The King of Fighters XI Review

The annual King of Fighters series is more than a decade old, and originates on arcade hardware that's older still, though the series' solid and varied gameplay has continued to bring the faithful coming back for more each year. Although many hardcore followers consider 1998's The King of Fighters '98 to be the best game in the bunch--and some feel the series has gone downhill since then--the 2D fighting series has finally returned in style with The King of Fighters XI, a fast-paced game with a huge, well-balanced character roster and a lot of gameplay depth. Even though the game originally appeared on the Atomiswave arcade platform (arcade hardware with the embarrassing distinction of having noticeable load times), the game traces its roots, and most of its art assets, back to developer SNK's NeoGeo platform, and this reliance on older graphics is hard to miss. However, if you're a bona fide 2D fighting-game fan, there's a good chance that graphics have always taken a backseat to gameplay for you, and if that's the case, you'll get all the great gameplay you can handle in this extremely well-crafted fighting game.

The King of Fighters series changed up the standard one-on-one style of most fighting games by introducing a unique team mechanic that lets you choose a group of characters to control across a series of rounds, and teams are back again in KOF XI, along with a new "shift" system. Shifting lets you call in another member of your team in the middle of a match, either to escape a severe beating or to assist in a few different ways to one you've been dishing out. The shift mechanic seems to work just fine and favors aggressive play; it's not a safe way to escape punishment (given that there's a slight delay on it), and it adds some good variety. If you're an ambitious sort who likes to string together huge combination attacks, you can use the shift mechanic for this purpose as well, though you can get through most of your matches with little to no use of it.

Regardless of what you think about the shifting system, the game's teams are quite solid because you can select from a huge, well-rounded group of characters. Most of them are old favorites from previous KOF games, and there's a few transplants from other SNK games. In addition, you can unlock several more hidden characters both by completing the single-player arcade mode, and by playing the "challenge" mode, which has a series of odd, puzzle-like requirements (such as defeating an enemy using only a certain type of attack). By default, the game offers a solid roster of 33 characters to play (divided among 11 teams of three apiece), though you can unlock 14 more characters, which brings the roster to a whopping 47 characters total. With the exception of the unlockable bosses, all of the game's characters seem balanced pretty well; just about any team of characters can take down any other team. And because there are so many characters choose from, there's a good chance you can find at least a few that you like. But you'll probably find a few that you don't care for, either, such as the extremely powerful sub-boss Shion, and the extremely unimpressive final boss, Magaki, who has an annoying voice and doesn't look terribly threatening, but is so absurdly overpowered that your final battles with him will be a chore rather than an exciting challenge.

The whisper-thin Magaki will be a bit hard for most players to look at, but depending on your experience with and expectations of fighting games, you might have some issues with the rest of the game's presentation. No, you're not going to get a game that looks as impressive in motion as a Virtua Fighter 5 or even a Soul Calibur 3. However, if you've played these types of games before, you should easily be able to look past the dated graphics and appreciate the game's artwork for what it is. This is truly a 2D fighting game with character sprites that have been retouched and tweaked countless times over the years, and they look just fine in motion. Many of the characters have plenty of personality and lots of different voice samples that play when they attack, get hit, or recover from being knocked down. The game's voice acting is all in Japanese, but it's all delivered decently well, and the menus and dialogue screens (for between-match cinematics and victory screens) are all in decently translated English. However, KOF XI's music isn't quite as impressive. Much of it is pretty generic high-energy techno and electronic stuff that's easy to forget.

The North American PS2 version of KOF XI seems to be a straightforward conversion of the original Japanese PS2 version of the game, minus support for online play. Both versions have one-on-one multiplayer, a single-player arcade mode, an alternate single-player team mode, a survival mode, a challenge mode, a practice mode, and a gallery of unlockable artwork. Likewise, the character roster is both big enough and deep enough (every character in the game has his or her own set of fighting maneuvers with special properties you'll want to experiment with) to keep you busy just playing the game in single-player mode against the game's fairly challenging computer-controlled opponents. However, like most head-to-head fighting games, KOF XI really doesn't really come into its own unless you have some good human players to take on.

KOF XI brings together some decent extras in the form of additional play modes and unlockable art galleries, a unique twist with the shift system, and a surprisingly good single-player experience. Each of these elements is a good addition, but taken together with a fighting game that offers solid, fast-paced gameplay and a huge roster of interesting and well-balanced playable characters, you get a very compelling package for any players who consider themselves to be 2D fighting-game fans.

Street Fighter III: Third Strike Online Review

Street Fighter III has long been a favorite of the hardcore crowd, but it's a game that never managed to match the wild mainstream popularity of its predecessor. Deeply technical and complex, SFIII was, for the most part, underappreciated when it was first released in the late '90s, but it nonetheless found a place as a favorite amongst tournament-level players. Street Fighter III: Third Strike was the last arcade update of the game, and it now makes its way onto current-gen consoles. This Online Edition is a practically flawless port of the arcade game, bringing with it all the nuance, complexity, and sheer fun of the original, as well as its various character balance issues.

It's easy to see why Street Fighter III never reached the stratospheric heights of Street Fighter II. Street Fighter III ditched the majority of the characters that players had grown to love, replacing them with an eclectic group of newcomers who, for the most part, looked and played little like the Street Fighter II and Alpha series alumni. The game also required you to have a high level of technical proficiency to master it and introduced some mechanics and concepts that were new to the genre at the time. EX moves--supercharged versions of normal supers--were first introduced here, but SFIII's biggest gameplay innovation was the parry system, a high risk/reward mechanic that let you negate attacks by pressing forward (or down for low attacks) the instant a hit landed. The parry system completely changed the way Street Fighter played, forcing you to significantly lift your skills to stay competitive in a world where any attack could be parried for no penalty.

Because of its intricacies, the game may not immediately appeal to those used to the accessibility of newer fighting games. Street Fighter III has a steep learning curve and certainly isn't as accessible as Mortal Kombat, Marvel vs. Capcom 3, or even Street Fighter IV. Third Strike Online is a game that demands dedication, but the payoff is a tight, exciting experience that rewards skill, timing, and strategy.

Those used to Street Fighter II or IV will find III's cast tough to come to terms with initially, but spend enough time with them and it becomes clear that the roster is the most diverse in the entire Street Fighter series. Ryu, Ken, and Chun-Li are the only representatives of the original World Warriors, while III introduced characters like Makoto, Dudley, Ibuki, and the Hong Kong twins Yan and Yung. The other brawlers who make up the full roster of 21 characters range from the familiar (French fighter Remy, capoeira fighter Elena, and Ken trainee Sean) to the downright strange (the one-armed Oro, the flexible Necro, and the batty Twelve), giving the game an impressive level of fighting-style diversity.

If you played Street Fighter III: Third Strike in arcades, then you'll be immediately comfortable with Online, because it captures the feel of the arcade version well. Characters, timing, and inputs all feel right, so those with proficiencies on a real-world cabinet will find their skills transferring easily. But accurately emulating the arcade experience also has its downsides, specifically with character balance. As in the arcade version, some characters in Street Fighter III: Third Strike Online are overpowered compared to their counterparts, with no new balancing implemented in this latest version of the game. Chun Li, Yun, and Ken have long been known to be the beasts of Third Strike, and it's the same situation here. Tournament-level players have had more than a decade to get used to this, but newcomers may get frustrated once they start to encounter the beasts in online play.

To the game's credit, Third Strike Online features a decent number of offline training options to get new players up to speed on its intricacies. Apart from the stock-standard free sparring mode where you can set your AI opponent's basic moves, there's a specific mode just for parry. In this extremely helpful mode, you can "record" the moves of an AI character, before switching back to your own fighter to see if you can parry the attacks. Third Strike Online also features a trial mode, which is essentially a way for you to become comfortable with some of the more complicated combos. Each character gets only five trials, however, which means you're only scratching the surface of the offensive manoeuvres available. The trials also aren't that user-friendly. You're given a list of moves to perform, but there's no way to figure out the correct timing of the inputs since there's no option to view what the combos should look like when executed. The parry trials are the most interesting of the lot, culminating in the near impossible task of emulating the famous EVO Moment #37, one of the most amazing events in pro-gaming history.