Neo Geo CD



"Don't cross the line unless you're serious."

The Neo Geo was truly a beast in 1990, but that came with a price tag: $650 for the AES console and past $200 for each game. The Neo Geo CD was released four years later, to offer the same games at a much lower cost. Well, you get what you pay for: it was plagued with annoying loading times (say, up to a minute between each round of a fighting game), and it came with a gamepad instead of the badass Neo Geo arcade-style controller. Still, its main problem was the bad timing: the 5th generation had already begun, and it was clear that a pure 2D console could not compete for much longer.

While it was technically almost identical to the Neo Geo, and most of its titles were ports, all of those had rearranged CD-based soundtracks; it also had a handful of exclusives, as well as some MVS ports that the original AES didn't get.

There's an updated version called the Neo Geo CDZ, which cuts down on load times, but it's very expensive and it's not that big of a difference.