“Get Pocket Power!”

I scored my first Neo Geo Pocket Color (NGPC) along with Sonic the Hedgehog Pocket Adventure and SNK vs. Capcom: Match of the Millennium for my birthday in 1999. It was an amazing little machine — in my opinion, the only US market competitor that stood a chance against the Game Boy in the long run.

SNK clearly studied Nintendo’s winning handheld strategy and succeeded where previous Game Boy competitors failed by keeping the Neo Geo Pocket Color’s technical specifications minimal and omitting a backlight, allowing for low retail cost and long battery life.

The NGPC even sported an innovative and satisfyingly clicky thumb stick that in some ways surpassed the traditional D-pad in functionality. Still, SNK couldn’t keep up with Nintendo’s first party franchises and voluminous third party support, and the NGPC died on the vine, never to realize its full potential.

Along with the Sega Dreamcast, the NGPG lives on in gamer memory as one of those rare consoles that failed due to commercial reasons alone, not technical ones. The NGPC hardware is currently cheap and plentiful, so if you don’t have one, I highly recommend picking up a unit and a handful of games.

Discussion Topic of the Week: What are your favorite Neo Geo Pocket Color Games? What game you think was best, over all, for the system?

Up now on Technologizer is my latest VC&G-related freelance work: 15 Classic Game Console Design Mistakes, a non-exhaustive analysis of various hardware and design goofs in video game consoles. In it, I discuss the Intellivision, Sega Saturn, NES, Atari Jaguar, and more.

This latest article is a follow-up of an earlier Technologizer piece I wrote back in June: 15 Classic PC Design Mistakes.

Interestingly, this latest piece is proving to be far more controversial. I suspect it’s because people have had more up-close experiences with video game systems than with semi-obscure computers, and because game consoles inspire quite a bit of unflinching loyalty in the general populace.

I came up with many more flaws than I listed, but I couldn’t keep writing forever. So feel free to share your ideas for game console design flaws either here or over at Technologizer.

You could eat off of this logo.

This week, I present to you the TurboGrafx-16 logo in relatively high resolution lossless PNG format for all to use and enjoy (click on the image above for the big version). Nice and clean. I’ve always considered this logo to be an exceptional example of good graphic design.

Discussion topic of the week: What’s your favorite game system logo of all time?

Just up is a new slide show I put together for Technologzier that showcases Game Boy oddities. It’s like a freak show for Nintendo’s venerable handheld, which turns twenty next week. Ever seen a Game Boy peripheral that dispenses laughing gas? How about one that demands tributes of child blood? If not, then mosey on over to Technologizer and take a look.

In honor of the Game Boy’s 20th anniversary this month, I recently dissected an original 1989 model of Nintendo’s famous handheld for PC World. Of course, I took pictures of the process.

This is the sixth entry in my “workbench series” of technology tear-downs for PC World. Here are the others: Nintendo Famicom, Apple IIc, Commodore 64, IBM Model M Keyboard, and TRS-80 Model 100.

I hope you enjoy it.