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Review: King of Fighters ‘97 |
Before I begin my journey to get my mittens on the much-awaited King of Fighters ‘98 for the PSX, I thought I’d stop by and give me thoughts on the game that has been keeping me busy for a couple of weeks.
Many of you already know about the King of Fighters series and like the .vs series, you either love it or hate it. You should read up on D. Schneider’s past reviews on them to get the goods on gameplay. What I will mainly focus on here is how the Playstation copes with a game such as King of Fighters.
Well does it?
*strained expression* Well…. Yes and no..
The first thing you notice is that the game only requires four buttons. This is quite a change, considering when you play an SF game, you’re restricted to four buttons unless you are dextrous with the controller. Some of the double motions are kind of hard to get out, the control is generally very good.
The animation in the game ranges from good to bad to *very* bad. But hey, this is the PSX right? Lemme put it this way, some characters like Shermie and Billy Kane have only few frames for their moves, clones like Iori don’t seem to be missing all that much.
The loading times are, how shall I put this? Long. Too Long. When compared side-by-side to godly SFA3, you’ll be sure to find out that you’ll be able to play at least 2 rounds of A3 while still waiting for the KoF match to load. There is also a 5 second “Now Loading” screen between rounds to load in the next character. It’s very annoying and manages to break up the flow of play very successfully.
Therefore I recommend trying Single Player Mode if you don’t like the in-fight loading. You’re stuck with one character, it’s not “true” KoF, but hey, you’ll live.
I must mention, that you get a few extra goodies in it as well. As well as the stock standard extras like the Survival and Training Modes you also get 2 art galleries filled with about 60 or so KoF artworks. I’m not a fan of that style of art, but at least it’s nice to know it’s in there.
I hear you asking “So is it worth it?” and I answer “Well, depends (And not that nappy for oldies mind you).” If you have the Saturn or NeoGeo versions already, then don’t bother with this. On the other hand, if you’re restricted to your PSX, then go for it. If you can live with the animation cuts, load time and the PSX controller, you’ll find one heckuva game.
