By The Bastard Gamer
(Lets have Lightspeed Tacos for dinner)
I’d make a video about this but due to hardware difficulties, money problems, and time constraints I’m gonna make it a text review.
The King of Fighters series was one of the many attempts to compete with Street Fighter II, and the one that totally “got it right”.
It was first launched by Japanese game developer SNK for its Neo Geo arcade system with King of Fighters ‘94. It was 2D and featured the first ever team fighting system where players controlled a three-man team of fighters. Your goal is to KO all three of your opponents one at a time.
The controls were tight and responsive, yet could not button mash your way to victory and you had to sort of take your time and work on your moves to win, it sounds hard but it’s possible. This was one of those combat engines that “worked so well why bother changing it”, as every KOF game onward added one new feature at a time and kept the 3-on-3 system and controls intact.
Its hard to pin down the best KOF, that’s because the entire series was so great. There was never even a single bad game in the series, the only time the series ever started showing slight signs of failure was KoF Maximum Impact, which was the series attempt at 3D. The games were good 2D and 2D is where they’ll stay, in fact KoF XII is planned for the PS3 and 360 sometime in 2009 and will rem ain 2D.
Fighting games shouldn’t change unless the King says so.
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Not a bad break down of what the series brought when it first came out. When it comes to this series of games you’d better know what your doing. I totally agree with you about Maxim Impact it was too good to be true. It’s sad that they didn’t have the option to change the voices to Japanese I did not like the English cast for that game.
The game did not deserve a sequel either. Sad to say I played it but it was the same as the first. I’m glad they are going back to their roots and keeping the formula the way it should be. Should they try to do another 3-D KOF they better do it right.
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