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Post by bonesnapdeez on Mar 27, 2023 15:06:56 GMT -5
Randomly got thinking about how bad pre-Neo Geo SNK arcade games were. Or, at best, how mediocre they were.
Athena is a notoriously shitty platformer. The Ikari Warriors trilogy sucks and is brutally mogged by Commando, Heavy Barrel, and even Front Line. (Hot take: the best variant of Ikari Warriors is the 2600 port. It simplifies the game into a nice pleasant playable state.)
Stuff like Guerrilla War and POW fare a little better. Lotsa random mid games that are way worse than Namco, Taito, etc offerings.
Vanguard is/was awesome though. Best second gen shooter? Maybe!
1990 is where things really picked up with the MVS/AES. Not because of Magic Lord or Cyber-Lip though... but because of TOP PLAYER'S GOLF (unironically).
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Post by toei on Mar 27, 2023 21:16:16 GMT -5
Their NEO GEO beat-'em-ups really suck, too. Great graphics, as you'd expect, but they play like ass. Burning Fight especially is straight up Rival Turf-level trash. Hits don't combo, the basic engine doesn't work, it's deeply unsatisfying to play. Probably the best-looking first-generation Final Fight clone, though. I think the other thing that elevated SNK, besides the arrival of the NEO GEO, is the hiring of Capcom's Takashi Nishiyama and Hiroshi Matsumoto, who proceeded to start all the SNK VS fighter series.
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Post by bonesnapdeez on Mar 27, 2023 21:40:03 GMT -5
Oh yeah, the thought of someone paying $200 for a Burning Fight cartridge back in the early 90s makes me feel bad lol. Same goes for Ninja Combat, though that one's better.
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Post by Sarge on Apr 2, 2023 17:19:22 GMT -5
I like P.O.W. a lot. It's not top-tier, but I've got a big soft spot for it. The local Walmart had it for a long time, and I got to play it once or twice.
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Post by Ex on Apr 2, 2023 20:43:17 GMT -5
paying $200 for a Burning Fight cartridge back in the early 90s makes me feel bad $200 in 1991 equates to $447 in 2023 money, according to the CPI Inflation Calculator. With tax that would equate to $500 for ONE FRICKIN' GAME. I knew literally no one IRL who owned a Neo Geo in the '90s.
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Post by toei on Apr 2, 2023 21:06:22 GMT -5
People keep forgetting that Neo Geo were cheap arcade systems first and expensive consoles second. They only started manufacturing the console version for rental stores initially, then got into direct sales to consumers because they were getting a lot of requests for it. But they conceived the Neo Geo for the arcades and that was their main business. Most arcade games cost several times what a Neo Geo arcade cabinet did.
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Post by Ex on Apr 2, 2023 22:15:03 GMT -5
That doesn't change the fact the Neo Geo console and its games were absurdly expensive. If in 1991 you were wealthy enough to afford a $649 Neo Geo and its $200 games, you were wealthy enough to buy an arcade cabinet if you wanted. The rest of us had to make due with arcade-to-console ports for cheaper consoles, which sometimes ended up being funner anyway.
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Post by Sarge on Apr 2, 2023 22:36:47 GMT -5
They were absurdly expensive... yet still not as absurd as an arcade cabinet, for the most part. As terrible as $200 a game sounds, at least it's not a whole cabinet again. Yeah, you could buy the boards for a JAMMA cabinet, but those would definitely run more than $200 as well.
Anyway, Neo Geo was still a rich kid's system, or someone that had money to burn. And I mean, if you had that money and that's what you wanted, who am I to judge? Kid me would look upon current-day me as gaming royalty, haha.
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Post by Ex on Apr 2, 2023 22:53:09 GMT -5
In today's money, it cost about $2000.00 for a Neo Geo console and one cartridge. That's retail list price including average tax rate factored in. This explains why I knew no one personally who owned one. I remember as a kid seeing Neo Geo ads in video game magazines and thinking it might as well exist on the moon. I can't recall even seeing one in a retail store.
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Post by Sarge on Apr 2, 2023 23:00:01 GMT -5
True, but the carts were definitely a solid cost-saving measure. Even if paying $200 (or more!) for a cart was absolutely unfathomable to me then. I'm not sure I saw that much money in a year!
I'm wanting to say machines around that time usually cost $2000-3500, so the Neo Geo was definitely appealing for operators that wanted to cycle through games without breaking the bank.
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