2347: Discovering the Neo Geo

To date, my knowledge of the Neo Geo platform has largely been limited to “it was that one where games cost over £100”. Thanks to a recent Humble Bundle, though (running for another 16 hours at the time of writing) I’ve had the opportunity to have a go at what my friend Chris assures me are a pretty classic selection of games from the platform.

I’m kind of sorry I haven’t checked out Neo Geo games earlier, because they fulfil every criteria I have in my head for what I think an “arcade game” should look, sound and feel like. This is largely because as well as being a home console, the Neo Geo also powered plenty of arcade machines in its time, and the versions you played on the console were exactly the same as you’d play in the arcade. Very few other consoles at the time could boast arcade perfect gameplay and presentation.

But what do I mean by what an arcade game should look, sound and feel like? Well, it’s largely a nostalgia thing. When I think of arcade games, I think of childhood trips to the seaside — primarily either Hunstanton if we were going for a day trip, or Newquay if we’d gone on holiday to Devon and/or Cornwall — which always involved a trip to the arcades. To Americans, this might sound like a strange thing to get excited about, but here in the UK, we never really had much of an arcade culture — except, for some reason, at the seaside. In other words, an arcade was a rather unusual sight unless you happened to live on the waterfront, so it was a rare treat to be able to pump some small change into these games, many of which either didn’t see home ports at all, or saw vastly inferior ports to home computer and console hardware that couldn’t keep up with the specialised, dedicated arcade hardware.

When I think of these trips to the arcade, I think of several things. I think of the feeling of putting a coin in. I think of the sound the machines would make when it accepted your credits. I think of the sounds they’d make when you’d press the Start button, and the dramatic presentation of a new player joining or the Game Over screen.

I think of beautifully defined pixel art, far sharper and more detailed than anything I’d see on a system connected to the TV. I think of impressive animation. I think of sprite scaling and rotation. I think of specialised controls.

When I boot up a Neo Geo game, all of these feelings come flooding back to me. Individually, these elements aren’t much, but they add up to the “arcade experience” for me, and said experience carries some fond memories.

I’ll talk a bit more about the specific games I’ve had a go with in a later post, but for now I’ll just say that, in terms of gameplay, the Neo Geo games are a reminder of a time when gameplay was first and foremost, and “gitting gud” wasn’t something seen as elitist or exclusionary — if you wanted to see the end of the game, you either had to git gud at the game, or you had to keep throwing those coins into the machine. (Of course, when playing at home, you have the option to keep putting virtual credits in indefinitely — though as any shmup fan will tell you, the real challenge in these games is going for a 1CC, or 1 Credit Clear — beating the game without ever using the Continue feature.)

I like them a lot, in other words, and I’m looking forward to exploring the rest of these interesting, unusual and extremely addictive games further in the near future.