History Of The King Of Fighters Explored
Thanks to 1UP for its feature charting the history of SNK's cult King Of Fighters series. The piece starts: "From 1994 until now and counting, SNK's King of Fighters... has almost as consistent a track record as EA's Madden football, and Madden didn't have to survive the protracted buyout and collapse of its owners." The yearly versions of these Neo Geo-originated 2D fighters are then analyzed, from KOF '94 ("Two dozen characters in a fighting game doesn't sound like much nowadays, but it was a hell of a cast in 1994") through the controversial KOF '99 ("a pretty daring move on SNK's part, delivering a complete overhaul of the series' tested gameplay"), to the present day, where a separate article delivers new details on the forthcoming KOF '03, revealing new rosters and "a tag battle system" for this latest arcade-bound iteration.
If you haven't played any of the King of Fighters games then you don't go to the arcade very much, or at least a very good one.
King of Fighters doesn't get many home console ports, but it's a solid series with greatly polished gameplay and much tighter control than it's Capcom competition. It has a huge following in the arcades, but I don't see many people that know of it outside of that environment.
Sweet stuff, check it out.