{"id":21409,"date":"2021-07-16T00:01:59","date_gmt":"2021-07-16T00:01:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/?p=21409"},"modified":"2021-07-03T13:00:14","modified_gmt":"2021-07-03T13:00:14","slug":"summer-of-snk-part-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/2021\/07\/16\/summer-of-snk-part-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Summer of SNK: Part 2"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Last time we looked at the arcade cabinet shaped NEO GEO Mini, which has a total of 40 games!\u00a0 That\u2019s enough to split this blog series into two parts, so here\u2019s the second part with the rest of the games on this mini console.<\/p>\n

Sengoku 3<\/strong><\/p>\n

I\u2019m not sure why they didn\u2019t include Sengoku 1 and 2 on here as well. I do remember them being fairly popular on the NEO GEO arcade cabinets.\u00a0 They\u2019re just 2-D side scrolling beat \u2018em ups, but they have a Japanese folklore theme that makes them a bit more interesting.\u00a0 When I first played them as a kid, I wasn\u2019t as familiar with that kind of folklore, so a lot of it was lost on me.\u00a0 But I\u2019m a bit more versed in that stuff now, so I understand it more.<\/p>\n

Magician Lord<\/strong><\/p>\n

I remember when the NEO GEO console and arcade cabinet came out, this was the game they used a lot to promote it.\u00a0 It\u2019s a 2-D platformer where you play as a wizard who shoots projectiles.\u00a0 But you can get power-ups to change your form into stuff like a dragon or samurai, which affects your shot patterns.\u00a0 I remember being floored by the graphics in this game back in the day, which were pretty good for an early NEO GEO title.\u00a0 It\u2019s a bit generic and hard now, though, but still not bad.<\/p>\n

Blue\u2019s Journey<\/strong><\/p>\n

Because of the $700 price tag and the fact that most games in the library were fighters, I never had much of a desire to own a NEO GEO console back then.\u00a0 But every now and then a game would come out that would make me kind of want one.\u00a0 This was one of those games.\u00a0 It\u2019s a colorful and cutesy 2-D platformer where you play as Blue, a tiny man in a bug costume out to rescue a princess with butterfly wings.\u00a0 Oh, and there\u2019s also a bad guy who is polluting the forest, because this was the 90s and every game had to have a \u2018save the environment\u2019 message.\u00a0 Blue can throw leaves at enemies to flip them over, and then he can pick them up and toss them into other enemies.\u00a0 You can also get other weapons later on.\u00a0 Blue can also shrink down in size to fit into small areas, but he can\u2019t attack like that.\u00a0 I never saw this one in arcades, just in stores that sold the NEO GEO home console.\u00a0 Since it is an arcade game, it\u2019s a bit hard and cheap, but still fun.\u00a0 I always wanted to play it back then, but luckily it was on the Wii Virtual Console so I got it finally.\u00a0 And now I can play it any time with the NEO GEO Mini!<\/p>\n

Road Army<\/strong><\/p>\n

This is a 2-D side scrolling beat \u2018em up where you play as a robot cyborg and fight other cyborgs.\u00a0 You can pick up arms and legs from defeated robots and use them as weapons.\u00a0 Everything makes a satisfying metal \u2018crunch\u2019 sound when you hit them.\u00a0 You can also get a power-up that transforms you into a car and you can run over enemies for a while.\u00a0 It\u2019s pretty goofy!<\/p>\n

Crossed Swords<\/strong><\/p>\n

Now this one\u2019s a bit original.\u00a0 You view the action from behind your character and fight other enemies head on as you swing your sword and block attacks.\u00a0 It\u2019s interesting as a couple of arcade playthroughs but that\u2019s about it.<\/p>\n

Mutation Nation<\/strong><\/p>\n

Yet another 2-D side scrolling beat \u2018em up.\u00a0 The gimmick here is that you fight mutants, which are just sprite swaps of generic thugs but with alligator heads and such.\u00a0 It would\u2019ve been cool if your generic fighters could get power-ups and mutate as well, but they don\u2019t.<\/p>\n

3 Count Bout<\/strong><\/p>\n

Just a wrestling game.\u00a0 The characters are all generic muscle bound men, but the sprites and graphics are big and neat looking.<\/p>\n

Art of Fighting<\/strong><\/p>\n

And now for a few one on one fighters, which SNK is best known for.\u00a0 I remember seeing Art of Fighting fairly early on after Street Fighter 2 got popular.\u00a0 Many Art of Fighting characters are in the KOF games, too, like King.\u00a0 I\u2019m a little surprised none of the sequels are on this collection.\u00a0 Art of Fighting focuses more on plot, as you can only pick two characters if you do the Story Mode.\u00a0 The other thing that really stuck out to me in Art of Fighting back then is that the camera zooms in and out of the action.\u00a0 This was a sprite based game so it had to handle both background and sprite scaling at the same time for this effect.\u00a0 That always impressed me back then.\u00a0 The NEO GEO must\u2019ve been pretty powerful to do that.<\/p>\n

The Last Blade 2<\/strong><\/p>\n

Like Samurai Shodown, this one on one fighter has a feudal Japan theme.\u00a0 In fact, I\u2019ve read in some places that it\u2019s meant to be a spinoff of that series, but I\u2019m not sure if that\u2019s really true.\u00a0 I always get mixed up which characters are in each series, though.\u00a0 For instance, I always swear cool lady Shiki is in The Last Blade, but she\u2019s not, she\u2019s in Samurai Shodown!\u00a0 There are a couple of other cool characters in this one, but I can never remember their names.\u00a0 Since this is a later NEO GEO title, the characters look more hand-drawn and less pixelly, and the animations are more fluid.<\/p>\n

World Heroes Perfect<\/strong><\/p>\n

Like Art of Fighting, I remember seeing World Heroes a lot back then.\u00a0 The cast in this one on one fighter is pretty varied, and includes a football player, a jungle man with a big mask, a French swordswoman, and a magician named Rasputin who can make his hands really big to crush his opponents.\u00a0 This game is also really hard.\u00a0 Too bad they didn\u2019t include World Heroes Jet on here.\u00a0 I think that was the last game in the series and has a game show theme to it.<\/p>\n

Kizuna Encounter<\/strong><\/p>\n

I had actually never heard of this fighter before now.\u00a0 It seems fairly forgettable, though.\u00a0 The main character is a woman named Rosa who wears jeans and a red t-shirt and uses a sword.<\/p>\n

Ninja Master\u2019s<\/strong><\/p>\n

Everyone\u2019s a ninja in this fighter.\u00a0 You can pick up weapons to do more damage, too.<\/p>\n

Top Players Golf<\/strong><\/p>\n

Now for a trio of sports games.\u00a0 This golf one is OK, but I really wish they would\u2019ve put in Neo Turf Masters instead, as that one is much better.<\/p>\n

Super Sidekicks<\/strong><\/p>\n

This soccer game has great graphics and is easy to pick up and play, but man the CPU opponents are hard!<\/p>\n

Football Frenzy<\/strong><\/p>\n

I don\u2019t know which games were exclusive to the US version of the NEO GEO Mini, but I imagine this was one of them, seeing how popular football is here.\u00a0 I have a hard time getting into football video games, though.\u00a0 I just can\u2019t wrap my head around all the different rules!<\/p>\n

Blazing Star<\/strong><\/p>\n

Next three games are 2-D shooters, which were a dime a dozen back then.\u00a0 This horizontally scrolling one has neat pre-rendered graphics and lots of pickups.<\/p>\n

Last Resort<\/strong><\/p>\n

Another horizontally scrolling shooter.\u00a0 This one reminds me of R-Type because you get a separate pod that shoots independently.\u00a0 It\u2019s also super hard and when you die you have to start at the beginning again, so no thank you.<\/p>\n

Ghost Pilots<\/strong><\/p>\n

This is a vertically scrolling shooter.\u00a0 You pilot a sea plane and shoot other planes over the ocean and stuff.\u00a0 You can really tell this was made in response to the popularity of Capcom\u2019s 1943 game.\u00a0 You even get power-ups by shooting red planes that fly in formations!\u00a0 I still like 1943 better, though.\u00a0 To this day, 1943 is one of my all time favorite 2-D shooters.<\/p>\n

Puzzled<\/strong><\/p>\n

And last is this puzzle game, made obvious by the title.\u00a0 It plays EXACTLY like Tetris, except your goal is to free a blimp at the bottom of the screen blocked by blocks.\u00a0 If you can clear enough lines so the blimp can float away, you win the level.\u00a0 Since it\u2019s an arcade game it gets hard pretty fast, though.<\/p>\n

And those are all the games on the NEO GEO Mini!\u00a0 In the comments section, let me know what you think of the roster and tell me YOUR favorite NEO GEO titles!\u00a0 Later!\u00a0 –Cary<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Last time we looked at the arcade cabinet shaped NEO GEO Mini, which has a total of 40 games!\u00a0 That\u2019s enough to split this blog series into two parts, so here\u2019s the second part with the rest of the games on this mini console. Sengoku 3 I\u2019m not sure why they didn\u2019t include Sengoku 1 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":21404,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-21409","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-miscellaneous"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21409","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=21409"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21409\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":21411,"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21409\/revisions\/21411"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/21404"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=21409"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=21409"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=21409"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}