1797: NGPC: Puyo Pop, Puzzle Link 2, Puzzle Bobble Mini, Rockman Battle & Fighters, Shanghai Mini!
0Quick plays of a bunch of Neo Geo Pocket Color games in Mednafen!
My other NGP games playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLZO3OPzPjIzMrVsRX667tvV52IbZOtNyU
0:00 - start
0:28 - Puyo Pop
24:14 - Puzzle Link 2
1:02:42 - Puzzle Bobble Mini
1:21:47 - Rockman Battle & Fighters
2:15:47 - Shanghai Mini
Puyo Pop
"Puyo Puyo 2" on other platforms; Wikipedia: "it became the most widely known multiplatform game in Japan" and "Only one version of Puyo Puyo 2 was internationally released, and that was Puyo Pop for the Neo Geo Pocket Color, which was the first Puyo Puyo game to use the international title of Puyo Pop, but the third Western release after Dr. Robotnik's Mean Bean Machine and Kirby's Ghost Trap/Avalanche." Bizarre menus and why is the playfield white. I've never clicked with Puyo Puyo and this was boring/frustrating.
Puzzle Link 2
Yumekobo had a stylish look here but connect-the-thingies-to-clear-them gets monotonous, and the alarm sound is irritating.
Puzzle Bobble Mini
Kinda weedy graphics. Save shows I played through all 99 stages of Puzzle mode back in the day, jeez. VS-CPU is way too easy (maybe there's a way to make it harder I dunno) and Survivor really does seem to go on forever, throwing more bubbles (or whatever) in your way when you're close to clearing the existing ones.
Rockman Battle & Fighters
Combination of arcade games "Rockman: The Power Battle" and "Rockman 2: The Power Fighters" ("Mega Man" in the west); those can be played in Capcom Arcade 2nd Stadium but are filled with screen flash and sprite flash FX, while this NGPC version doesn't have nearly as much of that stuff; it has a short white strobe when a CPU opponent is KOed--and loads of sprite flicker--but that's about it. And its 8-bit art style is way more charming than the soft rounded look of the arcade games. Six campaigns to play through, and four playable characters. It's boss-rush style, but survivor-ish, in that you don't regain all your health between battles; would usually end up scaring me off, but you seem to have infinite continues, so it really isn't that bad; in fact, the game feels like a big party of rad stuff, a celebration of goofy robo fantasies and wild sprites that Capcom just wanted you to enjoy. Really cool. A fan translation covers pretty much everything except the main menu.
One tiny complaint is that it was easy for klutzy me to quit back to the title accidentally when switching weapons on the pause screen; the EXIT option is one tap away with no confirm, losing your progress through whichever campaign you were doing; they're not that long but still.
Used a translation patch from romhacking.net.
Shanghai Mini
The credits for this are interesting: Success did other NGPC games--Pocket Reversi, Cotton, and Picture Puzzle, but their name isn't on game; all it has are Activision--who owns the rights to the game name of "Shanghai"--and SNK; credits apparently say "Source code [...] designed by SNK," but the names in the credits are apparently all Success staff; so it appears it was more or less a Success production, but without their company credit for some reason. The presentation is definitely not SNK-style. Discussion: https://www.mobygames.com/forum/game/17553/thread/247039/developer-success-corp/
It's a great version of Shanghai. The main game appears to be just playing whatever layout (of six or so) of tile-matching you want on whatever difficulty level you want. The symbols on the tiles are only two colors, and things like flowers, which can match other varieties of flowers, don't really look like flowers at all, so it was tough to tell at first which weird pixelated pattern could match which.
But the music and sound is spot-on, and, most importantly, the tiles are razor-sharp; I think maybe it was this game I was actually remembering when a year or so ago I went looking for a Shanghai game on modern systems and SNES, and failed to find a decent one that didn't have blurry symbols, either due to various visual filtering methods or just base blurry bitmaps. Definitely not a problem here, eyeballs rejoice!
There's even a story mode! (Confusingly named "Tournament.")
And there's a VS CPU mode where getting lots of matches dumps extra animal tiles onto your opponent's side of the screen; I guess I like to take my time in Shanghai and the CPU did NOT wait around so I got trounced. Not quite my thing, so I can skip this mode. ^ _"^
2/25/24
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