Games That Push The Limits of the NEO-GEO 

Neo geo was an amalgamation of 8/16/32 bit architecture, not solely 16 but.

Even as a child we knew not to ask for a Neo Geo for Xmas. It was a rich-mans toy. $200 for a single game was absolutely ludicrous.

Great job on the video. I just wanted to touch upon a few details based on my own experiences as an owner of the Neo•Geo AES home system, at launch, in the USA. 1. The Neo•Geo AES was launched in the USA in December 1990. (Wikipedia, and other sources, often wrongly state that it was released ONLY in Japan in 1990, and not until 1991 in the USA. This is of course false). I bought mine on 1990.12.18. 2. The prices were originally as follows: $399 for the "Silver System", which contained the console, ONE arcade stick, and NO game. And $550 the Neo•Geo "Gold System", which contained the console, TWO arcade sticks, and ONE cart. You had the option of picking between either Baseball Stars Professional, or NAM-1975. (Soon after the launch, SNK woukd also add the option of Magician Lord as the choice of game cart).**Again, Wikipedia and other sources often claim the system was $650 at launch. This is untrue. They are confusing the deal SNK USA had made with brick and mortar retailers, Babbage's, Software Etc., and Electronics Boutique. That happened in later Summer 1991, and for $649.99 MSRP. 3. Originally, Neo•Geo AES Cartridges were dynamically priced, based on their ROM sizes. For example, in 1990, League Bowling, at only 26 Mbits, sold for $120 (USD), while the largest game at launch, Top Player's Golf, (62 MEG) sold for $170. Later games such as Meal Slug 3, were htting sizes of 708 Megabits, or more.. This was even higher than the system's start-up screen brag was claiming "330 MAX MEGA". 4. Speaking of later AES games, some of the final releases, after SNK started seeing financial woes, had very small USA release quantities. With Metal Slug 3, Sengoku 3, and others reportedly only releasing print runs of only 500 copies each. This is a big part of the reason why those are now selling for $3000 for a mint copy. 5. One last thing. People tend to think of the Neo•Geo as a VS. Fighting system.. While SNK has some amazing fighters, they also have a pretty good blend of other genres as well. I went through all of the 157 games and have done some quick math, I suck at math!.. but I've come up with 37.5%. That's the total number of fighting games on the Neo•Geo. (50 out of 157). To put this number in perspective, the Neo has 24 sports games, 16 shooters (Shmups), and 16 run & gun games. Sure it's a lot of fighters, but people often tend to believe that the system is MOSTLY fighters. Often people throwing out numbers like "90% fighters" "75%", but no.. It's 37.5%, so please correct those people when you get the chance. I love the Neo•Geo, and I love it for it's classic arcade style action, sports, among others. -MattH.

When you consider how many years SNK used this hardware it's an incredible tech achievement that has never been repeated.

Greatest console ever created. It was a true honor to own one.

the neo geo was great, its 13 year long lifespan proves it

What I find truly impressive about the Metal Slug games is that they're so "over-animated" and yet never feel sluggish or unresponsive. (Aside from the slowdown.) Having animation with so many frames, without compromising responsiveness, is a serious challenge - one that a lot of other games at the time failed miserably at.

As a kid in the 90's you always heard about the Neo Geo, but none of your friends had a Neo-Geo. Shit was expensive.

I knew the Neo-Geo was good at sprite scaling, but I had no idea it could only scale down. What a strange and interesting limitation.

Technically you could say it was a 24 bit console.

I do not intend to sound as if I'm blowing smoke up your 455: now with that out of the way - this has become one of my absolute favorite RU-vid channels. The in depth information, the thoroughness, the attention to detail and narration that is pleasing and easy to listen to. Please keep making these gaming documentaries and minidocs, they are wonderful.

We are so fortunate that we can play these brilliant games through emulation. The SNK artists were the best. Magician lord and Cadash are my favourites.

Good stuff! Thanks in particular for putting some "baseline" games at the beginning to help calibrate expectations for the system.

As a very fortunate AES owner with fully loaded Terraonion ROM cart, this was a really lovely piece of work to absorb. Always amazed me how incredible some games still look today on a decent CRT (Slugs / Garou etc) but I'd never considered how the NeoGeo was completely lacking in certain areas, to the extent that Lemmings would be nigh on / absolutely impossible (which I had on my trusty GameGear). Anyhow, lovely stuff, thanks again and I'll 100% share this YT link with the NeoGeo community where I can.

It's silly, but one of my favorite games of all time is "King of the Monsters 2" on Neo Geo. They did make ports to other consoles but none of them came close the fidelity which Neo Geo put out.

A local video rental shop where you could get movies to rent, also did games and game systems. When I was a teen, after school I worked in a garage/gas station. I got paid every Friday and since I only had to work 1 Saturday a month, I spent the other 3 weekends renting a NEO-GEO from Friday until Monday. I would call days ahead and reserve the system, to the point I didn't have to call anymore, she held it for me anyway. Living in the country, trapped tightly between the mountains back then, there wasn't places I could buy it. Actually, I had no clue what it was when they got it, but seeing the back of the game boxes, I had no choice but to get it and try it out. Inside I knew it was going to promise things t couldn't deliver on, as many games/consoles did that all the time back then. I got Super Baseball All Stars 2, and took it home. I just absolutely couldn't believe what I was seeing and something you don't hear to much about, how amazing it sounds. It was like everything you saw at an arcade, but in your home. Suffice it to say, I basically got no sleep on weekends again, for a long time.

Gotta love how everyone picks the green ship in Blazing Star, it's just the default option to most players because of the spread shot.

В России практически не было этих систем, но в начале 2000 я познакомился с эмулятором Нео Гео и был в шоке от Метал Слага. Совсем недавно собрал свой автомат на плате MV-1B и картриджа 161 в 1 с суперганом для джойстиков Сега Сатурн. Какие бы игры могли быть, если вместо Сеги или Супер Нинтендо у всех стояла эта консоль!

Would love to see a collaboration between yourself and DF Retro, your stuff is on he same level imo

Yes, yes, yesss. I was hoping you'd do this. Great timing as I'm ill in bed and need something to take my mind off it all.

If I remember correctly MAME had pretty decent Neo-Geo emulation in 1998, so the Dreamcast AND MAME were options for Garou :)

Twinkle Star Sprites pushed the limits for sure. It intentionally crams so much stuff on the screen that it slows the game to a crawl. Plus it was made by ADK who did a lot of the engineering on the Neo Geo hardware itself.

The Neo Geo is one of those consoles that REALLY showcase how experienced programmers can make the absolutely utmost use of the hardware. For a 24 bit system it was right between that 16 and 32 bit era (SNES and Playstation). Because of it's exceedingly long lifetime for a console/arcade system (15 years) the developers became VERY familiar with the system's capabilities. When you compare early games to the Neo Geo to the later games it was night and day. Early games were barely any better than their 16 bit counterparts, but later games rivaled some PS1 games. Just look at Fatal Fury vs Mark of the Wolves. Night and day, man.

This was always one of my favorite systems, despite never actually owning one. Great games and had awesome soundtracks.

Thanks for the video man! hearing you talk about these systems is like opening one new in the box!

In The Hunt, Gunforce 1 & 2, Gunstar Heroes, Wild Guns, Vector Man 1 & 2, Alien Solider, Conta Hard Corps, Earth Worm Jim 1 & 2, Demolition Man, Midnight Resistance, Realm on SNES, Rendering Ranger R2 on SNES, Robocop Vs Terminator on Sega Genesis, Terminator, Mega Turrican, Turrican 3, Ruff 'n' Tumble,Jim Power: The Lost Dimension in 3-D, Alien Carnage to name some that hold up pretty well to Metal Slug imo.

Former Neo Geo MVS owner here. So the pricing for new games was around $200-$300 when I was shopping around back in the day. I seem to recall that's roughly what I paid for Garou MoTW (thankfully closer to $200 from what I remember). What cannot be understated though was the price of the second hand market. The majority of my collection was around $5-10 per cartridge, as fortunately the demand for MVS amongst collectors was pretty low... AES on the other hand, eep!

Hi Sharo, What an amazing, well thought out, and informative video you done regarding the Neo-Geo. This really is a greatly detailed upload to be shared for newcomers and vets alike to enjoy what the Neo-Geo is and has to offer for the public. I love it kind sir. Thank you for sharing this. I've been playing Neo-Geo for 33 years and it's never a dull moment playing the game for sure Sharo. The game that made me a buff since is Magician Lord. A very challenging game to play for sure. Your upload was posted up on the Neo-Geo thread over on the forums on AtariAae for others to take notice and to enjoy bro. Thank you for sharing this with us and keep up the excellent work you provide for the community. 8^) Anthony...

Such a great video! Thank you and keep em coming!

Love Neo Geo games at the arcades.

Sharopolis video on the Neo Geo!? I couldn't click fast enough. I did a bit of digging and the Neo Geo is a strange beast. It's really powerful compared to the SNES and Genesis, but it seems to also have a harder time with pseudo 3D or polygon graphics compared to the SNES and Genesis. I'm not talking about enhancement chips games like Virtua Racing or Star Fox. I'm talking about stuff like Race Driving or Another World.

Great video!!! My fave videos are like this one and the Lynx. Unique consoles that did things differently. So many vids on the Nintendo and Sega retro consoles but during the 80s and 90s there were so many obscure consoles that were released that most retro channels don't cover

Look ma! My name's in the credits! Another really cool look into a console I never really got to experience. Cool stuff.

Although I do enjoy my AES system & games I never really thought any of them pushed the hardware because it was so powerful at the time and the extra bits (not talking CPU bits people) and available space in the massive cartridges seemed limitless. I’m fact I always felt it was the Genesis/MD & SNES that developers pushed hardware quite literally in hundreds of games but definitely some fantastically impressive games you’ve listed here.

Absolutely bloody love these videos. Love the neo geo

Damn, i love Galaxy Fight so much, it's sad we didn't had some sequels.

It's hard to explain how good this console was in the 90s. I used to play the games at Skegness, then couldn't believe it when my friend swapped his Amiga 500 for one. He literally walked past my house. I went round about 10 mins later. It was awesome! Then I ended up owning one myself and the very game I used to play at Skegness - World Heroes 2 Jet. I swapped it for a Sega Saturn at a local game shop. Then fast forward a year and I ended up owning a Datel SuperGun and a Final Fight PCB. Awesome times! :)

Best 16 bit era console, for all the wrong reasons.

Great i played a lot of these games in arcades growing up .neogeo arcade systems where very popular compared to other brands .and the last time i saw them in public was as recent as 2012. but growing up i didn't realise there was a console version. back in the day it as harder to get info about this stuff the marketing for games was more limited.

My Neo-Geo experience starts and ends at beat-to-hell cabinets with one or another of the King of Fighters games. I had no idea how good these games look! Your explanation of the hardware capabilities was great as always, but I was distracted by the visuals and I'm sure I missed bits. 😅 Just amazed at how people figured out how to use this hardware so well.

metal slug has the mose beautiful 2d graphics there ever were and probably will be. the pixel art is on top level. animation! is beautiful. every little thing is so beautifully animated... such a shame snk decided to kick the metal slug series releasing cashgrab mobile games... ms3 is peak of 2d graphics and animation.

I always believed there was something superior about NeoGeo games and it was satisfying to confirm that from this video. Absolutely loved watching every second from start to end.

I wish we could've seen a successor to riding hero on the same system. It would have been nice to see how close the neo geo could get to creating a super hang on like experience

Another brilliant video. Thank you 👍

I can count the number of JRPG on this system with my testicles

Sometimes I forget that Garou MOTW is running on 1990 hardware. Everybody who was into beat em ups wanted one but it was the prices of the games was the roadblock for !many.

Lucky and Wild, Baseball Stars 2, Baseball 2020 where exceptional games on this console as well. NEO-GEO will forever be the ultimate arcade experience.

It was always the Metal Slugs games and the Samurai Showdown games. They were always beautiful at the arcades. And I know. Im a 90s kids.

I've played the Metal Slug games but somehow never knew about Cyber Lip. I wonder why there weren't way more Contra style shmups during the 8 and 16-bit era. The formula is so simple and the games are lots of fun.

great video! do one for the hyper neo!

I have waited years for this

Great Stuff!

Even all these years later, Real Bout Fatal Fury 2 remains my favorite fighting game ever. My brother and I used to literally spend hours in a singke sitting beating on each other in Real Bout 2.

i worked in arcades during the late 90's and early 00's and the Neo-Geo totally had it's place. Hot swapping games was great and there were even boards that could hold multiple carts that you could select through. Games like metal slug financially punched above their weight when compared to the big initial outlay of say a Tekken.

I hear a fellow english accent, I see neogeo, I KNOW the metal slug section is going to be the longest lol Nice one my man :D.

Last blade 2 is also great Bgm was phenomenal

I visited SNK every month in the 90s, there was a time that they worried about Polygons when the PS1 came out

Rouge leader one and two were like neo Geo games.

The Bugatti of game consoles

$200 for one game? I'm glad the Arcade Archives NeoGeo series is on Switch; the Switch does an awesome job emulating the NeoGeo and I can get the games for a fraction of the price. I have Alpha Mission II and Ninja Master's so far but would like more.

Great video, the NeoGeo is an impressive beast. That "cereal" looks like garbage though.

I had no idea why the Neo Geo was so different from the other consoles.

Fortunately it was possible to rent one at that time. There was a great video games store with a lot of games and consoles to rent.

I still say Neo Geo is the most beautiful console ever made. God i wanted one SO bad growing up. Here i am 20 years later....still cant afford one.

Interesting that you were so impressed with the realistic-shaped shadows and reflections in Galaxy Fight on Neo Geo, as this was also one of the things that impressed me with Killer Instinct on SNES (and with no flickering either), and even more so considering that sheer difference in relative power and indeed prices of both machines' games: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-UAyVXWY-wks.html ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-UAyVXWY-wks.html

Neo Geo was 24 bit - the MC68000 haS a 16/ 32 bit architecture. 4096 colours on screen for it's time was mental

Eu adoraria ver um vídeo seu sobre os jogos que puxaram o Pc88 ao limite

What, no mention of the saturn port of Metal Slug that has way better animation due to requiring the RAM cart

It was technically a 24 bit machine. It could display a ton of color , could do scaling and rotation. It also had more ram and the carts were huge for the time. They were technically around the same as N64 carts. People get all confused with megs and megabytes. I think one meg is 64 megabytes. On the other hand the snes and genesis used 4 megabyte cartridges Standard. They could expand up to 24 megabytes. Later on carts were modified to go to 32 megabytes. So one Standard neo geo cart was one meg or 64 megabytes. Not sure how high the carts could actually go but I am pretty sure some neo geo games went to 256 megabytes. I think later on they had one cart that went over 700 megabytes? For contrast not certain but the largest N64 games were 256 megabytes. So neo geo was putting PS1 , N64 size games on a 24 bit machine. That is why the damn cartridges cost so much. In order to get it almost arcade perfect SNK would cram those carts with a crazy amount of memory for the time.

I was almost a teen when the console released. Even my richest friends at the time couldn’t afford the system. Still never played the hardware. Maybe one day!

Released before SNES Still had games years after Dreamcast ☠️

Great video, imo you just missed The Last Blade 2 which I think looks even better than Garou but other than that you nailed it.

I want an AES w/Ram cart so bad. I wish I never sold my Neo Geo back in the day.

I love being a patreon so I can see these vids first. Some of the best content on RU-vid.

Loved my Neo Geo. Except for using the joysticks at night...

Nice!

DUDE - How'd you get Rich Evans to do your cereal ad???

I never really thought about how long the Neo*Geo was in the console race for before. What was it, 15-ish years? With that ideas in mind, how about a Consoles That Push The Officially Supported Time Limit, or something like that?

What's the reason for omitting tiles? Does it require a lot more to be added to the hardware or were they worried that programmers would rely on tiles and not animate and move things as much? It seems like they could have does even more scrolling and had more reserved for necessary sprites. I know they're more limited, but are tiles so much more trouble to use, or did they just not think they needed them?

Can you cover Killer Instinct for SNES that game’s graphics still blow my mind!! And I had a play station when I first played it at a friend’s house back in the late 90s!!

Yeah those early release titles were rough.

"On the GLEEN!!"

Feels weird hearing a news reporter talkin about neo geo

Magic Sharpoon!

I remember wanting one of these so bad back then. I was really into JRPG's like Final Fantasy III and Chrono Trigger at the time though. I wondered what one of those games would look like on the NeoGeo. The system was mostly fighting games and shooters as far as i knew. Not alot of bang for the buck at 700 + 250 for the top tier games. Chrono Trigger wasn't exactly cheap but way more game for the $ imo. But to this day, if i see a NeoGeo arcade, i'll plop spare change in an have a go.

It's great with a Neo SD pro cartridge.

It's a hard pill to swallow, but developers did more limit pushing on the Megadrive than they ever managed on NEO-GEO. There's no 'The Adventures of Batman and Robin' on the system.

The Big Mac.

Was playing gp rider litterally last night!

Fun fact: The program code alone for Metal Slug 3 is 50% larger than the largest SNES game! Yes; the P-ROM alone is _64 megabits._ 😮 Interesting aside: In most versions of the cart, this is two 32mbit PDIP mask ROMs, but there's an early revision where the two P-ROM sockets are spanned by a daughterboard which is basically a NEO-GEO Pocket Color dev cartridge with 4x16mbit flash memory, so it could be quickly rewritten with the same tools. btw, my understanding is that arcade operators were paying upwards of a grand for a game at the height of the MVS's popularity, which explains why some were using adapters to illicitly run AES carts in cabinets... 🤔 Another interesting thing about the arcades; SNK had a system for renting carts so ops could do location tests and decide whether or not they wanted to buy the game. You can spot these carts because they come in a slightly translucent white shell with SNKG molded in the side and no serial numbers or warranty label. Speaking of serial numbers... You can tell if an MVS game entered the secondary market during the system's lifespan, because the serial number will often be cut from the label so SNK couldn't find out what operator was reselling games. (I've even got an MVS mainboard or two with the serial _dremeled_ off the PCB! 😅)

For a min i thought super spoon was a neo geo game i had never heard of😅

I always wanted a neo geo

I thought the character in the thumbnail was Fred from Scooby Doo

Shocked Samurai Shodown 5 Special isn't in here, it's even bigger than Garou

Well you might think that polygon rendering should be possible on the neo geo trough software, Maybe trough extra expandiblr ram?

13:33 What about metal slug 2? Just asking cuz it had crazy slowdown and you didn't mention 2 just 1 and 3.

26:30 Outro music?

Another pair of fighting game on the NeoGeo with amazing animations, which I think it was developed by the same team as Mark of the Wolves, is The Last Blade 1 & 2. It has beautiful animation and background designs, but unlike Garou it features scaling similar to Art of Fighting and Samurai Shodown

I feel like it could handle something like Wolfenstein3D with that scaling hardware, a ray caster should run on this using the sprite scaling to draw the walls.

Awesome video, but surprised you didn’t mention the NeoGeo ports for the Nintendo Switch. They seem ok to my eyes, but I’d love to see a proper tech analysis.