Game Feature: King of Fighters '98

I haven't done a game feature post in quite a while, and the obvious one to do that I haven't yet is King of Fighters '98. For many, many years, the KOF was done on the same MVS hardware, and even when it briefly migrated to the Atomiswave hardware, it was still done with the same graphics. Only when we get to King of Fighters XII and XIII do we actually get improved graphics and only when when we move to KOF XIV and XV (out February) do we get fully 3-D graphics (although still with traditional 2-D play.) All of the Orochi Saga games can be "summed up" if you will in King of Fighters '98, and all of the NESTS saga games can be summed up with King of Fighters 2002. If you're not actually interested in playing the "story" of the games, you can get all of the action you want from the entire saga in the "summary" games; King of Fighters '98 has everything you can get in any Orochi Saga game, and then some. This is especially true for the "Ultimate Match" version, which added all of the (very few) characters who had appeared in an Orochi Saga game but hadn't yet appeared in '98, like the remaining bosses, Eiji Kisaragi, and a handful of others.

I have a handful of versions of this game, although to be fair, only the Ultimate Match is one that I'd ever feel compelled to come back to at this point. The first version I got was when I got my old Dreamcast, and it had the odd title of King of Fighters Dream Match 1999. I suppose SNK were a little self-conscious at feeling out of date with the title, which I suppose is a fair problem. For the PS2, I have the Ultimate Match version of the game, which also includes the original Neo Geo version of the game. And finally, I have the Neo Geo version of the game also on the Orochi Saga compilation for the PS2. There is one more final update, called Final Version, or something like that, which is what was available on Steam or now Good Old Games. It's relatively cheap, but it doesn't add anything new to Ultimate Match, just a few subtle tweaks to gameplay.

The whole point of '98 was to be a "Dream Match", i.e., there's no story to it, but it brings back all of the "greatest hits" of the Orochi Saga in one game, including teams that only made an appearance in the first game, like the USA Sports Team, or the Boss team of 96, or creating new teams out of "retired" master characters like Heidern or Saisyu Kusanagi and Takuma Sakazaki, etc. Although from a story perspective, Rugal was only the boss of the first two games, and was therefore just the taste of things to come, the developers also wisely realized that in most respects he was the most iconic King of Fighters boss, and brought him back as the boss of this game as well. Of course, for Ultimate Match, all of the bosses of the Orochi Saga made reappearances, even the mid-bosses like Riot of the Blood Leona, etc. Of course, the reality is that most of those bosses were kind of underwhelming anyway. Rugal was so good that they even brought him back for the next dream match in 2002, ignoring all of the NESTS saga bosses. In both cases, he was the supered out "Omega Rugal", complete with stripper shirt and everything.

A good case can be made that especially once 2002 got "remade" as Unlimited Match, a kind of upgrade very similar to the Ultimate Match upgrade to this game, that there was no longer any reason to play any King of Fighters game that had preceded it, unless you wanted to see the specific story cut scenes associated with one game, or something like that. I don't think that that's completely true; there are a number of things in particular that are unique to the Orochi Saga. Sometimes these are little things, like Terry Bogard's moveset, for instance, which is a bit different in the NESTS games, and other times its more in the vibe, presentation and "feel" of the game, and harder to put your finger on. 

While I can certainly see and actually probably agree with that perspective to some degree, I have a lot of nostalgic attachment to '98 over 2002 and in many ways still prefer it, especially in its Ultimate Match version. The game presents to you the two basic different "systems" that the prior King of Fighters games used; EX, which is similar to '94 and '95's manual charging of super movies, dashes, etc. and "Advanced" which was similar to '96 and '97s super stocks, rolls and other items. The Ultimate Match version also allows you to play an Ultimate Mode, where you can pick and choose elements from EX or Advanced, although honestly, I just prefer to use Advanced. Not surprisingly, it's the most like A-ism from Street Fighter Alpha 3, or the C-groove from the Capcom vs SNK games of the options presented, which is my favorite system.

You can play in teams, or you can play single player, which is more "Street Fighter" like in terms of how it plays. I usually prefer the latter, of course. The fact that there aren't any story endings means that team composition doesn't matter; the only endings are a bunch of joke animations from the characters during the credits.

The player select menus are, in my opinion, extraordinarily ugly, as are the character portraits. They are improved somewhat for the Ultimate Match, but the character portraits and end-match art/quotes are the same in every version. Shinkiro is the artist, who's normally quite a talented fella, but this is not his best work. That said, once you get playing, this matters very little. The Dreamcast version has the same menus as the Neo Geo or arcade, with the exception of course, of a very bare bones "text only" menu of console specific modes and options, which are all pretty basic. 

I've talked before about the shift to 3-D backgrounds that was happening right about at the turn of the millennium in these kinds of games, and it came for KOF'98 too. The Dreamcast version has the backgrounds redone in 3-D, although it's relatively low-res 3-D, and mostly just looks almost exactly the same as the 2-D backgrounds for most of them. (Oddly, the Osaka street scene outside of the SNK headquarters is an exception here; there are variants in the 2-D version that are not done in 3-D.) The Ultimate Match version gives us redone 3-D backgrounds, including more variants. In particular, it seems that the developers were very enamored this year of adding a bluish, washed out haze to make the backgrounds look like they take place early in the morning in the minutes right before the sun comes up but the light is still relatively strong. Almost every stage has a variant that looks like this. It also adds a bunch of new stages to the mix that hadn't yet ever been seen.

In fact, most of the stages are new to this game, even in the old Neo Geo version. A handful are from other games in the Orochi Saga series, like the '96 boss stage, or the Orochi boss stages, but most are not. In my personal opinion, this is a bit of a missed opportunity; the Ultimate Match didn't need new stages added when it could have brought forward the older stages from the games that had come before, redrawn if necessary. I think that there were some really beautiful stages that I miss not having in a game that I'm actually likely to still play anymore. The Fatal Fury and Art of Fighting team stages from '96 are in particular to be highlighted here. Sigh. In this game, stages are no longer associated with specific teams, except for the boss stages, and tend to come up randomly.

Curiously, the 3D stages, especially in the Dreamcast version, but even in the Ultimate Match version, are not necessarily better than the older 2D stages. Although in the case of most of them, it doesn't actually make much noticeable difference. The Japan Street set of stages are better in 2D. The Korea ones are noticeably different, but neither is better than the other, in my opinion. A few stages have slightly different lighting details between the 3D and 2D versions, which I think is very unusual. The characters themselves offer a smoothness indicator that can be modified, to give them a less pixelated appearance, so that they match the backgrounds a little better and don't look so old-school and clunky.

All in all, King of Fighters '98 is the best King of Fighters game, or at least it was when it came out, and remains so probably at least until 2002, although even then that's a question of opinion, not objectivity. In 1998 when it came out, it was side by side with Street Fighter Alpha 3, and that was probably the best game in the Street Fighter series up to that point. This was part of the genesis of the Capcom vs SNK series in the first place; with two of the best titles from the two most important series by each company out at the same time, it begged the question of what it would be like to have them really duking it out head to head. Although the Capcom vs SNK games are pretty good, I think that there's still definitely a kind of desire and demand to see this question answered more definitively still. And no, MUGEN doesn't really count.

But of the grade of games that precede the major graphical upgrades of the very late 00s and 10s years, King of Fighters '98 has to stand out as one of the best representatives, and one of the better games in the entire genre overall no matter how you slice it.

Game feature: Ultra Street Fighter IV

Now that I've had it for about six months--I didn't buy any version of SF4 until the Ultra version came out on Steam--it's past time that I did a game feature for it.  After all, it very quickly rocketed to the top of my preferences in the genre, to the point where I literally hardly play anything else in the genre anymore at all if I can't play this one.  I still mean to get more involved in King of Fighters XIII, but since I have to pick teams of three rather than focusing on one character at a time, as I prefer (and as most other KOF titles have allowed you to do if you chose, although it wasn't ever the default manner of play) it's unlikely to supplant my USF4 love anytime soon.

To me it still feels odd to play this on a non-console platform.  In fact, I don't have a decent laptop to play games on either, so it's loaded on my desktop.  I can't even plug this into my big ole 60" TV and watch the fights happen writ large with my sound bar and sub-woofer on; at least not until I decide to upgrade my older laptop to one with better graphics capability so that I can play Steam games on it.  That's the first thing that, to me at least, is odd.  But putting that aside, what do I think of the game?  Like I said, it's so good, that it basically invalidates the rest of the genre to me.  I almost don't have any interest in playing older games anymore.  It's that good.  It's clearly the best game in the Street Fighter series, and for my money, the best game in the genre overall.  I say this as a person who, for the last several years, had started to prefer King of Fighters games to Street Fighter games overall due to their variety and the quality of their later entries compared to the latest I had from Street Fighter.

Maybe I should take a small step back and reflect.  "Back in the day;" i.e., the mid-90s, I was a Street Fighter fan who played on occasion, but wasn't really into any of the SNK games at all.  It was more fair to say that I was kinda sorta vaguely aware of them rather than anything more intimate.  Of course, back then, we were still talking about plunking quarters into arcade machines.  There weren't even decent home conversions for any console that was available at this time; there were "decent" conversions to the PS1 and occasionally even the SNES for older games, but that was about it.  As my own console ownership improved to a PS1, a Dreamcast, and years later (although still very belatedly) to an Xbox and a PS2, I was finally able to start getting good conversions of more games.  I didn't play SF2 much anymore by this point; my favorite Capcom games were Street Fighter Alpha 3 and Capcom vs. SNK 2.  To me, the Alpha series was where the Street Fighter series peaked, and the Street Fighter 3 series didn't do much more me at all.  In fact, I didn't like a number of aspects of it, including some of the gameplay, some of the character selection, and I thought that the music actively annoyed me almost all of the time, and the boss was really stupid.

Because Street Fighter itself as a title started to feel stuck in the late 90s--either they weren't making updates at all for much of the time since then, or they were making updates that I didn't much like, it wasn't until this point that I started migrating more towards SNK games and really belatedly rediscovered the King of Fighters and Fatal Fury series.  For a while; heck; even a year ago--I probably would have told you that my favorite games in the genre were the final PS2 editions of King of Fighters '98 and Real Bout Fatal Fury 2, while Capcom would come in, probably third and fourth respectively with Street Fighter Alpha 3 and Capcom vs. SNK 2.  I remember years ago thinking that I'd love to see a game come out that used 3-D graphics to get rid of the need for hand-drawn and animated sprites, but which resurrected a 2-D Street Fighter-esque game-play, and that I'd really want them to be Street Fighter characters, frankly.  Of course, shortly after having that dream or wish; SF4 was announced, and it was exactly what I wanted.

Of course, I didn't get it for a long time, because I lacked the hardware to play it, and maybe that's a good thing.  Other than a small bit of playing around here and there and seeing a few things on youtube, I wasn't really exposed to the game until it was extremely refined; Ultra Street Fighter IV has a broad and deep character selection, finely balanced game-play, a lot of the unique gameplay elements that the IV brings to the greater series have been refined, and in general most of the "kinks", if you will, of the game are fixed.  I probably enjoy it more because I never had to "suffer" through older versions of the game.

Street Fighter IV takes place after Street Fighter II, and prior to Street Fighter III, which it largely ignores completely, other than to take the more popular characters from that ill-fated game and integrate some of them.  SIN is the new villainous organization, which is characterized as a division of Shadaloo (Shadaloo Intimidation Network) focused on developing weapons and other new technology.  It has a feel very similar--in terms of story--to NESTS from King of Fighters of about 15 years or so ago, which isn't a bad thing.  Seth, the boss, is some kind of synthetic human grown as a replacement body for Bison which acquired sentience and autonomy following the fall of Shadaloo in Street Fighter II.

There are a few nods to SFIII in terms of game-play, most notably in the fact that you must select your Ultra move rather than simply being able to do them all.  Ultra Street Fighter IV allows you to do either of the two Ultra moves if you select Ultra Combo Double, but the cost for this flexibility is that they do less damage.  Each character also has only one Super Combo (with a few odd exceptions).  Curiously, this makes the game feel more old school, however--King of Fighters could learn a lesson or two in terms of stripping down and focusing on core gameplay rather than on highly technical gameplay with lots of moves, many of which will be difficult to pull off.  Not that some SFIV moves aren't difficult to pull off; charge-characters and grapplers are notoriously difficult with a regular USB control pad, for instance, but there's still a feel that this almost ignored the Alpha games and SFIII entirely and is really a sequel to SFII instead.  This isn't a bad thing, really.

Super Combos are done much as they always have been; you gain energy on a super combo bar by landing hits or being hit.  Ultra Combos on the other hand, only get charged up when you take damage.  If you play too well, you won't actually ever get the opportunity to use an Ultra combo.

There's a few other neat additions, like Focus Attacks which make you vulnerable for a short time, and might actually end up taking energy from your own bar if you don't play it right, but which in return are armor breakers that knock your opponent down and give you an opportunity, if you're quick, to get in a super or ultra combo without any chance of it being blocked.  Playing on Steam also means that you have access to online matches that run pretty smoothly; you can upload your matches directly to youtube from your game, and more.  But really; the appeal of SFIV, in any iteration but especially this one, is the ability to play very classic (yet updated and modern feeling) Street Fighter gameplay with beautiful presentation in terms of the characters, the rest of the graphics, the stages, etc.  It even has decent voice-acting, with both Japanese and American/English voice actors (you can toggle in the settings which you prefer to have and you can even toggle per character, just in case you want your Japanese characters to speak Japanese instead of English in game.)  And it also advances the mythology significantly.

By this I mean that certain things in the Street Fighter mythos are actually changed.  Whereas before we were told that M. Bison was killed when Akuma did a Shun Goku Satsu on him at the end of SFII, well---clearly he wasn't, because he appears in this game.  Whereas previously we were told that Ryu and Ken's master was murdered by Akuma at about the same time-frame as SF1, well---clearly he wasn't either, because Gouken makes his first appearance in this game.  Whereas previously we were told that Akuma was holding back and Shin Akuma; the same character with a slightly different set of moves, was him fighting at his potential, we now get a totally new version of the character with new graphics, new moves and even a new name: Oni, who is the true potential of Akuma.  There's even some confusing talk in some sources about Oni being a "dream" character (as Evil Ryu is); what would happen if Oni completely foreswore his humanity and became--basically--a demon, warped by the "dark Hado" or, the Dark Side of the Force... er, his Martial Art power source.  This, of course, is kind of silly, since Akuma is already representative of someone who foreswore his humanity in pursuit of power.  Whatever.  Because I like the shotokan characters (I guess that makes me a bit of a scrub) I don't mind having another option, and one that's significantly different, for that matter, from the others, and I don't mind the update to the mythos.  And I like the look of Oni quite a bit.

Another fun aspect of digitally rendered models (rather than hand-drawn sprites) is that you can alter the appearance of the characters quite dramatically by downloading costumes.  My purchase of Ultra Street Fighter IV came with all of the previously released costumes enabled and deployed, and then I also paid some money for the Vacation package of additional costumes.  I didn't buy the more recently released animal cosplay ones because I think the notion of spending money on costumes is lame, unless they're phenomenal and I'm really excited, plus I thought the idea of animal cosplay costumes was really dumb anyway.  Anyone who reads my blog knows that I get inordinately picky about the color palettes and whatnot in past games; here, I tend to find a costume and color combination that I really like, and I like that I have a lot of options available.  Some characters that I don't even necessarily much like the look of in their original costumes are really cool looking in alternate costumes, although of course, many alternate costumes are extraordinarily dumb.  I'm in particular not fond of some of the "really Japanese" costumes that fail their localization efforts; gigantic bows tied on the back of characters with gigantic ropes, and weird, billowy, semi-samurai-ish robes.  Eh; that's the price of variety.  For (almost) every character, there's at least one costume that I like.  For some, it's even the original.

The character selection is also really great.  Every single SF2 character is here, almost all of the SFA characters (I haven't lined up the rosters to systematically compare, but I think Sodom, Birdie, Juni and Juli are the only ones missing.  I think...) and about half of the SF3 characters (Dudley, Elena, Yun, Yang, Ibuki, and Makoto); certainly all of the ones that you'd care to see again.  There are also a number of all-new SF4 characters: Abel, Crimson Viper, El Fuerte, Rufus, Gouken, Oni, Hakan, and Yuri.  There are, as always, too many shotokan characters: Ryu, Evil Ryu, Ken, Akuma, Oni, Dan, and even Gouken now, but they also all feel much more different from each other than they have in the past, so they don't feel too much like retreads of the same moves.

Game feature: Real Bout Fatal Fury 2: The Newcomers

It's been a long time since I posted a game feature post.  And heck--I've only done three of them so far anyway--so it's time for another.

SNK released most of the Fatal Fury series on two discs called Fatal Fury Battle Archives.  The first disc had Fatal Fury, Fatal Fury 2, Fatal Fury Special and Fatal Fury 3.  The second disc had the three Real Bout subseries titles, Real Bout Fatal Fury, Real Bout Fatal Fury Special and Real Bout Fatal Fury 2.  Missing from the collection are Fatal Fury: Mark of the Wolves, Fatal Fury: Wild Ambition, and Real Bout Fatal Fury Special: Dominated Mind.  The last was a special variant Playstation port of Real Bout Fatal Fury Special (actually, kind of obviously) while the other two missing titles can be seen as spin-offs that are not related to the "main" series--the latter being a 3D retelling of the first Fatal Fury story, and the former being a "ten years later" sequel of sorts with an almost completely redone cast and dramatically redone gameplay engine.  Curiously, MotW is only called Fatal Fury in the Dreamcast version; it's otherwise called Garou: Mark of the Wolves, giving at least some credence to the idea that it's not really a Fatal Fury game at all, but really a tangent, spin-off, or simply a related title that SNK hoped to stake a new series on.  Either way, it's not on the Battle Archives disc, but I do have the Dreamcast version.  It's also available as an Xbox Live arcade game in the Classics section.

In any case, removing it from consideration makes picking the "best" game in the Fatal Fury series much easier.  While I do occasionally hear of folks who give a slight edge to RBS--and I can kinda see their point--I give my edge to RB2.  It's the apex of the Fatal Fury series, and the best game in the series, in my opinion.  It's got the best character selection, including most of the characters who have graced the series over the years (minus a few mostly forgettable ones like Michael Max or Axel Hawk.  It's also missing Hwa Jai who has made his triumphant come-back in King of Fighters XIII, though--which proves that some of these older characters certainly can be rehabilitated and modernized.)  The animation is bright, detailed, and reasonably well done, if a bit cartoon-like compared to more modern King of Fighters animation.  In fact, in many ways, it has a similar "feel" graphically to Street Fighter Alpha 2 or 3, which was no doubt the point.

However, in terms of gameplay, it feels very specifically like a Fatal Fury game.  By this I mean that it has a pronounced two-plane arena, which has been tweaked at this point to where it's a nice tactical addition rather than a novelty, or a frustrating "chase each other back and forth from one plane to another" routine.  It has three regular attack buttons instead of four (which in the PS2 controller takes a little getting used to, especially if you're coming off playing a more traditional layout game.  When I played this last night it was right after toying around with King of Fighters XI for a while, for instance.)  Super move charging is also very FF instead of KoF or SF-like; every character has one super move that you can do when your meter is charged.  When your meter is fully charged, it will slowly drain away.  Once it does (or once you activate the super move) you can't do it anymore.  You can also use your supermove at will once your life is lower than 50%.  If you have a charge and less than 50% life, you can actually do a super super move (technically called a P. Power move--the "regular" version is called an S. Power move).  For some characters, this is a more powerful version of their super move, for others, it's actually an all new Super-super move.

With games modes in Capcom like A-ism or C-groove--similar to how super charging works in some King of Fighters games too, for that matter--you have to pay attention to how many charges you have, but in this game, you have to pay a bit more attention to it, because of the fact that the meter drains away fairly quickly, making your supers a use it or lose it proposition.  I don't know that I necessarily like this better (actually, if I could choose, I no doubt would choose something more A-ism like) but it certainly does feel different and very unique--except to other Fatal Fury games, of course.  Heck, if anything, this is a good argument for the inclusion of Mark of the Wolves within the series, because super meters in that game work very similarly to this one.

Presentation-wise, the game is also a little bit hit or miss.  Certainly it looks really nice, and has beautiful backgrounds (although each gets only two slight variations, so it feels like there a little bit of discount usage somehow) but the lack of any kind of meaningful ending, inter-battle demos, or anything like that feels a little bit spartan compared to other games that I'm used to playing.  Especially Street Fighter Alpha 3, the game that most logically this would be compared to.  The music is mostly recycled from RBS, but it's still pretty good stuff, so I don't feel too bad about that.  SNK music in general was always a bit more adventurous; willing to try wildly different genres than what you'd expect, sometimes.  This leads to a hit or miss situation in some ways; stuff that I really really like, and stuff that I think is too bizarre for words, but I do admire their willingness to experiment.

But in spite of a few quibbles where it did things in a way where I'd slightly prefer a different way of doing things, in reality, the game wins me over easily with its colorful character selection, fine control, sufficient yet not too much tactical complexity, and general personality.  It also helps that--although in SNK games I always tend to first gravitate to Terry--that there are plenty of other characters I enjoy playing in this one.  It's one that I find in my player pretty frequently.  It's a lot of fun, it's a good looking game, it's got lots of replayability value, and it's just really quite polished.  Like I said earlier, I really believe it's the apex of the Fatal Fury series, and certainly it is if you count Mark of the Wolves as a spin-off rather than a series entrant proper.

There is a secret boss or alternate character named Alfred in the game.  I guess he's more of a secret character than a boss per se.  He's insanely hard to play against; you can't lose a single round, and even at low difficulty, that's a challenging proposition  That last picture is him and his stage, though.  His stage is somewhere in the American southwest from the looks of it.  So are Terry's and Rick Strowd's (they actually look like the same stage, but at different times of day, and in Terry's there's a big-rig truck that's gone in Rick's.)  This game is technically a "dream match" rather than a canonical game, so I'm not sure if it even matters, but unlike most Fatal Fury games (minus 2/Special) it does look like it takes place in locations other than Southtown and instead has an international flair of sorts to it.  Franco Bash and Joe Higashi also seem to be on a ring or stage in Thailand.  The rest of them could be in Southtown, if you really needed them to be, but there's not necessarily a strong reason for believing that they should.

Game feature: King of Fighters XI

This seems like an opportune time to indulge in another game feature post. My son, while playing with this the other day, accidentally deleted the savegame file (he inserted the memory card after it was already running, which caused the autosave to rewrite the file with no data to speak of) so I've had to spend a little bit of time going back through and attempting to unlock all the hidden characters again. As of the time of this writing, I've got everyone except Mai and Geese done, and I should be able to have them complete the next time I'm able to sit down with the game... which hopefully, but not necessarily, will be tonight.

This is the first game from the King of Fighters series that I'm featuring, and it's in most respects an unusual entry in that series. A little background: the King of Fighters series used to come out with a new entry every year. From 1994 through 2003 that was the case, even when SNK went belly-up, a new title came out every year, but increasingly, they barely squeeked in under the date, and the games were (almost certainly) rushed in at least some respects. King of Fighters XI is the first in-sequence game to abandon this schedule; the year was dropped from the title, and it was released when it was ready to go. The poorly recieved King of Fighters Neowave was also released prior to this one; really it was a lightly tweaked adaptation of King of Fighters 2002 on the new hardware. This game, then, was the first real new game, on new hardware, with a new titling scheme.

That said, it was a continuation in every other sense of King of Fighters 2003. Not only is it part of the same "saga"--miniseries within the greater King of Fighters series, but it also continues to build on the tag-team mechanics of that game. In XI, there are new tweaks to the tagging--you can get out of combos with a timely tag team, or jump in and complete combos. Like 2003, you pick a leader for your team, and the leader is the only character who can get the so-called Leader Desperation Move, your big supercombo. This is unfortunate, but there are ways around it.

For example, although you can play it in arcade mode with the tag teaming, you can also play it in a mode that more closely resembles "classic" King of Fighters gameplay, and you can also play in a mode that more closely resembles classic Street Fighter play; i.e., instead of a team, you pick a single fighter and play best two out of three (or three out of five, if you set it up that way.) Needless to say, based on my already well-established preferences, that's usually how I play. In 2003 that mode was rather poorly executed; instead of having rounds, the battle was collapsed into a single round and each character has three health bars. Lame. Here, it works exactly as you'd expect.

The character selection for this game is unusual. While many classic characters that have been in almost every chapter of the series so far are conspicuously missing, at the same time, the game is packed with a number of unusual characters that have made only sporadic appearances before, and even characters who have never been in any King of Fighters title before. So frankly, even though it seems maybe a little weird to not have Joe Higashi or Andy Bogard show up (and the exclusion of Mai from the standard version of the game--she's a PS2 exclusive who has to be unlocked--was very controversial amongst fans) I've got them already on every other King of Fighters title I've got; it's kind of nice to see instead more esoteric characters like Duck King, Eiji Kisaragi, Mr. Big, or Silver, Gai Tendo, Jazu and Tung Fu Rue make appearances. One odd thing of note; once you get beyond the basic character color and start exploring the other three, there are some really weird ones out there. Of course, there's also a color edit so you can create two custom colors. These are also interesting; as in the PS2 Ultimate Match version of KOF98, you can also edit the colors of the character's "special effects" so that if, for example, you wanted the flame effects around Terry's Buster Wolf to be white and blue instead of yellow and orange, to give them a colder feel, well, you could. It seems a lot of work, but it's doable. Although I still haven't finished unlocking everyone again after losing my original savegame file on the memory card, I did go in and create an edit of Athena that looks more like her KoFXII version--just for fun. I actually quite like Athena in this game, after not liking her much in several recent ones. Her "deadly rave" style supercombos are replaced with a simplified and graphically quite astonishing move that makes me wonder if the designers are familiar with the classic X-men "Dark Phoenix" saga.

The presentation of the game is otherwise also very good; menu is perhaps a bit too small to easily see the character portraits when you're looking for your favorite, and the hidden characters are all off screen. The backgrounds are very nice, and higher resolution than the old Neo-Geo hardware was able to provide (although the more recent ports of Neo-Geo titles still had upgraded backgrounds anyway. 2002 simply redid the backgrounds in higher res, while 2003 did that to a few stages, and then created a whole bunch of new stages that were only loosely similar to their Neo-Geo counterparts.) Notably, there are fewer changes to these backgrounds as you advance--not much of the going from daytime to sunset to night time, for example. Given that the game is meant to be played in a single round format, with tag-teaming fighters, this is certainly an excuseable lapse.

All in all, I don't know that King of Fighters XI will go down in history as a real classic title in the series especially given the unusual character selection and a few other oddities about its game sstem, but it's certainly one of the better ones, as well as one of the most attractive ones. Frankly, its one of the ones I come back to the most, along with King of Fighters '98: Ultimate Match, so I consider it amongst the very best in the series.

Game Feature: Capcom vs. SNK 2

One game that continues to get a lot of voice for "best game in the genre" is Capcom vs. SNK 2. I have this game on the Xbox, so technically it's Capcom vs. SNK 2: EO with the EO (for either Easy Operation or Extreme Offense) added to the end of it. I don't really have much use for the EO mode, but for my kids, who haven't really mastered the art of the joystick motion required for, say, a basic Hadoken, it's one of their favorites to play because they can sit down and have a go at it without knowing what they're doing.

Really, though, the draw for this game is the fact that it combines all kinds of Capcom and SNK fighters together. Otherwise, how could you ever see what happens when you pit Ryu against Kyo or Terry? Sagat against Geese? Bison against Rugal? Or whatever other combination you wish. Of course, you can't do every combination, you're limited to the characters that they provide, but with 49 characters available (counting Chang and Choi separately) there's only a few that you'll miss.

Sadly, that gets right to the heart of one of my handful of small gripes about the game, but I'll just mention it and move on. There are a number of characters that don't really fit in the genre. They come from games that aren't really comparable, and in comparison, they feel out of place. In particular I'm thinking of Haohmaru and Nakoruru from the Samurai Shodown games and Hibiki from Last Blade. They've also continued the tradition of over-representation by some very similar Capcom characters; do we really need Ryu, Ken and Akuma? Well, probably yes, but if so, then do we really need Evil Ryu and Shin Akuma too? Probably not. If they'd removed these extraneous and out of place characters, we could have had room for a handful of other ones instead that better fit and are more sorely missed, that would have improved the experience.

But that's a minor pet peeve.

Rather, what did this game do right? There are a handful of other games that also mix Capcom and SNK characters, but this is regarded by nearly everyone as the definitive one. Partly that's because all of the other games out there that give us that same experience have significant flaws that they struggle to overcome, but partly it's also because this one is really just that good.

Sorta like Capcom did with Street Fighter Alpha 3, you can choose a game engine to apply to your character. There are more choices here. Twice as many, in fact. C-groove plays very much like SFA3's A-ism, while A-groove plays very much like SFA3s V-ism. P-groove creates an environment that is much more similar to SFIII's system, including parrying. The use of super combos is simplified from SFIII (you don't have to just pick one, for example) but its roots are very clear. There are also three grooves that are based on SNK games: S-groove which is like the earlier "EX" mode from King of Fighters, N-groove which is like the "Advanced" mode from slightly later King of Fighters games, and K-groove which is most similar to Samurai Shodown, except with "Just Defend" from Fatal Fury: Mark of the Wolves thrown in for extra effect. This insanely high number of possible combinations of characters and grooves makes for a game that you could potentially be mastering for years. I certainly don't claim to have done so: I stick with C-groove and about a dozen characters as my "go-to guys" most frequently. The level of choice is amazing, though.

As an improvement from the earlier Capcom vs. SNK, each character has been tweaked and improved. The earlier title had regular and EX versions of many characters, both of which felt movelist impoverished. This game, on the other hand, has merged those, creating more "full" characters that feel complete on their own. The older game also had a four button layout, which made it feel more King of Fighters like. In particular, this made the Capcom characters feel impoverished in terms of regular moves. They've reinstated the six button layout, and added new animations to allow every character to take advantage of them. These character and basic command improvements really propel this game to the top of the genre, and the phenomenal character roster to choose from cements its place. The fact that it combines SNK and Capcom characters together in a format that's not MUGEN or fanfiction is just icing on the cake.

That said, I can't let my description of the game pass by without making a handful of negative quibbles with elements of the game. I've already mentioned that a handful of the characters don't really fit and are poor choices. Most of the rest of my dislikes about the game are presentation issues.

One that's got a lot of attention on almost every discussion of the game I've seen so far are that the sprites are of mixed vintage and it really shows. The SNK characters were obviously all drawn recently, because Capcom didn't otherwise have them in their library of sprites. OK, well that's fair enough. Some of the Street Fighter characters, notably Ryu, Ken, Akuma, Bison, Chun-Li, and maybe one or two more that I'm forgetting at the moment, were also redrawn to look more similar to their SFII or SFIII appearances. A handful of other Capcom characters needed new sprites because they'd otherwise never appeared in a modern fighting game, like Eagle and Maki. Most of the rest of the Capcom characters use their recycled Alpha series sprites. These really don't look nearly as good as the newer ones. And most egregious of all is Morrigan, using her old Darkstalkers sprite, which in turn looks notably worse than any of the Alpha sprites. She's really a blight on the screen when she appears, which thankfully is rarely.

There's also only a handful of stages, and most of them aren't particularly attractive. This is disappointing, as the improved hardware could have given us some great ones. The older game, Capcom vs. SNK, actually had better stages (although it also had worse ones---stage design there was about 50/50. Real hit and miss.) None of them really actively offend, but they're extremely bland. There's nothing anywhere near as cool as the huge flaming car wreck stage in the earlier game, for instance. The exceptions to this are the two boss stages; the roof in the rain on the Japanese castle, and the rooftop after a massive explosion, with flaming debris everywhere if you get one of the the "true" bosses.

The same complaint could be made of the music. By the time I got this, I already had Marvel vs. Capcom 2 and Street Fighter III: Third Strike for the Dreamcast, so I knew what really bad fighting game music could be like. This game doesn't have particularly bad music. Sadly, it doesn't have very many tracks that are very good either. Most of them are kinda bland and uninspiring.

An even more minor issue; I'm not a huge fan of how they choose to render the special effects of super and special moves. I prefer the hand-drawn effects of prior efforts. It's not nearly so bad as the blobby mass of colored pixels that you got in the first game, although that could also be an artifact of the hardware that I'm running my ports on. But they're not very good, either. Considering how good some of those special effects have gotten in other games, like Marvel vs. Capcom 2 or King of Fighters XI (to use two particularly good-looking alternatives) having them appear lackluster here is a bit of a disappointment.

That said, all of those presentation issues are, when everything's considered, fairly minor quibbles. I really like this game, and it's certainly one of my "go-to" games when I feel like a little bit of karate supers action.

Game Feature: Street Fighter Alpha 3 Upper

I'd like to start a regular feature on this colum where I "feature" a specific title, and talk about why I like (or don't, if I don't particularly) that title. Because I've got a lot of titles, this is something that could go on for months. Should be fun.

Let me start with a game that's very near and dear to my heart; a strong contender for my favorite game in the entire genre, and certainly my favorite game in the entire Street Fighter series, Street Fighter Alpha 3 Upper. The best version of this is on the Playstation 2 compilation Street Fighter Alpha Anthology; what you have to do first is beat the "regular" Street Fighter Alpha 3 and then this is unlocked. It's basically a home port of an arcade game which in turn was an arcade port of a console version of the original Street Fighter Alpha 3 title... which was ported from the arcade. A bit confusing, I know. The biggest difference is that, unlike the regular SFA3 game, this one has all the characters that were added back in, including everyone who was ever in any version of SF2, plus all of the revised Street Fighter 1 and Final Fight and Alpha sub-series original characters. This makes a total of 34 characters, although granted, two of them are variants of existing characters. Either way, the roster is certainly respectable. A big roster is no substitute for a good one, though... the nice thing about SFA3 is that so many of the characters are actually going to be very fun to play.

Four characters, notably, are not included, even though they were in the portable version of the game: Ingrid, Eagle, Maki and Yun. Eagle and Maki would have been great additions, because as SF1 and Final Fight characters respectively, they would have fit in nicely with the other Alpha characters. Be that as it may, I've got them nicely done for already in Capcom vs. SNK 2, so I don't feel like I'm missing out too much. Ingrid and Yun's addition is a bit more questionable, but hey, the more the merrier, for the most part.

Aside from the character selection, this game also is helped by superior presentation. Each character has a unique stage, and a unique (and new! and pretty cool, for the most part, although some of them start to run together after a while) BGM track. In fact, the soundtrack was good enough that I tracked down an import CD from Japan so I could listen to it while I tinker with Street Fighter related thoughts, or read my Street Fighter comic books by UDON. Actually, I'm nerdy enough about this genre, that I've done that for a lot of related titles, but this one was literally the first that I ran down.

Each time you play against the computer, you fight ten (or occasionally 11) matches. The final match is the boss, and in almost all cases, the boss is called FINAL BISON; he's a roided up version of Bison that you can't play because he's too cheap for actual players to get their hands on. Fine boss, though. Difficult, but not too cheesy. He certainly does the job, plus he's iconic for the Street Fighter series. Before you fight Final Bison, you have a sub-boss, which will be one of the other characters in the game, and which will vary depending on who you are. And the fifth match, halfway through, will also be a "mid-boss", a character with a unique rivalry, or other reason to want to face off against you.

Despite the fact that all of these elements are excellent, it's really in the gameplay that Street Fighter Alpha 3 shines the most. It brought some variety back to the game by introducing "isms" that control the game engine that your character will respond to. A-ism is a tweaked (and in my opinion, very nearly perfected) version of the Alpha gameplay engine, X-ism does the same thing to the Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo gameplay engine, and V-ism is the odd Custom Combo system that debuted in Street Fighter Alpha 2. Each of these modes has been pretty heftily tweaked from their earlier incarnations, and work really well. SFA3 is a relatively fast-paced and superheroic game compared to some others in the series, although compared to, say, the Marvel vs. games maybe not quite so much.

There are also some other options you can layer onto the game; you can pick Saikyo, Maki or Classic filters, which change damage output, defense ability and super combos ability. Saikyo is basically a major handicap mode, Maki is "don't get hit, but your own hits will be scary powerful in return" and classic is Street Fighter 2 with no super combos at all. I clearly prefer A-ism with the "normal" filter, which gives me the ultimate in Alpha gaming experience. I also turn the number of victories needed to advance up to three, to give me longer to savor the experience. I really like the A-ism gameplay engine. Not only do I almost exclusively use A-ism in this game, but I also almost exclusively use the C-groove in Capcom vs. SNK 2... which is A-ism all over again, pretty much. That said, it's still nice to have these other options available. The game is fun.

The only minor quibbles I'd have about the game are 1) that some of the BGM tracks start to sound too much alike after a while (although others are among my favorite BGM tracks in a fighting game ever), and 2) the World Tour mode isn't present in the PS2 compilation. Then again, I haven't played my PS1 World Tour mode much at all after winning through it the first time, so maybe that's not such a handicap after all.

Anyway, I've also attached a few screenshots, snagged off of Moby Games, which is a great source for Capcom and SNK screenshots, by the way. Just to complete my own post and make it prettier.