will the greatest handheld d-pad ever return? Or is it too complicated for inept chinese engineers to produce without off-the-shell components?
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The best retro handheld, killed by Nintendo brand loyalty
NGPC is overrated. I am saying this as a former owner. GBC was very comparable, older and ridiculously common. But that whole 1999 generation of portables were a joke. They were trying to make something slightly better than a 10year GameBoy. Wonderswan color, a total joke.
It was only a few years until GBA came around and a bunch of really interesting and reasonably nice "32bit" color portables came around.
That 3year span of 1998-2001 should have happened much sooner and with better efforts than a samey Z80 clocked slightly faster with a screen that has slightly more pixils, slightly less blurring, slightly more color.
>NGPC is overrated. I am saying this as a former owner.
I mean, it is SNK.
I'd say blame Pokemon but the development of that and the GBC seems to be concurrent, so I guess not
Crystal is the only Pokemon game exclusive to the GBC, all the others are GB compatible. I'm sure Game Freak wouldn't have minded another 20 years of monochrome GB.
The launch of the GBC coincided with Pokémon mania in the west. While not concurrent, Pokémon probably had nearly a 1:1 attachment rate with the Game Boy Color in North America.
NGPC and Wonderswan were much more power efficient than the GBC and GBA. They used 16 bit CPU, not 8 bit, moron. There was a market for them but their library was lacking and hence they lost to the pokemon machine.
Handheld tech has always been gimped intentionally as they have to be toys first, basically. They have to be made so that younger audiences can buy and maintain them. You could've had a handheld N64 in 2001, but it would've been expensive and ate up batteries like crazy. Part of the reason for Pokemon's success was how cheap agameboy and a game was.
Nintendo figured out how to design great games around the handheld medium instead of in spite of it, which is why they still dominate in that realm.
Lynx, Game Gear and Turbo Express came out about a year of the time GameBoy came out. It seems very odd that they were matched, from computing perspective, around 7 years later with Wonderswan Color and NeoGeoPocket Color, yet they couldn't fit a back lit screen in the budget.
NGPC and WSC used setups compatible to much older 16bit PDAs/palmtops. Much like that a few years later GBA used components comparable to much older 32bit PDA components. Still took some time to throw a back lit screen.
Back lit screen isn't as big a deal as a reasonable, relatively, low blur screen, like the GB pocket. PDA manufacturers didn't seem to care about motion blur. So the tech trickling down to games were poorly suited for it.
This isn't the WonderSwan
Hopefully just contrarianism and not actually this delusional.
Isn't this just a analog?
No, it's microswitched like arcade sticks and the NGCD controller.
>analog stick with digital input
mmm I sure love having massive delay when I want to move from one direction to it's cardinal opposite
give me a real d-pad any day
There's very little travel. You should try using it.
It's not analog to begin with, you've clearly never used a NGP/C so I'm not sure why you're here at all.
Imagine being so stupid you frick up "mmm doughnuts"
Pic related fits off the shelf 6x6mm tac switches. Readily available in the newtons of your choice.
Do you think arcade joysticks are analog too?
Like 6 button pads, this sort of controller is only beneficial to fighters
I borrowed a friends neo for about a month a couple of decades ago. Don't knock it till you try it. I still remember how satisfying those little clicks were.
I liked this on the neogeo cd (it was one of the few redeeming features that thing had), but being portable, all the clicking gets annoying fast.
I think that the GBA SP, DS fat and Vita have the right amount of tactile feedback. Very responsive dpads but not overly clicky.
It's noisy as frick and I almost got into a fight when I was 16 because of it. Also it's not that precise. Nobody will ever win a tourney with something like that. It does feel unique tho.
>Nobody will ever win a tourney
yeah because all the competitive tourneys are played on handheld gaming devices, solid point bro
come to think of it, all handheld devices should be built with "hitbox" style buttons instead of dpads or sticks at all because they are 0.001% faster and give you the advantage in muh tourneys
But it's true, it does't perform well. I don't think anyone plays with neogeo cd pads anywhere. And I played on the thing, I couldndo all the infinites and shit on SvC. It does feel great tho.
your autism got in the way of seeing my point. Handhelds are primarily for casual play. Very few, if anyone, is trying to squeeze the last 0.01% of ergonomic performance out of a handheld device the same way that high level tournament players are. Thus, for the vast majority of players, it doesn't matter if you could squeeze a tiny bit of performance out of one d-pad versus another. That said, the d-pad on the NGPC is excellent, and I doubt even 1% of gamers can play at a level where the microswitch stick is bottlenecking their performance--not to mention there are no tournament level games for the device. Like every other handheld, it's a casual gaming device.
Like I said, if you want maximum performance, there is no reason to play on anything other than hitbox style digital inputs.
> NGPC is overrated
shutup b***h, I'm not even bothering to read the rest of your post
>crymore
But that's a completely wrong assumption. It's not to squeeze the last edge, the thing simply kind of sucks at making it do what you want it to. Like half the library is fighters, and while definitely casual, the inputs are precise and anything basically responds better, PS pad, satirn pad, nintendo etc. As I said it's a nice novelty and the clicks feel good but it's inferior for controls.
>the thing simply kind of sucks at making it do what you want it to
no it doesn't
Please, share the story behind the (almost) fight.
I was sleeping over at his house and after he fell asleep I went into his mom's room and fricked her without a condom. After blowing my wad across her forehead, I pulled out my NGPC to play some Metal Slug and the clicky sound of the stick woke up my friend and he was pissed when he found me in his mom's bed.
So I jumped out of the two pints of cum pouring out of her slit and did a triple backflip into my Maserati, whipped out my universal remote and made the whole house explode
I don't know how the neo geo pocket did it but they should've brought that particular mechanism over to the NGCD pad, because holy frick that thing sucks ass in the long term. Why must all of their microswitches die?
it's nice to click around but actually shitty to play, even for said fighting games
the same applies to the NGCD controller
if you disagree you never touched one
stop swallowing youtubers opinions
Never, especially now that everyone just uses the dysfunctional joycon analogs for anything compact
its great
i kinda regret selling mine
but the library just wasn't a good match for me
the dpad/stick is great though
you really have to try it in person to understand
fricking floweranon
in every thread and this time even the color scheme matches?! somethings fricky
If its so good why has no company ever attempted to copy it?
JK but always wanted to play one of these. Too bad its library of games isn't better though. Doesn't seem worth it at all to me.
seems like a nice portable, would love to try the d-stick or what you may call it. What are some games that justify picking one up in current year? I was thinking the sonic pocket adventure for starters.
>What are some games that justify picking one up in current year?
It's similar to the Dreamcast in that it has a small library but very few stinkers. I enjoyed the Sonic game, the Metal Slug games, and Puzzle Bobble.
Not technically retro, but isn’t generally agreed upon that the Vita’s dpad is all around excellent?
white the Vita may have an excellent d-pad, this thread isn't about which device has the best d-pad, it's about whether or not the NGPC style d-pad (d-stick or whatever) will ever be used again, and if not, then why.
The only hope for such an input comming out again would likely be on one of those handheld Chinese emulation devices. But, I remember when a Neo Geo mini arcade came out, the company said they opted against microswitch sticks because of price, so they might not ever bother due to cost concerns. Furthermore, the Chinese companies making these emulation devices almost exclusively use off-the-shelf components since they lack the ability other people (Americans, Japanese, Koreans, maybe a few others) have to innovate or improve technology--they can only replicate designs that they rip off from others.
while unimpressive by today's standards, I loved the NGPC screen when it first came out. Sure, it wasn't backlit, but my 14 year old eyes had no problem with it. The GBC was far more difficult to see in comparison (I stuck with my GBP to play the pokemans). I loved the NGPC color palette and how the pixels looked on the screen. I also loved the simplified Neo Geo art style the games had. I only ever bought a few games for it. I don't remember the details, but I got the NGPC because of some kind of supposed integration with the Dreamcast I read about in magazines. Not sure if that every panned out or what the extent of it was, but I was a huge Dreamcast fan at the time. I knew one other guy at my highschool who had a NGPC and I'm pretty sure we were the only ones at the entire school who had one.