Title: NEOGEO Super Pocket
System: Evercade
Price: $69.99
Release Date: June 2025
DISCLAIMER
While I’ve mentioned this off-hand in site status updates and the like, I do need to give a rambly disclaimer on my process for SNK related products when it comes to Evercade reviews; I am doing these as part of my aim to review every Evercade related cart thing I can, but otherwise I would not be doing so.
While I’ve previously reviewed SNK products in the past, that quickly changed when SNK was bought out by the country of Saudi Arabia. Not a random company within Saudi Arabia that happened to like SNK a lot, I’m talking about the government and the Crown Prince in particular. As in, the same one that murdered a journalist and does human rights violations like they’re no biggie, currently in a long attempt to rebrand in hopes of breaking free of Oil. Oh, and they’re also involved in that thing making everyone’s gas prices spike. Due to all the things the current government explicitly cracks down and tortures people for, I don’t want to give oxygen to these guys if I can help it, so thus it was easy to avoid reviewing SNK related stuff until now. These guys have invested a lot into gaming in general the past few months, but SNK (and soon to be EA) are the companies they went all out in full ownership of.
So here’s the deal; this disclaimer will be repeated on every single SNK related Evercade review, with slight tweaks as needed, and for various reasons I plan to only cover these products six months minimum after they come out. So if a SNK cart comes out I’m really eager to write about and I get done, it’ll be shot up into space for six months before I actually publish it. Obviously, I know my vocal stance on the internet for a niche review website covering niche devices that play niche carts of fun niche retro games isn’t gonna bring peace to the middle east nor fix any human rights violations. Seeing how I’m the person I am however, I do genuinely advise if you have other places of playing these games that you enjoy already (like the old PS2 Compilations and whatnot) and care about this stuff to have it impact your purchasing like I do, to stick with those unless you like the super pocket form factor, I promise you don’t need these games to live. Or at the very least, I advise making a contribution to Human Rights Watch or UNICEF or other similar organizations, just to help make things a little better.
I also will state that the review score and my thoughts on the device/games on this set will be completely unimpacted by the details within the disclaimer; all the dismay about their ownership largely stays within this disclaimer section and does not impact my opinion on anything else doing forward, so onto the review.
Prelude
The pockets came in pairs, and with the third pair of pockets a brand new system joined the Evercade ecosystem with the Neo Geo! One of the most famous arcade hardware setups in gaming history, this pocket focuses exclusively on Neo Geo games, specifically of the MVS variety. For a system known for almost nothing but fighters though, is this kinda bundle even a good idea? Well, that’s on us to find out, as we return to covering one of these Super Pockets yet again.
Presentation
At first I was expecting this to be the usual routine by now with these pockets, and they mostly are; you have a nice looking device, comfy face buttons, weird but workable shoulder buttons, and a comfortable form factor for adjusting the volume. It also now has the brand words NEOGEO on the bottom, which seems to be a trend they started with the Atari edition. (where the Atari Logo was in that space)
However, the biggest change to the Super Pocket’s build isn’t one you’ll notice without tearing this thing open or playing games on it for yourself; the D-pad has gotten a complete revamp! It has a pivot underneath it now, making it far better for playability and comfort, and I’ll go more into how it changes how games play in the next section, but this small tweak just helps to make an already nice looking device feel a whole lot better.
Otherwise, the visual/audio options on the device are similar to the previous Super Pockets; good screen with nice screen size options, and a speaker much louder than the EXP-R, to the point the lowest audio setting on this thing might still be a bit too loud in some places. Yet again, I wish they’d add an extra volume level before going to mute so this would be more practical in public settings.
Gameplay
This Super Pocket offers 14 NeoGeo games, all in their MVS incarnations. Unlike the other Super Pockets, there isn’t an Easy Mode for easiest DIP Switch options, meaning you’re stuck on level 4 default settings for all the included games; the Neo Geo had a different difficulty system than your average DIP switches, with the settings being via BIOS changes instead, and while the Evercade carts would eventually get this (and AES options), this Super Pocket still locks you to those defaults. The button layout you have for the Neo Geo games here matches 1:1 with the Neo Geo CD pad, leading to great accuracy to the original home system, albeit in a way that might take a bit to get used to when compared to other reissues of these games.
By and large, I didn’t really mind the default settings for the games here, and the built-in games have a great variety. You have the popular “Classic Era” Fatal Fury game, Fatal Fury Special, plus the original Last Blade and Samurai Shodown II as your big fighters here, and all feel really good to play on this device. Thanks to the D-Pad having a center pivot, I was able to pull off even the complex moves of Last Blade’s super techniques, and it likewise feels good for fighters on other carts like Fighters History. Mutation Nation, King of the Monsters 2 and Sengoku 3 are all fun belt scrollers, and even though you’re going solo in them Sengoku 3 in particular really shines as the highlight here, and the improved d-pad makes diagonal movement so much better in that game than if this was on an earlier Super Pocket.
Shooters get a good variety here, with some of the best games on the entire Neo Geo hardware showing up in this sector. The godlike Blazing Star plays like a dream, Last Resort is still as evil of an R-Type clone as ever, and Alpha Mission II is a launch era title that holds up better than most from that early era of Neo Geo. Metal Slug X and Shock Troopers Second Squad also hold up great, and those shooter adjacent games also work brilliantly here.
The remaining miscellaneous games are all solid picks, too, with Top Hunter being a quirky action platformer, (albeit one that loses some charm due to the lack of co-op here) Soccer Brawl being a pretty decent soccer game, (and one I enjoyed far more than Football Champ on the Taito one) and Overtop being a surprisingly engrossing rally racer with some great music. Of the built-in games, the closest I’d consider a dud would be King of the Monsters 2 for being just plain cruel with its difficulty, but even that can be fairly decent if you keep at it more and use save states when needbe. All in all, an excellent lineup for the built in games and easily the best lineup for any Super Pocket to date.
So, how does it handle games from the other carts? I mentioned in the past how due to the awkward D-Pad for those older Pocket models, some games were nigh unplayable, either due to the center of the D-Pad getting marked as a weird button press or just making diagonals awkward. Thankfully, the two biggest problem games with those old pocket models work brilliantly here on the Neo Geo one. Chaos Engine no longer has the center of the D-Pad pause the game constantly, and Blaster Master’s top-down dungeon sections are no longer an agony to slog through. Pretty much any game you played on a Super Pocket before 2025 controls far better on this newer D-Pad, and I couldn’t really find much complaints about the control here besides the R2/L2 buttons being a little awkward to use in some games where you might need to hold them down.
Despite the near perfection of the Super Pocket formula however, there were a few things I felt could have been done better. I already mentioned the aforementioned lack of difficulty settings for these games, and having that consistency with the rest of the Super Pocket line get added back would be pretty helpful. I should also note that using a NEO GEO cart on the Super Pocket currently has a weird bug with the save states taking place, since an Evercade update made AES mode and DIP toggles available for the cartridges, and ever since said update MVS mode on the evercade is different from the one on the Super Pocket, even if you keep default DIP settings.
Thus, if you make a save state on the Super Pocket and put it in an Evercade device, you cannot load that state, and vice versa for any states you make on the Evercade you try to bring back to the Pocket. AES mode not being on the Super Pocket isn’t a big issue for me, but I do hope the Super Pockets get an update to match the MVS mode of the evercade consoles so save states on the carts become consistent again.
Conclusion
In conclusion, as a handheld gaming device, the Neo-Geo Super Pocket is the apex of what the Super Pocket line should be. Nothing but hits throughout the entire lineup, ensuring there’s something for everyone, followed by a new D-Pad fixing every last problem I had with that cruddy original Super Pocket D-Pad, and you have yourselves the perfect starting point for getting into Evercade or even just for playing some of these Neo Geo games on the go.
Disclaimer aside, I can’t really find much wrong with this thing outside of the lack of the usual “Easy Mode” option, meaning you’re stuck on Level 4 for every game and thus it’ll make some of them really brutal. Maybe a KOF of some kind could have been thrown in for good measure too, but otherwise this device has a great range of variety from the NeoGeo and easily makes for the best exclusive game lineups from a Super Pocket thus far.
Blazing Star alone would be one of the best games ever available for Evercade, and so having a dozen extra titles alongside it ain’t a bad deal here. If you’re like me and hesitate to want to buy this at all for Disclaimer Reasons, the good news is you the same improved D-Pad is also on the Data East Super Pocket, and seems to be the standard going forward for future Super Pockets.
I give the NEOGEO Super Pocket a 9 out of 10.