| | Another good port, though this is my least favorite of recent KOF's. Maybe it's due to the death of the old SNK, I don't know, but many of the backgrounds are just plain ugly and I don't like the music. The new moves don't have the effortless intuitive quality of the older games and the new characters are gothic freakshows who clash unpleasantly with the old Japanese street punk characters. And if Zero was frustrating in 2000, imagine how fun fighting a suped-up sub-boss Zero will be, and then a young blond super turbo version of Zero, Igniz. Urrgh. Oh, and the "wire system" where certain moves bounce the opponent off the side of the screen like a rubber ball, is just silly.
I like that they streamlined things by axing the armor and (whatever it was) modes, and the ratio system where you allocate four characters among players and strikers is rather nifty, and how you can set practice mode's "watching" so that the winning CPU character stays around for the next fight, but these still haven't made up for the other things.
I don't like the puzzle mode as much as last year, now it's just another Vs. block-dropping game, except turned sideways and you can use built-up energy to fire off a KOF character's "super" that does nasty things to your opponent's blocks. Well done, but that tile unscrambling puzzle mode in 2000 was awesome. |
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