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Humble Bundle for the Neo Geo 25th Anniversary Sounds Amazing
For only $10, Humble Bundle is offering an astounding cornucopia of classic gaming, but there's a catch.
News
by
Mike Williams,
12/08/2015.
It's been 25 years since SNK's Neo Geo arcade board and home console were released. The actual anniversary was on April 26 of this year, but SNK Playmore has been celebrating the anniversary for some time now, primarily with its work on the upcoming King of Fighters XIV. Today, SNK Playmore has tried to outdo itself in partnership with Humble Bundle.
The Neo Geo 25th Anniversary Humble Bundle looks like the best bundle many have seen on the site. It's not just that titles like King of the Monsters, The Last Blade, Shock Troopers, Twinkle Star Sprites, and Sengoku 3 are being officially released on PC for the first time ever. It's not just that paying $10 gets you 21 classic Neo Geo games and the Neo Geo 25th Anniversary soundtrack. It's not just the fact that you're getting two Samurai Shodown games (II and V), four Metal Slugs (1, 2, 3, and X), or three King of Fighters games (98, 2000, 2002).
The best part is the Neo Geo 25th Anniversary Humble Bundle is finally bringing legit copies of Garou: Mark of the Wolves to PC. For $10. Garou: Mark of the Wolves may be my favorite SNK fighting game ever. It never had a sequel, but it was just perfectly animated, the mechanics were solid without being too complicated, and the cast was just the right size. Garou is an amazing game that stands alone.
Of course, the headline says the Humble Bundle "sounds amazing". Here's why: the non-Steam games in the Bundle are literally ROMs of the original titles that run in a browser window. People are reporting that each game is packaged with a DotEmu emulator. They're running in MVS mode, with gamepad and save state support. You're not getting detailed graphical options and there's no online play if you wanted to challenge your friends. If you're willing to work with these stipulations, you should get on that bundle.
The full list of games:
Any Price:
- Art of Fighting 2
- Fatal Fury Special
- King of the Monsters
- Metal Slug 2
- Samurai Shodown 2
- Sengoku 3
- King of Fighters 2000
- Baseball Stars 2
Pay More Than the Average (Currently $8.87):
- Last Blade
- Pulstar
- Metal Slug (Steam)
- Metal Slug 3 (Steam)
- Shock Troopers
- Neo Turf Masters
- King of Fighters 98 Ultimate Match Final Edition (Steam)
- Twinkle Star Sprites
- Neo Geo 25th Anniversary Soundtrack
Pay $10 or More:
- Shock Troopers: 2nd Squad
- Samurai Showdown V Special
- Garou Mark of the Wolves
- Metal Slug X (Steam)
- King of Fighters 2002 Unlimited Match (Steam)
Pay $40 or More:
- Neo Geo 25th Anniversary Metal Slug T-Shirt
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The limitations are definitely disappointing, although at least you can download them and play them offline with gamepad support, which is not nothing. (And it does have the side effect that Mac-owning folks like myself aren't left out in the cold, which we often are when it comes to this sort of thing.) It's not a lot of functionality, but hey, it's at least as much as the original arcade games, which is probably enough to make me happy. At least, for $10 it is.
Pass.
@hanschinaski Folks on Reddit are saying it's a monitor thing; the games run at 60Hz so if your monitor is set at 120Hz they'll be all messed up. Your mileage on that may vary, and like I said it's second-hand, but if you can adjust your monitor's refresh rate that may help.Edited 2 times. Last edited December 2015 by Patrick-C
@thewonps You'll probably be pleased to know that just this week a Steam database entry was discovered, and seems to indicate that Garou IS coming to Steam pretty soon.
As for this bundle, the browser emulations are a huge turn off to me.
In particular, the first EVER official release of Samurai Shodown V Special (not vanilla SSV as Mike mentioned in the article) on a non Neo Geo platform. This was a true holy grail game, the final official SNK release on the Neo Geo system. Popular rumor even has it that SNK intentionally wanted to leave it Neo exclusive to remain more "special" as the final game, sort of a weird love letter to the wonderful system. And now... this weird emulation? That's profoundly sad, the game deserves better. Like a revamped "Ultimate Match" style release, maybe on PS4/Steam? Oh well, I'll stick to my prized AES cart - yeah that's bragging a little bit, but it's kinda the pride of my Neo collection :)Edited December 2015 by hamfighter