Exorbitant Emulation- NeoGeo Station Review

Ten games have been made available on the PS3: Fatal Fury, Alpha Mission II, King of Fighters ’94, Samurai Shodown, Baseball Stars Professional, Magician Lord, Metal Slug, League Bowling, Super Sidekicks and Art of Fighting. Although each game is sold separately, they are all part of a complete collection, as indicated from the NeoGeo Station startup screen, that display which ROMs you have downloaded and booted up. Other than that start up screen, there is nothing else that ties the games into PSN or the PS3. There are no trophies, no online leaderboards or friends list integration. Identical ROMs are being made available for the PSP, but are being released in pairs, rather than all at once.

Each game is based on the arcade ROMs and run through a NeoGeo emulator that you may have noticed was included in an earlier firmware update. Each arcade classic is presented in its original resolution, offering unique borders to fill up the rest of your screen. Although I lack the certifications necessary to throw around terms like “arcade perfect” around, I would say that these titles come pretty darn close. Emulation is spot on, with almost no lag or graphical glitches. There is online multiplayer, which is mostly stable and lag-free, provided that your connection is sound.  The PSP ports lack online modes, but ad-hoc multiplayer is available, as long as you aren’t using a PSP Phat (1000).

All of that sounds okay, until you remember that every one of these games is available somewhere else for much less money. Suppose you walked into a store and saw a NeoGeo collection on the shelf. You look at the back of the box, and notice that the collection has 10 games, no trophy support and no additional content. Then you notice that the game costs $90. I can’t speak for the reader, but I would put it back on the shelf and wait for it to drop down to maybe $20, where it belongs. Then I would put the remaining $70 toward a new marquee title and a churro. Also remember that if you want to play on your PSP and your PS3, you have to buy the games twice: $8.99 for the PS3 version, and $6.99 for the PSP version. When all is said and done, you’ll have spent $150 on 10 games from the early 90s. I know, I know: “but Sean, I’m only going to buy 1 or 2 games. I don’t need all 10!” Are any of these titles really worth $8.99 by themselves? I love Metal Slug as much as the next guy, but for $15, I could have Metal Slug Anthology, which has seven Metal Slug games, including the first! Let me help with the math there: that’s 6 more Metal Slugs for $6, or $1 for each additional game.

It has been said that price should not come into play when reviewing a game, and to that end, we’re given some of these games for free. It takes the investment factor out of the review and lets us concentrate on the overall quality of the product. To that end, I feel obliged to tell you that the NeoGeo Station games are of relatively high quality, provided that you are not playing on a launch PSP. However, I care about our readers, and I worry about their pocket books, so have a difficult time recommending to anyone that they spend such an absurd amount on these titles. If you need to collect every version of Art of Fighting, then I suppose this is your lucky day. Otherwise, wait for someone at Sony to realize that they accidentally put an “8” in front of “.99”.