NEO GEO Pocket Color Selection Vol. 2 (Switch, PC)
Game maker SNK is known for their fighting games, but they also made their own consoles, like the NEO GEO and subsequent arcade machine. When it came time for them to compete with Nintendo’s Game Boy Color, they brought out the NEO GEO Pocket Color. This was a really awesome little handheld, and for a short while, I even liked it better than Nintendo’s portable offerings. I’ve been happy they’ve been re-releasing NGPC games on the Switch, and collections of those releases when they’ve had enough to do so. And now you can play a collection of ten MORE NGPC games on the Switch!
The menu screen lets you select from the ten games and view 3-D models of the boxes, instruction booklets, toggle the languages, and choose the borders (mostly NGPC handhelds). I’ll briefly go over the games on here I haven’t reviewed yet, and provide links to the ones I have.
Baseball Stars Color
This collection has a few more sports titles than the last one did. Baseball Stars is SNK’s signature baseball series, and the most playable sports game on this collection. I don’t really like how slow your outfielders run, though, and I’m horrible at batting. All the sports games here let you play a single round or a tournament.
Neo Geo Cup 98 Plus Color
This is a top down viewed soccer game. The characters are large and well animated as you run up and down a vertically scrolling field. The CPU is nigh impossible to beat, though.
Pocket Tennis Color
The presentation of this tennis game reminds me of Namco’s Smash Court Tennis series or their Family Tennis games. As with the other sports titles, the CPU opponents are way too hard.
The King of Fighters Battle de Paradise
This is actually a board game featuring King of Fighters characters! It was never brought to the US, so it’s all in Japanese. But luckily the instruction booklet is translated. Even so, it doesn’t really help out much when you are actually playing. You can roll the dice or use cards during your turn, but it’s hard to know what the cards do. You can land on spaces that give you coins or take some away. You can also buy cards on certain spaces, as well as play mini-games. But again, having to constantly refer to the instruction manual really slows down the flow of the game, and I have no idea how you win.
Puzzle Link 2
I have a lot of good memories playing this on the NGPC back in the day because I reviewed it for The Dallas Morning News! It’s a puzzle game where you shoot connection pipes to match two pieces of the same color and they’ll disappear when this happens. Pieces will then fall up and make chain reactions with other same colored pieces. In one mode, if you clear the round fast enough, you can earn a card, and you can use those cards to play a battle mini-game. There are also endless and clear modes, too.
Gunbare Neo Poke-Kun
This is another game never released in the US and it’s all in Japanese. But it’s very easy to figure out and the instructions are in English anyway. The game is one part virtual pet and one part mini-game collection. You view a character named Poke-Kun, who was kind of the mascot of the NGPC in Japan (I guess). Neo Poke-Kun lives in your NGPC and your goal is to make him happy. You do this by pressing a button to have visitors come in, and there’s all sorts of weird ones. The only problem is that there is no indicator of how happy he is, and the visitors you invite are random and may not always make him happy. But when he is happy enough, he’ll go and make mini-games for you to play. These start out as simple Pong and Breakout clones, with their own creative twists, but eventually get better and better until you are playing a fighting game nearly on par with other NGPC fighters! The game also uses the NGPC’s real time clock, so if you play it at night he may sleep the whole time, so you want to try and play during the middle of the day. Even though this game has a lot of obvious problems, I actually really liked it for some reason. It used an internal clock way before most other games like Animal Crossing did, and it predates other mini-game collections like WarioWare by a few years!
SNK vs. Capcom: Card Fighters Clash
I didn’t think the two player modes would work here since you had to use a link cable in the originals, but they got around it here but having a second NEO GEO Pocket Color pop up so the other player can choose their character and whatnot. You can also use this feature to trade cards in Card Fighters Clash even though you don’t really have two systems and a link cable to do so. Although some games don’t use either of these features, unfortunately. Also, since these games came out 20 years ago, they don’t have all the quality of life features that a lot of today’s games have. But luckily, there is an option screen that takes care of a lot of that. You view the action on a mock up NEO GEO Pocket Color handheld (which is weird when you are playing the handheld on the Switch handheld mode), but you can choose to zoom in on the screen to make it much easier to see. You can also toggle various screen filters, and rewind, too. One thing I do like about this collection is that it has more variety than the first, which had mostly fighting games.
The only problem I had was how these games were released. Originally they were sold separately before being on this collection. I don’t like it when companies nickel and dime you like that. Just release the compilation! Also I would’ve liked to have seen a physical release of this collection as well. But if you didn’t get any of these titles separately, you gotta get this collection! Especially for Card Fighters Clash alone, I enjoyed that one back in the day even more than Pokémon! I hope they keep releasing these classics in the future. Maybe someday we’ll get an English translated Card Fighters Clash 2. Or maybe Crush Roller? And even though it’s a licensed title, I’d also like to see Sonic Pocket Adventure.
Kid Factor:
NEO GEO Pocket Color Selection Vol. 2 is rated T for Teen with ESRB descriptors of Crude Humor, Fantasy Violence, Language, Simulated Gambling, and Suggestive Themes. Some of the games feature fighting, but you’re just battling cartoony robots or pixelated people. The board game has dice rolling, so that’s simulated gaming. I didn’t really notice any bad language. The Neo Poke-Kun game has crude humor in that he picks his nose and farts, and some of the games feature anime ladies wearing skimpy outfits. But even so, the simple graphics negate a lot of this stuff and I’d be mostly OK with any kid playing these titles. Reading skill is needed for the text, though, and some younger gamers may get bored with the older style titles.
Don’t forget to check out my review of the first NEO GEO Pocket Color collection, too!
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