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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.
Unfortunately, the game series is much less popular in the US than it is in Japan - the same goes for many, many of SNK's games.
But Capcom treats their games differently. Street Fighter Zero/Alpha is not a sequel to SSF2X/Turbo.
They generally only increment full version numbers with complete engine overhauls, which are also accompanied by storyline changes. So, talking only about 2-D Street Fighter-branded games, we have:
Each series is distinct enough in gameplay to merit differentiation from the others. Even a master of the games in one series MUST learn new skills to perform well in the others, especially in areas concerning defense.
Now, similar things can be said of KoF moving from one edition to the next, but since it's SNK routine to bring out a new KoF game every year according to tradition, it makes sense that they name their annual game series according to the year. Big deal, this is just how SNK works. If Capcom's release schedule were so rote, it would probably make sense for them too.
Me, I like Capcom's infrequent, multi-series release strategy. It provides focus and stability to the competition scene.
< tofuhead >
It is still the dark of night.
I'll take Soulcalibur any day. Of course, maybe that's just because I could never stomach learning endless combo lists.
My only political goal is to see to it that no political party achieves its goals.