The Neo Geo cd was released in 1994, four years after its cartridge-based equivalent, in an effort to reduce manufacturing costs. The system was originally priced at US$300 new. The unit's 1X CD-ROM drive was quite slow, making loading times very long with the system loading up to 56 Mbit of data between loads. Neo Geo CD game prices were lowered to a reasonable $50 as opposed to the usual cost for AES game cartridges, sometimes upwards of $300. The system could be used to play Audio CDs. The Neo Geo CD comes with a control pad instead of the joystick that is in other Neo Geo systems. This made the controls more stiff and caused some difficulty in play if one was used to the joystick. Ultimately, the Neo Geo CD was considered poor, mainly because of the lack of marketing and the long load times.