Ep. 233 - Pod of Casters, an ICS SNK KOF Roundtable

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@“Nemoide”#p68011 (which isn’t helped by the fact that FGC folks seem to just suggest things like “oh, just spend 40-60 hours in training mode before playing”)

you can spend 40-60 hours in training mode before playing if you want to. some people do like this approach, though i find that most of them don't think of 'training mode' as separate from 'playing', it's more like the difference between practicing scales on a guitar or working through bits of a song before trying to play the whole song from beginning to end.

the main thing you have to get comfortable with is the idea that you are not going to be fast enough or familiar enough with the game to always get what you want, or react to a thing, or make a smart decision. fighting games are tuned so that players are _never_ fast enough to play perfectly. but the more you play it, the faster and more comfortable you'll get, and so you'll be able to eventually be faster and more comfortable with the game than your opponent is.

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I never play training modes, I have no desire to get that good. I just wanna mess around and be surprised when cool stuff happens and then learn what I can do from that.

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my daughter and i have been playing for a couple hours and have found our teams.

  • 1. king, chin, shermie

  • 2. terry, ryuji, yuri

    • she's currently in practice mode with ryuji.

    also, [this](http://www.vgmuseum.com/art/kof97/KOF97%2015.jpg) is a pretty cool image from the gallery for '97 on saturn

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    @“pasquinelli”#p68065 also, this is a pretty cool image from the gallery for ’97 on saturn

    Quit giving @yeso thunderdome ideas

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    By the way in case it‘s unclear, the official stance on snk here is you should not give them money. Andres mentioned the no ethical consumption under capitalism thing but video games aren’t a need, so that doesn‘t really apply. You don’t have to buy them, or any luxury good, so while you can choose where your money goes, you should do so.

    So I'll buying kof xv, but only when I see it used, because then I'm not giving them money, the damage was already done by someone else.

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    I’m not fully through the episode yet but wow has this ever reminded me of how much I had fun playing KoF casually with some friends. They leaned more heavily Street Fighter so I ended up following them but that was never where my heart was. Then I got burned out on online play skewing either towards people way more seriously into it and skilled than me, some trying it out and button mashing, and those who found a cheese combo and it just wasn’t fun anymore. Now I’m looking around to see who I could play with.

    Also felt called out about the “used to read your stuff in middle school” and am 35 now(in a week).

    I look forward to finishing the episode, it’s been a blast listening to it as I have time, and maybe I’ll pick up some fighting games again!

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    If only a crazy billionaire would just fund a pirate KoF and release it for free instead of everything they always do

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    I didn't risk my neck in the Neo Geo Battle Coliseum just so SNK could roll over for the Warez Conglomerate

    but actually, barring some dramatic geopolitical collapse, I can't imagine bin-Salman ever divesting and it suuuuuucks

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    I‘m neither a fighting game person nor an SNK person. I’ve had a few brief flirtations with Metal Slug over the years but literally never played KOF. Nonetheless, this was a standout episode. Suddenly a franchise I was only aware of enough to think of as “the one with that Terry guy?” was brought to life in my imagination as a flurry of colour and sound, melodrama and queerness. I can‘t say I feel inspired to actually play KOF but that’s only because it‘s still a fighting game and I have more than enough experience trying to enjoy fighting games to feel comfortable saying they’re just not for me.

    But wow, what an episode. It's such a rare pleasure to be a fly on the wall as a group of intelligent, charming people talk about a shared niche passion. All of you own and I sincerely hope your beloved SNK is swiftly wrested back, somehow, from the clutches of its hideous new owner.

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    @“goonbag”#p68090 thanks, this was a lovely thing to hear about the episode! Insert credit will always be niche so it can be hard to know if you‘re alienating people by digging further into one specific niche within that niche. So yeah, it’s good to hear that something like this still works for people.

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    @“gsk”#p68083 companies don't make games, people make games

    it will be ok :3

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    I just played KOF 97‘ with a friend and although the cast is a lot smaller we had such a great experience!! We were unsettled by the ambient backing track at first but the second Shingo’s theme started playing in the last round… the hype was immeasurable. I get it now. KOF 97' RULES.

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    I do love SNK and KoF (even if I could not hang with big dogs like the people on this episode) so I listened to the last drop, but for what it‘s worth, I’d listen to occasional singular deep dives into other strange/interesting games alongside the normal Chex Mix, too

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    @“Venus Emperor”#p68094 not sure what this means in this context! It might not be okay for snk

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    @“gsk”#p68083 Neo Geo Battle Coliseum

    I now get to tell my story about _NeoGeo Battle Coliseum_.

    I got to go on vacation to Japan for about two weeks in 2005 with two great friends and we just generally had a fun time. At one point, we wandered into a Sammy-branded arcade and I plopped 100💴 into the first fighting game I didn't recognize. It happened to be _NeoGeo Battle Coliseum_ which according to wikipedia just came out a few weeks prior. I picked my team and played through about 5 rounds and barely got touched. Then the 6th round happened and the boss basically wiped my team with perfects. "Dude," my friend said. "Sammy just totally took your yen."

    I tried playing it a year or so ago when I got the Atomiswave/Dreamcast port running and... it's not that great.

    Those are the only two times I have played _NGBC_.

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    Really enjoyed this episode! I am an incredibly lapsed listener that was watching the Google Hangouts when those were occurring and didn't really keep track of the IC podcast until a month or so ago.

    Personally saw KoF in magazines but, despite a large interest in it and it's huge roster, had no real experience with it for years - no local cabinets, etc. Samurai Showdown was all over the place, though!

    Played Art of Fighting and Fatal Fury ports, thought they were neat. I liked that they were _different_.

    Fast forward to the late 90s and NeoRageX and my Pentium gave me an opportunity to finally play these games. I played the hell out of King of Fighters 99. A **ton** of it.

    At the turn of the century, became an adult and threw disposable income at Saturn and Dreamcast releases, like most of the people posting here.

    Kind of fell off of SNK fighters after the Dreamcast releases until KoF XIV released. I thought it was a respectable first outing for the fairly green team and anticipated they might have the opportunity to make more and improve on it. I played a good bit of it with my teenage boys and enjoyed it well enough.

    Sad to hear about SNK passing into pretty undesirable hands.

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    https://twitter.com/gatoray_kof/status/1519641911291617284?s=20

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    I loved this episode. I‘ve liked SNK fighting games for a while (starting with Art of Fighting, Fatal Fury Special, and Samurai Showdown on the SNES) and later got into CVS2. I’ve dabbled in KOF (mostly ‘98 and 2002 UM), but this episode has inspired me to dig deeper into the series and try some of the other entries. Played some ’94 today, and, even being the first entry, it did not disappoint.

    [upl-image-preview url=//i.imgur.com/y5pju28.png]

    I enjoyed everything about this episode: the deep dive format, KOF being the topic, Brandon/Pat/André/Azurelore lending their unique passions and perspectives, the cool/cute/Yagami question rotation, all of it. Well done, and thank you.

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    Just finished watching the video edit, thanks @“esper”#11 ! Gotta say that replacement referee really struggled to keep the buzzer ruling on the rowdy panel participants. Some random notes as I watched along.

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    First thing that came to mind with this podcast is that, honestly, I had never really associated Insert Credit with KOF until listening to it! There was indeed the King of Posters forum, but to me KOF was much more synonymous with The Madman’s Café, and Orochinagi as a distant second banana. I would have rather associated IC with Asuka 120% (obviously), Korean games / the GP32, and premier coverage of the AtomisWave’s extremely short lifespan.

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    I guess Insert Credit’s perceived association with KOF speaks to the place of the series in US video games culture in the late 90s to early 00s. I probably had never really properly considered how niche and alternative KOF was in the United States until this podcast. Must have been really weird for neighboring Mexican kids back then, like "_wait why does nobody care about Soccer in Texas you guys are just three minutes away from us_"-level weird.

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    I do remember @"nothingxs"#139 from that Sagat avatar! And being way less chill haha. Also made me realize that KOF x ~~Captain Tsubasa~~ [Captain Majid](https://youtu.be/8q-2VWhkhM0) would be a very clever collab’.

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    Always assumed Fire was an enthusiastic SNK fan from Hong Kong or a nearby Chinese-speaking region with limited access to translation tools. Altavista’s Babelfish was still the best thing we had back then. I don’t think he was a troll or an experimental A.I. from the future sent to warn us about Elon Musk but fatally distracted by some lore explanation on the importance of Krizalid’s earrings on the front page of Insert Credit.

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    I choose to believe that @"esper"#11 silently protested / petitioned for Magician Lord’s revival all along through the power of the visual medium (even though the panel talked about it eventually).

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    If you organize a fighting game event on a parking lot, you have to let people line up and be given 30 seconds to freely punch and kick a 90s Japanese sedan. Just saying.

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    The previous owners of SNK, before the MiSK buybout, were Ledo Millenium. Ledo Millenium is [size=9](extreme simplification required for brevity)[/size] a subsidiary of Leyou, which indeed was connected to (a good way to explain would be "spun off" from) Perfect World via Alex Xu, one of the first prominent engineers and subsequently entrepreneurs of the Chinese video games industry. Imagine if Mark Cerny and Bobby Kotick (minus the problematic stuff) were the same dude. Alex was also the lead person behind the investment in Warframe, which he then sold to Tencent.

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    No love for Doki Doki Majo Shinpan in this episode. Wouldn’t you all play a Doki Doki Majo Shingo Yabuki game or mini-game?

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    Some NGPC bookkeeping: ① If you do not boycott SNK, or if you already bought this release but have not checked all the games inside yet, Dark Arms Beast Busters 1999 is playable in [Neo Geo Pocket Selection Vol.1](https://www.snk-corp.co.jp/us/games/ngpcs-vol1/) ② The Faselei IP indeed belongs to SNK.

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    A tabletop RPG adaptation of SNK games was mentioned. ① In fact, there have been KOF collaborations with a few japanese TTRPGs in the past ② I think it would have been interesting to explore the idea of what a good SNK board game would be, in the current board game boom.

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    Hard disagree on Shermie’s new design. She is supposed to be a Parisian Fashion Designer bitch of the mid-90s, not a half-drunk Osaka nightclubber of the mid-90s. The genius detail of her original costume design came from the fact she visibly had no pants on _and_ had those leglock moves completely unfitting (or waaaaay too befitting) of such a specific fashion statement. There is nothing clever about her new outfit.

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    Speaking of outfits, since @"𝔞𝔷𝔲𝔯𝔢𝔩𝔬𝔯𝔢 𝔨𝔬𝔯𝔯𝔦𝔤𝔞𝔫"#26 is such a cheerleader for King, aren’t you disappointed that SNK has seemingly spent the last twenty years erasing her androgynous look? It feels like such an important piece of the original character to me that I am really disappointed the dudes at SNK can’t reign in their heteronormative lust to showcase her bust and exaggeratedly petite waistline so prominently. And to be clear, I have zero problems with Mai’s blatant pandering, but that’s because the pandering is her reason of being. King went from "a young woman masquerading as a handsome man" to "Blonde Vanessa" and, while the issue is still far from the flaming Hindenburg that is Baiken’s evolution in Guilty Gear, it still ticks me off.

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    The KOF x Kunio-kun idea is properly amazing and I will do all that is in my power to help make it happen. Let’s find a way.

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    Great comments on Terry’s affable and inherent daddiness. It’s true that the kids got his personality immediately, beyond the early "Old bum Pokémon Trainer" memes.

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    Also, I guess Terry won the King of Fighters question because he is the one who got selected for Smash – despite Iori being Sakurai’s favorite character. I feel like Smash would have rather invited Nakoruru, then Kyo, then Iori at various points of SNK’s history and diverse fortunes. Like, 20〜25 years ago, Kyo is the alpha dog, no question, as shown in the Capcom crossovers. But it’s fascinating that it all rolled back to Terry after all these years and up and downs (both for Nintendo and SNK).

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    Since it does not appear in the notes, here is Mai’s metal chick outfit, dating back to Fatal Fury 2’s promotion, which is mentioned in this episode. (Or at least that’s the illustration that jumped to my mind immediately.)

    • [upl-image-preview url=//i.imgur.com/vYAk7Pd.jpeg]

  • * The >!lion!< answer was an incredible flex.

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    That Mai alt did make a recent appearance in the Senran Kagura gacha game, of all places:

    [upl-image-preview url=//i.imgur.com/iwF8eMz.png]