Retro Gaming Australia

The Tommo/Blaze developed and SNK-approved NEOGEO X Gold Limited Edition handheld is now available for purchase in North America and Europe.

For $US199.99 or £175/€199, you get the NEOGEO X handheld, a HDMI enabled docking station, an arcade stick modelled on the original AES sticks, 20 preloaded games an a Ninja Masters game card.

The jury is still out on whether the system is a worthwhile investment, however.

Some time ago you may recall we discussed a SNK sanctioned Neo Geo branded handheld being produced by Blaze for release later this year. It seems that those plans have gone a bit further with the introduction of the Neo Geo X Gold, which includes not only the aforementioned handheld, but a docking station that allows you to hook the system up to a television. It also comes with a joystick modelled after the original Neo Geo controller.

Twenty games are built-into the system – 3 Count Bout, League Bowling, Art of Fighting 2, Magician Lord, Alpha Mission 2, Metal Slug, Baseball Stars 2, Mutation Nation, Cyber Lip, NAM 1975, Fatal Fury, Puzzled, Fatal Fury Special, Real Bout: Fatal Fury Special, The King of Fighters ’95, Samurai Showdown 2, King of the Monsters, Super Sidekicks, Last Resort and World Heroes Perfect

Of course, this doesn’t come cheap – $US199, to be exact.

Given Blaze’s track record with shonky system-on-a-chip clones, we’re not going to get our hopes up. We’ll find out for sure when the Neo Geo X Gold launches on December 6.

I was just fishing around the GameGadget site, since I had remebered it was meant to be out on Friday, but hadn’t heard anything about it. Turns out it has been delayed until April 6. For the last week running up the release of the system, there’s a £20 discount and 30 free games if you use the code “gamegadget20” (sans the inverted commas) at the checkout.

Little had been said about what games would be available for the system, but they’ve announced at least those 30 that they’ll have on day one, which are Alex Kidd in the Enchanted Castle, Alien Storm, Altered Beast, Bio-hazard Battle, Bonanza Bros., Columns III, Columns, Comix Zone, Crack Down, Decap Attack, Ecco the Dolphin, Ecco II: Tides of Time, Ecco Jr., ESWAT: City Under Siege, Eternal Champions, Fatal Labyrinth, Flicky, Gain Ground, Galaxy Force II, Golden Axe, Golden Axe II, Kid Chameleon, Ristar, Shinobi III: Return of the Ninja Master, Space Harrier II, Super Thunder Blade, Sword of Vermillion, Vectorman, Virtua Fighter 2, Shadow Dancer: The Secret of Shinobi, Sonic Spinball, Sonic 3D Blast and Dr. Robotnik’s Mean Bean Machine.

What do these titles all have in common? They’re all Sega published Mega Drive games.

And the price? £4.99 a pop. Think of that what you will.

Blaze’s GameGadget, an open-source retro gaming handheld with a download service often compared to iTunes, will be on sale on March 30 for £99.99.

You can pre-order it from the Blaze website now.

Very little has been said about what games the GameGadget is going to run (the website claims “100,000s”), or how much those games are going to cost. Guess we’ll find out on March 30.

Back in January, we reported a rumour from a Japanese site that SNK was preparing a Neo Geo handheld. That rumour has turned out to be partially true, with yesterday’s revelation that the Neo Geo portable is happening – but it’s being developed by Blaze in conjunction with SNK.

It’s called the NeoGeoX.

With the architecture of the Neo Geo, and the game selection previously revealed, it’s highly possible that this is another cheap system-on-a-chip job that’s going to cost bugger all and produce the kind of sound that’ll make your ears bleed.

The system will sport 20 built in games (World Heroes, Ultimate 11, Top Player’s Golf, Sengoku, NAM-1975, Mutation Nation, Last Resort, King of Monsters, Frenzy, Cyber-Lip, Fatal Furty Special, The Art of Fighting, Super Sidekicks, League Bowling, Metal Slug, Magical Lord, Baseball Stars Professional, Samurai Shodown, The King of Fighters ’94 and Fatal Fury) and SD card support.

No price of release date has been announced as yet.

For many years, clone systems have provided an opportunity for players to relive their gaming memories without having to hunt down the original hardware. Usually these systems are unauthorised efforts, but that’s not the case with the Blaze Mega Drive, which bears the official endorsement of Sega.

The Blaze Mega Drive is hardly new, with the first models hitting in early 2009. It’s actually a rebranded version of the ATGames Firecore. The only difference between the two machines is that the Firecore has more games built in. Blaze has a tendency to switch the games so as to have multiple models on store shelves.

For $AU49.95, you get a small console with AV-Out, two 6-button pads and 15 built-in games Alex Kidd in the Enchanted Castle, Alien Storm, Altered Beast, Arrow Flash, Bonanza Bros., Columns, Crack Down, Decap Attack, ESWAT, Fatal Labyrinth, Flicky, Gain Ground, Golden Axe, Shadow Dancer (i.e. the usual suspects Sega digs up for collections) and Sonic & Knuckles. (continue reading…)

GameGadget is a UK-developed, open-source handheld that plays “a variety” of classic games which are downloadable from an online store. Details of those games are currently scarce, but what we can tell you is that the GameGadget handheld will be going on sale in the UK in March through distributor Blaze Europe.

For £99.99, you get a handheld with a 3.5″ LCD screen (320×240), four face buttons, two shoulder buttons and a D-pad. Under the hood, the machine is packing a 433mHz dual core CPU, 64MB of RAM and 2GB of flash memory, with expandable storage through SD cards.

An interesting little device, if a little pricey. One would think that the price of the software and the quality of the emulation will make or break the system.