KI Gold is something of an in-joke here. The other review we have in our archives is an enthusiastic piece of prose from the “High Voltage” days, which concludes by scoring the game 100%. It’s still there today, despite numerous message board posts asking whether it’s an elaborate April Fool’s gag put into the wrong section, or people begging us to take it down (OH GOD WHAT WILL THE OTHERS SAY??/!!1)

Well the continuing decomposition of the Nintendo 64 console, plus a bit of eBay japery means I was able to secure a copy for a very low price, and can now put forward my own views on this holy piece of coding. Oh god yes (faps)

Now don’t go thinking I’m writing this review as some sort of belated “damage control” to counter HardCore’s. I don’t believe he and his fellow ex-staffers are now the equivalent of the embarrassing grandfather you’d put in a home. I don’t think anyone back then was worried about the online Streetfighter Community of Truth and Justice thinking they were ’scrubs’ or ‘fanboys’ and in a continuation of that spirit I’m perfectly fine with that article, and am writing my own take on it simply because I can.

Killer Instinct Gold is that rarest of beasts, a 2D fighter on the Nintendo 64. It shares this honour with a small but fabulous collection of games: Mortal Kombat Trilogy, ClayFighter 63 1/3 and ClayFighter: The Sculptor’s Cut. That’s it, the console’s entire 2D fighter library. It’s hard to say whether any of them represent the utmost limits of the machine’s 2D capabilities – and whether the low points (ie all of them) are just down to sloppy coding or laziness. We’ll never know.

It’s also kind of funny or ironic (it has to be one of those, it usually is) that a port of this quality shows up on this machine, when the first Killer Instinct was originally designed to be a showcase of what Nintendo’s “ULTRA 64″ could do. l0l.

So, how do you fit the contents of a Seagate custom hard drive, a R4600 RISC processor, and a Midway DCS sound system onto a 96 Mbit cartridge?

Answer: very badly.

I guess trying to put such a huge visual and sonic feast onto a format that made its living being limited by cartridge size was kind of stupid, but hey, Rare, Nintendo, Nintendo, Rare. They tried their best and managed to deliver something that, although missing the polish and style (and thus you may argue, the POINT) of Killer Instinct 2, is marginally entertaining with a few fun extras.

Fundamentally they’ve managed to keep the spirit of the game intact. It’s recognisably KI and all the gameplay features have been included, and although the N64 has taken the question mark over its true 2D abilities to its grave, it’s clear that it can do better than … the SNES. And the … NES. Er. It manages to keep up with what’s going on onscreen no problem, no slowdown or glitching and it recreates the physics, collisions and speed of the arcade game perfectly.

However there have been ample reductions in the graphics field – space and hardware limitations or whatever. It’s not so bad as to be a total disgrace, but it just scrapes it. The sprites have much less animation in their motions, along with a single winpose. There are less colours onscreen, making the models seem less rounded and realistic, and the “anti-aliasing” does away with their sharpness and clarity. Sequences such as the fatality animations, which in KI2 are wonderful, are massacred to often just three or four fuzzy frames.

The special effects, something KI has always excelled in, are poor shadows of the original. Moves, sparks and projectiles no longer have that gorgeous luminance to them and look simplistic and out of place against the backgrounds. While some light effects are recreated acceptably, such as the flame that spews forth during an extended hit sequence or Fulgore’s beam laser, some of them just look woefully flat and lustreless. Kim Wu’s two-colour air fireball is particularly shameful as it plummets to the ground and dies lonely and unloved. The hit sparks are now polygonal ala PSX SFA3, but don’t really fit in with the game look, and while the ‘64 can do transparency, and indeed does it here in places where there was none before, it’s clear it just can’t match KI2.

The backgrounds have suffered in similar fashion, as the N64 quite clearly lacks the processing power to do justice to the arcade version. While all the stages bar one (the alternate Spinal stage) are present – they’ve all been severely toned down to make up for the consoles’ shortcomings and make for very poor comparison. All the depth and detail, scope and realism of KI2 is gone and in its place are clunky, fake-looking levels, shoddily put together and full of objects that just don’t fit in. The difference between 2D textures and 3D models is horribly obvious; backgrounds once full of impressive architecture are now populated by big empty spaces and flat-shaded pyramids and cubes.

Some are better than others. Orchid’s helipad stage retains the most important features of the original (giant helicopter gunship, apocalyptic ruins), as does Glacius’ crashed spaceship. Sabrewulf’s castle is fairly close, although the breakable wall on the right now leads to a simple ledge instead of the outside of the castle and well like KI2 did. Spinal’s ship is now at a totally different angle to the arcade, Jago’s bridge is zoomed right in and lacks any discernable background detail and Tusk’s stage is a bland, over simplistic version of his cool Stonehenge stage, without the mad sky effect, or the flying rocks.

As well as the traditional 2D back-and-forth stages, several of the levels rotate around you as you fight – this is a feature new to KI Gold and it has to be said is not a particularly good one. As you leap about and get knocked over, the ‘camera’ spins slowly around the stage as the fight goes on, so a wall you can see in the background will eventually be at a 45� angle to the characters and later on it will be to the side of you. For a start it’s woefully unrealistic, secondly trying to retreat into a corner of the level while the camera rotates means the area you were retreating to is no longer active, causing you to fall short, and often get hit when you land. Thirdly the rotation means that sometimes an object in the arena such as a wall or fence in T.J Combo’s stage or those rocks in Tusk’s level obscure the action. As well as round and round, the viewpoint also moves up and down in some locations. It’s not a great addition either – seeing as the sprites are flat, it just leads to strange looking pans where the view moves up and down and the sprites just stand as they were, despite now being practically 90� to the ground below them. Oops.

The camera’s newfound abilities don’t stop there, another KI Gold feature not in the arcade game is the zooming camera, similar to the one from the first Killer Instinct. Now instead of being limited by the standard screen aspect, it’s possible for the players to retreat to the opposing corners of the stage, the sprites a mere inch high. Although subtle (it actually took me a while to notice it, dur dur) it actually improves the game slightly, as it’s not constant in-you-face mayhem, and allows for far longer retreats, makes certain charge-up moves less risky to perform, allows for “rest periods” and wondrous (boring) long-range projectile wars.

The zoom also gets closer than before, and when something interesting occurs like an Ultra Combo, Ultimate (fatality) or win pose – it zooms so close that the characters fill the entire screen. It looks really ugly, as all the blurring and lack of detail, colour and animation are just thrown in your face.

The ‘knock-offs’ – where the defeated character is knocked off a roof or into a lava pit or something, have changed for the worse too. Instead of cutting to a separate, totally 3D sequence, the stage you’re on will now rotate or zoom out as you follow the (sprite) victim to their doom. It’s nowhere near as good and at times is hilariously unrealistic. Gargos’ death animation, which is great in KI2 is a no-effort travesty of the original. I wish I could show it here somehow.

There have been other, predictable graphical sacrifices. All the wonderful CG movies, intros and win clips are gone and the rendered ending images replaced with still pictures and the odd zoom or polygon effect. The select screen is a sad sight to behold; the arcade game had these huge imposing 3/4 body shots of the characters and they breathed, glared and bounced in a very menacing manner. The console version has the same images, but without any of the smooth animation. What makes it worse is instead of being completely still, the programmers have tried to add a little life by having one part of each character move. It just makes thing worse, seeing Tusk’s 3-framed jerky hair, or Glacius’ finger twitching (haha!) or Sabrewulf’s lower jaw opening.

So yes, a hell of a lot cut out, what remains given less-than-great treatment and a few distinctly crappy new additions. It’s fair to say the game will never win any sort of recognition for its visuals. It’s not as butchered as the SNES port of the first game (sorry if you’d blocked it out) – but it’s not far off.

Surprisingly though, the sound is amazingly accurate. All of the voices are present (except the ones that accompanied the CG scenes) and are of high quality. The immortal “C-C-Combo Breaker!” is, of course included and the music is practically arcade perfect, even the tracks with lyrics remaining intact, and only the odd tune sounding slightly tinny.

KI2’s famed combo system (famed for what I’ll leave to you) has always interested and amused me, so it was with great pleasure that I found KI Gold to possess an intelligent, helpful training mode, or rather a training mode AND a practice mode.

Practice mode is instantly recognisable from a host of other fighters. Pressing the Z-trigger on the underside of the controller brings up the move list, and it displays the most recently highlighted move from the list at the top of the screen when you press Z again. It details your characters’ specials, supers, super linkers and the five combo enders. Sadly there are several omissions in this mode. Because the dummy’s life bar never gets to ‘danger’ status, it’s impossible to practice Ultras, Assaults (mini-ultras), or Ultimates. Plus you can’t access things like Ultra-breakers, or Jago’s spirit move either. You also have no control over the dummy player, and so there’s no way to practice things like parrying, or air juggles or retaliation moves. In short it’s great to pick up and practice the basics, but once you’re ready to move onto the level of FRUITY K.I. MASTA, you’re screwed.

Then there’s the training mode – one of the funnest, and most frustrating parts of the game. It’s a series of KI-engine-oriented graded challenges, split up into levels of increasing difficulty. You chose your character and start at the first challenge, which is performing your chosen players’ moves against one of those spinning wooden things that martial artists kick. The second stage introduces autodoubles, the third combos, the fourth combo breakers and the fifth counter moves (every move in KI Gold has a counter move, apparently) Each trial has a 10-second time limit, and five opportunities to get it wrong before you’re given a “fail”. A neat touch is the floating Zen master in the background who transforms into a clone of your character to demonstrate each task, and spends the rest of the time clapping and saying “pass” or “fail” when you do so. Nifty.

It’s also possible to select ‘focused training’ – which allows you to pick any of the five levels without having to progress through them. Again, like practice mode, it’s good (and frustratingly hard in places – the timing for manual button press chains is NOTHING LIKE what the dummy demonstrates) to learn the basics, but totally ignores the more complex features. No, it’s still off to GameFAQs for that sort of thing. (I recommend the FAQ by “HSeijas”)

Given the complex controller motions and precision button presses required to do well in the game, the N64 controller isn’t actually as bad to use as I expected. The buttons are a little small and the pad lacks diagonals, but it’s accurate and responsive and I found I could do the moves I wanted any time. It’s only after an extended play session at the utmost difficultly level that I started finding it a little uncomfortable.

As befits a home conversion, KI Gold comes with a host of options to tweak the game. The standard choices such as time, damage, difficulty and a rather welcome ’speed’ setting are present – and there are also five ‘levels’ (each comprising or three or four selections) of unlockable options, gained by beating the game and the training modes. These allow for more in-depth buffoonery with the game engine, with such modifications as disabling throw damage, easy combo breakers, unlimited super meter, fast fireballs, deactivating ‘autodoubles’, enhanced (”cheap”) juggling, disabled blocking and more. These extra options seem to address most of the complaints that are commonly levelled at the KI2/Gold game system, which is nice I guess, though like the System Direction in Dreamcast SF3:3s, I just feel the game isn’t the same when it’s been messed about with and so leave all the options on default. Even if it does mean losing 15 times in a row. ;_;

So for lastability you’ve got the game itself (no, shut up) – the practice modes, a ‘team battle’, an ‘elimination team battle’ – basically the same but you need to ultra/ultimate/knockoff the other guy to win, and a tournament thing.

Unlike the coin-op, which had the novel, if ultimately pointless multiple endings for each character (depending on who died and who didn’t during the game) – Gold just tells you none of each (single) ending on easy, half of it on normal and all on hard. Like I said earlier the endings are wretched compared to the arcade, but really you should be getting used to that concept by now. A couple of even harder difficulties open up after beating the default toughest, but KI games anger me enough as it is and I’m not feeling particularly masochistic of late, sorry.

The presentation is neat enough, a sort of evolved version of the KI2 look with a few cosmetic changes here and there. It’s also nice to have a wider selection of character outfit colours to pick from, as I can finally pick Orchid in her wipe-clean sexy green. Golly.

As a port of the multimedia masterpiece its parent was, Killer Instinct Gold is oh so weak. Should that be counted so heavily against a game that never stood a chance to be anything but? Yeah, why not. Fortunately the numerous options and other goodies redeem it somewhat, and the game is still fairly playable in small doses. It’s nice to be able to actually sit down and pause the game, and check out the numerous moves at a leisurely pace, and I’ve actually taken to using it as a practice mode for playing the KI2 rom – probably it’s best use. So I’m afraid as much as I want to, I can’t give this 100%

How’s 73%?

• Score: 73%
• Developer: Rare
• Publisher: Nintendo