Tuesday 5 May 2015

4th Generation - Neo Geo

SNK survives the crash of the arcade in the early 80's and in 1990 proceeded on to release a home console exclusive only in Japan directed to the idea of arcade games being played at home. It was called the Neo Geo, with a selling price of $649. It was a cartridge based system which ran all through 1990's and later was revived in 2012 as the Neo Geo X. This console was falsely advertised as a 24-Bit system when in fact it used 2, 16-Bit parallel processors.

The console could be played both in arcade games, and then continued to be played at home. This was done by using the memory card system of the arcade, saving the game using the 2KB memory cards and putting the memory card in the console at home. This was the first home console to have a removable memory card. It had a resolution of 320x224, 64k colors available to be used with 4k of them able to be viewed on screen. It's ROM cartridges original specification was 330megabits and some other games such as top hunter could achieve the ''100mega shock''.This was always presented as one of their main advantages over other consoles when advertised in commercials as you can see below. Later the ROM size on cartridges could be upgraded to the 716megabits. When this was done the loading screen would show you ''Giga Power Pro Gear Spec'' to notify you that the console is using the 716megabits cartridge enhancement. 



One of the main problems that this console had was the price. The console being way ahead of all the other consoles and of it's time, was incredibly expensive ($649) compared to other consoles which some costed $199. Another problem was that the games where also very expensive, price at $250 each. This meant that you could buy an NES console at about $199 and also some additional game equal to one game console of the Neo Geo. Another thing that wasn't in their favor was the gamer's tastes which shifted away from their game style, which was 2D sprite based graphics, this lead to developers developing less games for the console.

This Neo geo commercial focused on their ''100mega shock'' console capabilty and their most popular and success game ''Art of Fighting'' which was SNK's response to compete with the famous Street fighter released by Capcom.



Bibliography: 
Wikipedia, (2015). Neo Geo (system). [online] Available at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neo_Geo_(system) [Accessed 6 May 2015].

Narcisse, E. (2015). Neo Geo | Top 10 Failed Gaming Consoles | TIME.com. [online] TIME.com. Available at: http://techland.time.com/2010/11/04/top-10-failed-gaming-consoles/slide/neo-geo/ [Accessed 6 May 2015].

Wikipedia, (2015). History of video game consoles (fourth generation). [online] Available at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_video_game_consoles_%28fourth_generation%29 [Accessed 6 May 2015].

YouTube, (2015). Top 10 Worst Video Game Consoles. [online] Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o7XfaVkIlqo [Accessed 6 May 2015].

Videogamecritic.com, (2015). The Video Game Critic's Neo Geo Console Review. [online] Available at: http://videogamecritic.com/neogeoinfo.htm [Accessed 6 May 2015].

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