Particularly the AES, but if you had other experiences, share them below!
Like everyone else, I mostly remember being amazed by both the graphics and the price. Nobody I knew had one, except one guy who acquired it using money he’d raised through, shall we say, illicit means. As such, he kept it under his bed all the time in case his parents ever found out and nobody saw it. Come to think of it, he may have been making the whole thing up…
As mentioned elsewhere, this was the first system I was enthusiastic about emulating.
I was lucky enough to live in Japan during the early 90s and again the early 00s, and remember the neo Geo and wonderswan fondly. I never owned any, I had a Gameboy, but I had friends with them. Japan’s older games always had a unique charm to them, especially on those consoles, and of course their arcades (all their * mania machines!)
I remember them from magazines in the 90’s but they were totally urban legend. Never seen one in real life but it’s been good to experience them emulated. Wind jammers, metal slug, king of fighters, last blade, so many classics. It’s a shame it never went mainstream.
I mostly remember seeing reviews of Neo-Geo games in CVG UK when I was a kid, and remarking at how insanely expensive they were. I think one game was something crazy like 300 pounds of 1990s money, so probably about 10,000 pounds of today’s money. When I moved to Japan I would see the same games on sale used for about 500 yen, which was about 4 pounds at the time.
Neo Geo was one of the first systems I was really into playing on emulators because of how much we all desired them as kids and because they played great even on my ancient Pentium 200 back in 2000 or so.
EDIT: I just remembered that when I joined my first company in Japan (in 2006 I think), one of my colleagues had a real Neo-Geo and we played 2-player Metal Slug during our afternoon break from time to time. He had the smaller sticks, not the behemoth ones that are larger than the console itself, and they were quite comfy to use. He had Blazing Star, Last Resort, Metal Slug and Metal Slug X. I think only Last Resort and Blazing Star were legit carts, and he sold Blazing Star for a decent amount of money when he got rid of it all.
Holy jeepers! 12 grand usd for a game! Never grew up around these but they’re the only games I emulate seeing how it’s 400usd for a aes everdrive and 1.2k for a console (in bad condition). The games really are beautiful though. Fatal fury has some of my favorite pixel art to date!
I was exaggerating, sorry :) I don’t know what that is in today’s money and am too lazy to find out, but it’s a lot. I don’t know exactly the difference between regular home console carts like those for Megadrive and SNES, and those for the Neo-Geo, but I think the main difference was that the Neo-Geo was essentially an arcade system, so didn’t sacrifice anything for the home cartridge version. I think the price was mainly so much higher due to the comparatively huge ROM chips back when memory was rather expensive. Typical SNES games were 8 megabits I think, and the largest (according to Wikipedia) was 48. Neo Geo could go much higher and games were often 100 megabits or more.
I do know a bit about AES hardware, and there are actually 2 boards in there (pic related)
Sorry if this gets a bit technical, but iirc it uses a huge banks of ROM then a chip to synchronize both boards. Might be entirely wrong though, I can’t find anything on it recently
Haven’t played it really until recently, but got into the Metal Slug games in emulation and had a wonderful time. Great series of shoot-em-ups with fun visual designs and a looser feel than the Contra games that makes them feel less intimidating (even if I still have to continue a lot.) 3 especially is fantastic.
From there tried out Neo Turf Masters as the other game by Nazca and it clicked in a way golf games haven’t for me in the past and played it for hours on end. Extremely intuitive, pick up and play, and actually good at communicating which clubs to use for what in a way I haven’t seen before.
Many fond memories of MVS cabinets being commonplace in the 90s. Lots of hours playing Metal Slug and Bubble Bobble.
Never saw an AES system in person.
I put many a quarter in my local Pizza Hut’s MVS in the 90s. Back then the pizza was good, too!
I still have my old AES (2 of them) with all of the controllers and tons of the huge games. One of my favorite gaming memories is with this console.
What in particular did you want to know?
I never saw one in the wild. I remember it had a ton of arcade games it could run. It was super SUPER expensive though, right?
For some reason this and the Atari jaguar are linked in my brain. They must have come out around the same time or something.
I remember seeing the AES in magazines and the like and wanting one but they were stupidly expensive. Nobody I knew had one, they were known as rich kids toys.
I bought an AES with controllers, memory card and a few games from an unsuspecting kid in the late 90’ for next to nothing because “2D games are old”, best deal I ever made.
I could never afford “new” games tho, so I bought and superguned a MVS a few years later. Windjammers still is a late-night staple with friends.
Lucky!
Lucky af!
That kid saw me playing emulated Neo Geo games in high school on the communal space’s computer. He went like “oh you like those games? I have one of those, my brother gave it to me, I wanna resell it to buy a N64”.
I have the RG405M with Android 12 and I still enjoy playing Metal Slug on the Neo-Geo emulator but I never owned a Neo-Geo.
By the way: Does anyone remember the Neo-Geo song by Keith Apicary? ;) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q_kGJBv6Wr4
Never owned one, but the Metal Slug Anthology and the KOF Collections on PS2 showed me how much of a powerhouse it was for the era.
I only got to try one at the National Video Game museum in Texas. I was blown away when I learned that the cartridges have like entire computers in them.
I never used/have been lucky to be around an AES, but I got a Neo Geo Pocket Color last year and I LOVE it. Despite the smaller game library than other handhelds, the control stick feels super premium and I love the build of it. It feels like a handheld that was designed for arcade enthusiasts, which seems to be what it was intended to be. Also the game library is quite good when it isn’t casino games for some reason!
