I've been thinking about a lot of the games in these series lately (mostly because I've gotten my PS2 down and played a bunch of them recently. I haven't played much if any of the games I have for other systems.) My wife doesn't really understand why I want so many titles when to her, the games all look pretty much the same. And even my kids, who get that the games are very different, often wonder why I care about the older titles when--to them, at least--the newer ones mostly clearly make many of the older ones obsolete. This is especially true with the King of Fighters series, where there are a number of possible obsolesence points within the series. You could reasonably argue that the recent KOFXIII with its migration to a much more powerful hardware and greatly improved graphics makes all the previous iterations feel obsolete. You could argue that the dream match capstone games at the end of the various subseries make all of the games in the subseries obsolete too--and you'd be a little hard-pressed to even get me to not kinda shrug and say, "yeah, you're right." Because honestly, I almost never play KOF 94-97 anymore, especially since I can use KOF98:UM to "replicate" earlier versions of the characters through the EX characters, and it has all of the characters that ever appeared in any game in the subseries. This isn't quite true for KOF02:UM because it's not a striker-based game like 99-01 were, but honestly I was never a huge fan of the strikers anyway. It turns out that the only reasons I have for turning to some of those older games are to get a closer look at some of the stages again, or some other nostalgic or "research" purpose. You could make the claim that with KOF98:UM, KOF02:UM, KOFXI and KOFXIII you are completely covered in terms of KOF titles. There are practically no important characters or game-play options that you are really missing that way.
You could probably make similar (although not quite as clear-cut) cases for the Street Fighter, Darkstalkers, Marvel vs Capcom and Fatal Fury series too; in fact, I pretty much have made exactly that case for Darkstalkers and MvC (although I was also driven by lack of availability of ports on systems that I own to some extent too)--and I rarely play any FF game other than RBFF2 anymore too.
Part of the reason for this is that I'm a rather casual player. I'm honestly not that good, nor am I much interested in getting significantly better at playing these games. I don't even care to play competitively at all, really. I'm interested in game that I can, when I'm in the mood, sit down and play for a while against an interesting but not too frustrating or challenging CPU opponent. I don't know what the rest of the market is like, but I imagine with the mainstream success of games like SFIV or MvC3, that there's a lot of newer and casual players out there. So I think that a developer has got to be careful to not cater to the niche of harder-core players. Those who like really technical play that's too fast, or with complicated air juggles, or deadly-rave type supermoves that are unlikely to be learnable by casual players. This is even true with unintentional technical issues--grapplers, for instance, that have 360° motions that are doable on an arcade cabinet with a joystick, but which are a complete pain in the butt with a standard hand-held controller of a console game. If developers aren't careful about this, then what they've managed to do is create a game that appeals to a hardcore niche audience that values system mastery but have created massively impenetrable barriers to entry to newer and more casual gamers.
In fact, I suspect that to some extent SNK has suffered due to this syndrome. I think much of what they have developed rewards system mastery, and excludes casual players. And I think that's at least part of their story of struggling to find a big US market comparable to that which Street Fighter and Capcom were able to find. Only part, as I think console availability, localization and presentation issues and more were at least as big if not bigger issues for them.
I do have to say that MvC2's popularity in the US kinda sorta refutes this, but my response to that is that while its possible to play that game very technically, you can also play it reasonably successfully as little more than a button masher too. Not competitively against a really good player, of course, but against the CPU, or against other casual players, sure. It's not hard to actually pull the moves off, at least. Plus, the presence of all the Marvel characters was a big draw in its own right.
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Another example of an odd pet peeve that comes from catering to a niche market is the artificial inflation of combo hits. Combos, of course, being the number of hits in a row that you strike your opponent without him having any opportunity to avoid getting hit. Once they started displaying the number of hits in a combo, people started wanting to see those numbers inflated. This became fairly silly in some games, starting with the super combos (or desperation moves, if you prefer the SNK terminology.) For example, with Akuma's Instant Hell Murder technique, you generally consider it to be one move. But most games will tell you that it gives up 15 hits. Huh? How so? You do one move. Akuma floats over to the opponent. If it connects, the screen goes dark for a moment, and you see fireworks and hear sound effects like a bunch of hits. When the lights come back on, Akuma is standing over his fallen foe and it tells you you've done 15 hits. But you only did one move!
This gets much worse in the Marvel vs. and some of the KOF games, where approaching, or even passing 100 hits is not at all unheard of... even though you're not really doing anything too complicated from a command perspective in terms of pulling off moves.
Frankly, I'd like to see the whole combo counting thing done away with. I don't want to see some number that's artificially inflated because they just added a bunch of little concussive graphics and percussive sound effects and told me that I actually hit many more times than I really did. That's silly. Besides, the only thing that really counts is how much damage an attack does anyway.
So, the games I'm most likely to play are, then, KOF98:UM, KOFXI, KOF2002 on occasion, CvS2, SFA3, and RBFF2. And for some reason, I really like FF3 too. When I finally get my system upgrade, I expect to add a UM to that KOF2002, KOFXIII and SSFIV.
And probably some UMvC2 as well.
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