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Review – King of Fighters ‘98: Ultimate Match |
King of Fighters ‘98: Ultimate Match is the big one, the real deal, the main event. SNKP have been putting out KOF compilations for a couple of years now, and every single time KOF’98 has been conspicuously absent.
Acknowledging fan opinion that it is the apex of the series in terms of design, content and lastability the company responsible have gone back and fixed some of the long-running complaints, added some missing characters and generally dicked around with moves and balance, hoping upon hope to improve upon near-perfection.
And was it worth the wait? Well no, quite frankly it wasn’t. Because it’s just KOF’98 with loads of puny, pissy barely-noticable little changes, plus the addition of characters who mostly showed up later on in the series anyway.
Maybe that’s a bit harsh, but it’s the bare honest truth. Let’s gild it, in traditional SNK apologist style. Because that’s what we’re here for after all.
So what is “new” and “exciting” enough to warrant the £40/$60 or in time-honoured fashion, few gigs’ bandwidth and blank DVD?
Well the whole thing has been given a facelift. Not an especially impressive one it must be said; hopes will be dashed as the game starts up and the same god-awful intro that first raised hackles more than a decade ago plays out identically to the Neo*Geo version in all but soundtrack.
Then there’s the menus. Lots of options to be sure, although nothing that will surprise anyone who has played an SNK home port in the last decade or so.
Now the original KOF’98’s presentation can be summed up in a single word: soil. There’s no chunky brown goodness in Ultimate Match that’s for sure, instead there are metallic menus and gunmetal blue sheens on things, and spinny logos and globes all over the shop. The game weakly attempts to channel KOF’97’s TV-style presentation but without a fraction of its aplomb.
The ingame interface; lifebars, super meters, combo meters etc. have likewise been modernised but sadly everything else is way too familiar.
There are few truths sadder in gaming than the acknowledgement that SNK’s KOF art has not aged well, and the attempts to disguise this; the videogame equivalents of botox and lipsuction fall equally flat as once more players are served up with sub-par 3D recreations of classic (or, in ’98’s case, average) stages. This reviewer recommends a hasty switch to the 2D versions as soon as possible, if only to see how the newly-added 3D stages suddenly lose their perspective-shifting, while retaining the ugly aliasing problems they had in the previous dimension!
It makes no difference how many shitty 3D backgrounds or how much anti-aliasisotropicaphal sprite filtering is added, there’s no getting away from the fact they are still twelve year-old sprites designed for the DeLorean of home consoles. What with those, ’98’s famously ugly portraits and the uninspired new GUI – the game looks terrible, worse than ever before in these days of high-def televisions.
And it harms the overall product, it’s true. It’s not impressive or interesting in the slightest, this mix of creaky old resources, half-hearted polygon interference and sprite blur band-aids. It wasn’t impressive when they did it back in 1999 with the Dreamcast Dream Match ‘99, and it’s sad to say that it feels a lot like that title. Simply put, it’s not the “holy shit” experience it should have been, the one that KOF’98 so richly deserves.
Fortunately as always, the game manages to shine through. It’s still ‘98 at heart, but with added nice new bits. Most obvious are the new characters; Kasumi Todo, of Art of Fighting and KOF’96 fame with a mixed-up move set and pleasingly unpleated trousers, far more soothing to the eye than those awful starched things she wore in KOF’99.
Here’s Eiji Kisaragi, he of the long-awaited return and instant plummet back to obscurity in KOFXI showing up as well. Then there’s Mr. Big and Wolfgang Krauser, Goenitz and Orochi; basically every character from every KOF up until ‘98 is now present and accounted for.
Tweaks galore have been made to almost everyone in this huge and meaty roster. There are new supers, new moves, changes in existing move properties, EX versions of previously single-version characters as well as changes in existing EX versions. The chance to check each and every character to see what’s new and different and think of ways to use them is a warm, familiar feeling that any long-term fighting game fan will recognise and embrace.
Then there’s the new mode. ‘98 always offered the choice of ADVANCED, (AKA ‘KOF’97-ISM) and EXTRA (which is KOF’95-ISM.) (Or something.)
Added to the mix is ULTIMATE mode, a crazy mix-n-match mode which allows one to cherry-pick the offensive and defensive tropes of both modes and combine them at will.
It’s worth mentioning instant SDMs, the new ability to instantly fire off a super-powered, er, super by performing the motion with both buttons (albeit at the cost of three levels of meter.) Although it’s still possible to do it the old-fashioned way, removing the mandatory POW stock burst, for so long a KOF staple, and the glorious, frustrating and delightful way it changed the flow of the game will be sorely missed.
What else? For the single player, a choice of three mid-game challengers will show up, depending on how skillful they are and similarly there are three different final bosses; Goenitz, be-wigged Mexican priest/child abuser, Orochi, the defendant in sixteen seperate cases of gender fraud and Omega Rugal, who is just a great big cunt. Unless your character has an uppercut that is, in which case he’s flowers and kittens and candy floss.
And for anyone out there who is salivating at the thought of a redone, anime-style pre-Rugal resurrection cutscene, NO they DIDN’T BOTHER. In fact they even took the old one out! No H.R. Giger-esque scuba action for you, my friend.
Oh who am I kidding, this is still a truly great game. It’s just not enough of a revamp. It’s not the Ultimate, Ultimate, Ultimate version that you, or I, or anyone with a spark of humanity and sliver of imagination was expecting.
The saddest thing of all is that it’s not SNK’s fault. At least, not all of it. Just like Capcom, currently hard at work revamping Super Turbo for a souped-up rerelease, for KOF’98UM too it seems like a case of too little, too late.
Two years ago both this and HD Remix would have been incredible news; our eyes would have rolled, our mouths would have frothed and our underwear would have pinged away as if on wires. But here we are, almost done with 2008, with Street Fighter IV and Tekken 6 in arcades worldwide, Soul Calibur IV lighting up home consoles and tantalising images and footage of King of Fighters XII in all its high resolution, super-detailed 2D glory slowly dribbling out.
Take into account those genre giants, as well as countless other fighters, from BlazBlue and Tatsunoko vs Capcom, right down to Strip Fighter IV and Mortal Kombat vs DC Universe and believe it or not a new SF2 and a remix of the best KOF ever have suddenly been rendered boring, non-events.
And by the time you read this, o space traveller from a distant world, who knows what else will have changed?
If nothing else, SNK have once again proved they have almost legendarily bad timing. You wait nine years for a fighting game to come along, and all of a sudden twenty show up at once! New, good-looking, well-designed ones!
Given the choice it would be silly to go back to that plain, vanilla slugfest now this newer one with more characters and moves is out there, but it’s a hard game to recommend all the same, and I suspect the same will be true for Capcom’s own effort. Back when the fighting game community used to pore over each and every possible rerelease as some sort of relief from the nine-year drought, and actually looked forward to things like Capcom Fighting All-Stars, an effort such as Ultimate Match would have been acceptable, awesome and a gift from the gods. Now it feels more like a hollow, token gesture.
Let’s play the initials game. What other vaguely summing-up flavoured words could U.M. stand for?
Underwhelming Misfire?
Unexciting Mess?
Unfortunately Misogynistic?
Unexpectedly Middling?
Untimely Misjudgement?
Please email any other acronymn suggestions to someone else. Or post them on a forum that isn’t ours.
