordered my Dreamcast at here in the UK had a large section for it and was pushing it hard. I thought it looked super cool, but I was never going to buy one because my focus was entirely on the Dreamcast at the time and I already had a Game Boy Pocket for portable play. New old stock ones still show up on Ebay here quite regularly.

Like most things, no marketing power. If it got marketed with tons of money behind it it could have been a huge success. But SNK had limited brand power and money to push to the west.

It came out too late. It was a genuinely well made, well thought out system with good games, somehow making fighting games work on handheld, and would've easily murdered the GBC. And then the GBA came out. And the price dropped and dropped until it was sold in those plastics that cheap action figures come in, complete with multiple games, making it look like a chinese knock off, and then it just died and SNK went bankrupt. A real tragedy. I don't think the fact that the hype for fighting games died down in the late 90's helped it either
In the early 2010's you could still buy this for ten bucks

>>10664439
Because it was basically a Game Gear but somehow worse despite coming out like 10 years later. It was the same amount of buttons (with a super shitty joystick thing instead of a normal D-Pad), didn't even have the backlighting GameGear had 10 years prior, the games didn't look any better, what was the fucking point? I guess it was slightly smaller, but, like, so? The games were also less recognizeable to most people and the ones that did recognize franchises like Metal Slug or Fatal Fury wanted arcade-true ports, not these shitty chibi wanna be trash games.

Game Gear:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=auRr5UIb_2Y

NiggerGayPocket:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KTQ6UJyjmMU

So, in 1999, buy a used GameGear for like $20 and get Sonic 1, Streets of Rage 2, Power Rangers, Columns, Batman Returns, Shinobi I and II, and maybe Gunstar Heroes if you're feeling frisky and then either one of the two battery pack options or some rechargeable batteries so faggots can shut the fuck up about "I spent more on batteries than the whole system cost hyuck hyuck hyuck my Reddit username is 'faggotnigger'"

>>10664638
The most popular handheld at this time was the gbc which was worse than both

>>10664638
It was a lot more powerful than the GG and didn’t have the screen smear or the battery consumption. But Sega had more marketing muscle.

>>10664645
GBC was cheaper (new), backwards compatible with older GB, was easy on batteries, had the Nintendo name parents knew, etc.

For the record, a used Game Gear was a better buy than a GBC, too. IMO it wasn't until the GBA SP with backlighting and rechargeable built-in battery that the GameBoy truly surpassed the Game Gear. I know on a technical level it did, but in practice the GBA wasn't all that impressive to me at least.

The Game Gear also had some astonishingly fun to play games in its library that were sometimes even more fun to play than those on 16-bit consoles. GG Sonic 1 was better than Genesis Sonic 1, Batman Returns was way better on GG, I wouldn't say NBA JAM was better but it did have a really catchy background song when the 16-bit versions were silent, Power Rangers was more fun than it had any right to be, and the Game Gear Aladdin was dooooope and I actually prefer it to the 16-bit versions as well.

>>10664652
It may have been more powerful on paper but it wasn't in practice. Look at those videos I linked. The GG version is scaled down from the arcade and has moving backgrounds, etc. The NGP version has completely static backgrounds and gay chibi renditions of everything. Lame as fuck.

The screen smear wasn't as bad back when these were new, most Game Gears you see nowadays have completely shit-the-bed capacitors making it much worse than back in the day. Once again, like I said above, buy one of the two battery packs or get rechargeables, you're a fucking dipshit if you think you need to keep throwing away alkalines. I had the "belt clip" battery pack as a kid and I almost never ran out of battery on any given day.

>>10664654
Oh, and to reiterate: THE GAME GEAR CAME OUT 10 GOD DAMN YEARS EARLIER

10 years of computing in the 90's is like 50 years nowadays. It's absolutely wild the Game Gear was even close let alone exceeded the NGP with such a gap in dev time.

>>10664439
Most people had no familiarity with SNK stuff.
>be parent shopping for Christmas presents
>Look at NGP
>few games
>don't know the brand and never heard your kid or their friends talking about it
>See Gameboy color
>wall of games
>its a Nintendo
>it has pokemon that your 9 y/o never shuts up about
>it's only $10 more
It never stood a chance desu

>>10664638
Atari won.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-h5uEnkOkO0

>SNK dumped money into Neo geo world and the hyper Neo geo 64 instead of this

I mean at least the HNG64 was an attempt to move into the next era, they just didn’t know what to do with 3d polygons. I wonder if they should have tried to work with Sony like namco did. To me SNK is another Sega but not quite as retarded: you can hypothesize all day about what they should have done right but even if you change one thing in their timeline they were so destined and determined to be retarded the other dozen bad decisions would have still come to fruition, or maybe new ones instead.

Almost all the games were from SNK. SNK was never popular in North America.
They also released a color version 1 year after the initial monochrome version.

>>10665579
>I wonder if they should have tried to work with Sony like namco did

snk tried working with sega but it was more limited stuff. they made a 3D rhythm game on dreamcast and a neo geo pocket to dreamcast connector or something

>>10664540
Bust-A-Move Pocket is the best game on the system.

>>10664653
>For the record, a used Game Gear was a better buy than a GBC, too.
You're certifiably insane.

>>10664653
You live in a world where the Atari Lynx won dude

>>10664439
my uneducated guess is nintendo strong-arming to keep neo geos off store shelves

This marketing would definitely have gotten me though

>>10666032
Sovl

>>10666032
Way better than the other shit they did

>>10666052
Kino, dicklets blown out

>No recognizable titles
Americans not caring about SNK without a doubt hurt it. But they knew about Sonic, Megaman, and Street Fighter
>Outdated
Compared to the GBC, it's a formidable competitor if not way fucking better. In fact, showing restraint and working with 8bit was a smarter move than things like the Game Gear or Atari Lynx or Turbo Express being too expensive and costing too much power. People didn't need the console experience 1:1, they wanted Tetris or an ugly RPG like Pokemon gen 1 that you could play with your friends. The fighting games they had where you could play against friends and unlock cards could've been their answer to that.
The counter to this though is a year later, the GBA came out. Nobody were gonna settle with 8bit by then, the Nintendo brand name was just too powerful
>Too pricey
70 bucks?

I think there's a lot of things to keep in consideration, the turbographx didn't take off in North America but that didn't kill NEC. SNK almost stopped existing after this, it didn't do well in Japan where they had more brand recognition.

>Segafag coping and seething ITT
Everytime

>>10665920
NTA, but the Core system models were being sold by Majesco for 30 usd at the same time as the GBC and i recall the games being around 10.

>>10664439
You listed all the good games mate

>>10664552
I think if it just came out a few years earlier, the chance to play actually decent fighting games on-the-go and with friends would've been enough to sell it. But fighting games were on a downturn by the late 90's

>>10666032
I wanna buy it! Time travel & whooosh.

I was like 12 at the time and only heard about Sonic Pocket Adventure after Toys R Us had some exclusive blister pack thing to clear out stock. I went right into GameStop asking for a Neo Geo and they thought I was some kid who heard a playground rumor.

At the time of release, during a trip to a far city with my parents, I saw a demo model in an electronics store. I quite liked the hardware, and thought it looked realy cool. Not even the backlit screen, but the hardware felt solid and it just seemed well-designed. But I already had a Game Boy and investing in a whole new ecosystem was expensive. I had no idea about which games were good, nor where to find out. I think I bought Tamagotchi GB that day, which I actually still play sometimes.

>>10666835
>But I already had a Game Boy and investing in a whole new ecosystem was expensive.
I think this was the deal for most people. And in Japan it was losing to the Wonderswan

>>10666864
The Wonderswan is incredible, if only the games were in English I think it would have turned out to make a big comeback. I wonder how it would have stacked up against Nintendo in the west?

>>10666879
I just wish it came out here if only for the Digimon card game on it.

>>10664439
>So why did SNK's final game system die off in less than a year
SNK didn't really do anything wrong with Neo Geo Pocket. They just ran out of money and the new owners shut down everything. NGPC didn't fail naturally but was forced out, like the Dreamcast.