You all know the drill with Humble Bundle by now. The service lets gamers pay whatever they choose for a select pack of games, and its newest bundle is perfect if you're hankering for some retro fun. This latest collection offers a grab bag of Neo Geo games that represent all the arcade goodness of the '90s for SNK's classic platform. Even the smallest donations get rewarded with eight games, including titles from the Fatal Fury, Metal Slug, King of Fighters, and Samurai SHOwdown series.
Hold your applause, though: it gets better. When you give $10 or more, you unlock a full load of 25 Neo Geo games to explore in all their splendor, at resolutions up to 320 by 224 pixels with an incredible 4096 colors on screen at a time.
If you’re still looking for reason to act, consider that this is the PC debut for most of these games, and they’re exclusive to Humble. As a bonus for beating the average donation, the Humble team will throw in their 25th anniversary soundtrack to boot. It’s hard to deny the majesty of this epic track:
Like other Humble Bundles, you get to choose how to allocate your payment between the developer and a variety of charities. Even better, Humble now lets buyers choose the charity that'll get the proceeds from among thousands of options. Just select a foundation that’s important to you, adjust the payment sliders as you see fit, and don’t forget to tip Humble for putting this package together.
Just a cautionary note before you rush headlong into your purchase—these games were designed to run on a system with 64 KB of system RAM. Be sure your machine has what it takes before ordering.
I would argue that resolution is over-rated in the vast majority of games, I guarantee that there are few that can tell the difference between 1080p and 2k or 2.5 k and i seriously doubt anyone can tell the difference between 3k and 4k just by looking at a running game.
I think it’s fair to increase resolution to maintain a consistent ppi on a larger display. However, I must admit that I’ve never been able to notice the difference from Retina-like hidpi monitors.
The only two games I’m interested in are 2020 Baseball and Soccer Brawl.
Which would have cost a billion* dollars back in the day when you had to buy the console and cartridges. Today, I believe that $13.37 would be a fair price.
* Not actually a billion but as my childhood memories serve I wanted so much to buy a neo-geo and it was *not* going to happen on my paper route salary, heh.
Ｅｖｅｒｙｏｎｅ ｓｈｏｕｌｄ ｂｕｙ ｔｈｉｓ！
If you haven’t played Samurai Shodown 5 Special or Blazing Star, you’re really missing out. Two of the best games on the NeoGeo! Blazing Star in particular has INCREDIBLE visuals for a 16-bit game! And hilarious voiced engrish! (∩´∀｀)∩ GET IT MORE!
The Metal Slug series is always a lot of fun, too, and along with the aforementioned two games Garou: Mark of the Wolves really pushes the hardware to its limits, but as far as fighting games, I think the King of Fighters 2002 Unlimited Match is probably the best of the old-school KoF games, while The Last Blade is reknowned (notorious?) for its incredibly technical combat. Sengoku 3 is a another great game in the bundle, a fantastic brawler title in the vein of Streets of Rage (it shares some ancestry with the legendary arcade version of Aliens vs. Predator), and don’t overlook Twinkle Star Sprites, which is a nearly-unique competitive shooter game with a cute style but serious action! Cute ’em up!
Don’t miss out! (≧▽≦)
If I didn’t already own ports of Garou: Mark of the Wolves and Baseball Stars 2, this collection would be worth it on for those two titles alone.
So are these are actual ports, or are they emulated in some way?
Looks like they’re emulated in the browser somehow. There’s a play-test at the bottom of the page.
Nonono — they run locally. They ARE emulated, but they’re local programs that run very well. (*’ω’*)
I’ll second that – just tried Samurai Shodown 2 (so many quarters lost as a teenager) on my desktop. The executable goes into a well-done emulator offering some basic options for graphics, sound, windowed vs. desktop, and also offering savestates.
And if you don’t want to use their emulator, the ROMs are provided in the install directory.
This deal is awesome.
They’re the original ROMs but run in emulation. In the browser there’s an asm.js emulator, otherwise there’s a native Windows emulator.
For those titles available on Steam, I’d redeem their codes from Humble and get them instead of downloading from them: the UI is a little nicer in the Steam versions.