And there are still games left for volume 3!
Well, the NeoGeo Pocket was a bit of an underrated console back in the day, so I'm happy that NeoGeo Pocket Color Selection Vol.2 is here, and heck, I'd hope we get a third one. Most of the heavy hitters were already featured on the initial selection, so this one has a few more obscure games... so obscure that some of them don't even feature English, so you have to hope that the translated digital Instruction Booklet is enough.
Baseball Stars Color
It's a Baseball game. I don't know Baseball and I don't care about Baseball, and guess what? This game didn't make me care about it either. But, yeah, it's a Baseball game.
Big Bang Pro Wrestling
As the name would suggest, this is a Wrestling game. The graphics look really good, and I really liked the character designs... but I didn't find it very enjoyable. I just couldn't get the timing for the grappling right, either that or the CPU cheats, so it felt... random. I don't know, at least it entertained me for a couple of minutes.
Biomotor Unitron
This is a RPG, and it's not horrible, but it's built around a very boring loop. Visit the four neighboring dungeons to get money, use money to buy parts for your robot, rise two ranks in the Arena to unlock more parts, return to the four dungeons to make more money and buy the new parts, rinse and repeat about 4-5 times until you can clear the arena and get access to the parts you need to defeat the bosses in the four dungeons so that you can unlock the final dungeon.
I can't stress enough just how repetitive it gets by the end, as you have to fight a TON of random, turn-based battles in order to get money, and the story is barely even there, and what little there is ain't very interesting as it's just the story of a kid and his pokemon-like robot and his rise to the top.
Ganbare Neo Poke-Kun
This one is weird....? You have to wait for this mascot thingie to make mini-games that you can then play? It's almost like a virtual mascot, except that you can only press the A button to make something happen, a mini cutscene of sorts. Honestly, I got bored before I even unlocked a single game. It's boring, at some point I was mindlessly pressing A while watching youtube videos. Too boring.
The King of Fighters: Battle de Paradise
Have fun playing this board game that's entirely in Japanese. It's not completely unplayable, but there's no way to know, unless you know Japanese, what the items you collect do. So, is it good or bad? Couldn't say since I can't get much out of it due to the language barrier.
Megaman Battle & Fighters
I'm so happy that this game is here! Having Neo Geo Pocket Sonic would've been just perfect, but hey, I'll take this one. It's a pseudo port of the Arcade Megaman fighting games, as its a sort of compilation-dash-demake of both games. This one doesn't have English language, but since it's a fighter... you don't really need it, although translating the menus in the game itself would've been nice, you can actually see what every item on the menus are on the in-game manual, which was translated to English, thankfully.
Obviously it's not as good as the Arcade game, but dang if it isn't close.
Neo Geo Cup '98 Plus Color
Team descriptions in story mode are HILARIOUS. "Best in the world, bad heading", "Best team overall, low goals", "Ok coach". Story Mode has very Akira Toriyama like NPCs, and you can buy items to change the stats of whichever team you picked.
About as good as a handheld soccer game could be, I actually found it quite enjoyable, and the story mode is a neat bonus.
Pocket Tennis Color
This one is really cute, really simple and a lot of fun. It's pretty barebones, but it gets the job done, and since it's bundled with all these other games... it doesn't really matter if it's "just" tennis.
Puzzle Link 2
This one is weird. It's a puzzle game in which tiles slowly drop down in lines from the top. You have to shoot tiles to create a road between them, with the goal of forming a road between two matching tiles. A bit forgettable, but I dug the art direction.
SNK vs Capcom: Card Fighters Clash
The Neo Geo Pocket's crown jewel, this is an RPG/Card-battling game. Split into two versions, a la Pokemon, one SNK and one Capcom. This one is a lot of fun, because the card battling is simple, and very easy to understand, but it's also a lot of fun... that said, the game can be a grindfest as you battle the same opponents in order to get good cards so that you can face off against the strongest enemies.
Overall, personally, this selection of games didn't appeal to me as much as the ones in the previous Selection. It's not a bad set of games perse, but there's not much here I'd like revisiting.
5.0
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