Editor Reviews:

Editorial Review:
Look out, Game Boy Color. When it comes to serious portable gameplay, there's finally some legitimate competition for the popular Nintendo system (which has sold over 80 million units). If you dare to be different, consider the NEOGEO Pocket Color, a hand-held system created by the Japanese company SNK.

The screen is 10 percent bigger than Game Boy's, but the overall machine has roughly the same convenient pocket-sized dimensions and light weight as the Game Boy. The NEOGEO Pocket Color provides up to 40 hours of continuous fun on just two AA batteries. The 16-bit graphics are crystal clear--making it easy to tell the difference between humans and animals, friends and foes, and walls and doors--and easily viewed in both bright and dim lighting. The color palette has three times the range of its competitor's, with 146 possible shades. There is also a built-in calendar, daily horoscope, alarm clock, and global clock that can be accessed even without a game cartridge in the slot. Two players can go head-to-head with a simple cable connection (sold separately). NEOGEO is available in six different casing colors: silver, clear, blue, ocean blue, stone blue, and anthracite.

The only drawback is that NEOGEO is new and, therefore, playing catch-up to Nintendo's well-stocked list of titles, which boasts A-list offerings such as Super Mario Brothers, Pokémon Pinball, and Tetris. But SNK scores points for the few titles that it does offer for the system. Among the better titles for NEOGEO are Dragons Wild video poker, arcade classics Bust-A-Move and Pac-Man, and your basic serve-and-volley Pocket Tennis. Most of these games are pretty addictive and perfectly suited to the well-designed, thumb-friendly, eight-position joystick. --Carrie Bell

Pros:

• Better graphics than other portable players
• Very good visibility in bright sun and dim light
• Variety of fun colors

• No Pokémon titles yet
• Response of the joystick isn't the best on games (such as Crush Roller) that require sharp, quick turns

Rating : - A Finished Masterpiece of Design and Quality
I just purchased this system (current date: July '08) and have been using it for over a month. I believe that this portable system is perfect. The time that has passed between now and its active production only sharpen my feeling that the NeoGeo Pocket was a masterpiece production.

This review will be improved by the fact that I am not a hardcore video game player and I had not owned a portable game device in years. I purchased the Nintendo DS at the same time that I purchased the NeoGeo Pocket and so my comparisons/perspectives here are fresh and objective.

The NeoGeo Pocket has a terrific design that makes it easy to handle. It has a much more functional design than the Nintendo DS. Human hands fit the device perfectly and the digital input joy-pad and snappy buttons feel terrific. Directional movements that are very difficult to execute with a d-pad are easy to perform with NGPC's joy-pad.

The games that were designed for the NGPC had to be operable with two buttons. The game designers were clever and succeeded in doing more with less and so the NGPC is more efficient and is easier to use than a Nintendo DS. The 'DS has 6 main buttons (input through the buttons is soft and disappointing) and it 6 mediocre buttons seem superfluous in comparison to NGPC's wonderful two-button implementation.

A recent article in Game Informer magazine observed that '[the majority of the...]' games produced for Nintendo DS are 'shovelware'. It is a fact that many of the games in the ds library should never have been released, for example 'Shogun: Total War' has known bugs in it and is basically a game that was released half-way through its needed development time. Shogun's beta-quality is surprisingly un-surprising due to an overall low quality found in many DS games.

The NGPC game library is brimming with quality. There are several titles on NGPC that, taken individually, have more production quality and entertainment value than the entire library of games that exist for the Nintendo DS. NGPC's games have an incredible level of polish in their design. This portable system has a higher quality surrounding its library than any other portable.

The battery life is wonderful at approximately ~40+-50+ hours. The NGPC hardly ever needs to have its batteries replaced and so you don't have to be aware of how much battery power you have left each time you use it.

If you are thinking that the non-back-lit screen should be a deal-breaker, you're wrong. The screen is really good you don't need a lot of light to comfortably use it.

There's not much more to say. The NGPC is a better hand-held than the Nintendo DS. The architecturally superior, multi-buttoned, back-lit, wireless-enabled Nintendo DS hardware is capable of making games that are more engaging/better than the ones released for NGPC. Unfortunately, without Mario, Nintendo DS is basically the impotent millionaire compared to a vigorous NGPC professional (brains over brawn).

Most of the artwork and animation in the NGPC is composed of 2d-art and animation. A person can really 'feel' where the organic visual and sound production meshed with hardware to produce a complete universe that is artistically original and consistent in a pleasant way. As video games these days come closer to achieving the qualities of the cinematic and the realistic, those qualities only seem more ordinary, and so a system like NGPC stands out at this time, because it engages users in a way that is consistently stylized to be original.