Portable Planet

The next generation of consoles is a godsend to SNK Playmore, whose Neo Geo games aregoing to appear on the Wii Virtual Console, Xbox 360 Live, and PS3 in downloadable form.

SNK US boss Ben Hermanwas recently asked whetheranyNeo Geo titles were going to be exclusive to a particular system.

“What I would say is, right now, I personally have not seen anything to suggest that there will be any exclusivity of titles for either machine,” SNK US boss Ben Hermantold Spong. “Microsoft has been very selective and is not looking for everything… Sony is just getting started. Nintendo is being careful, with NES and SNES titles, not to over-saturate the market. Microsoft has shown us that online games can be a strong part of a machine’s offering.”

Herman also revealedsome new andsomewhat disturbing information about online play.

“Nintendo is still not letting Wii third-party publishers include online capabilities in their games and it doesn’t look like they will during 2007. So the best chance they have at building an online presence appears to be what they’re doing with Virtual Console,” he said. “The (Neo Geo) games will be available at some point this year. I can’t say exactly when. I expect that we’ll be putting out a certain limited number of titles per month.”