90s SNK were just going at full steam, it’s kinda crazy what their output was. 2002 is probably my favorite of the older KOF games so I hope you enjoy it when you get around to it.
Some other SNK fighters you might wanna checkout.
Mark of the Wolves is basically SNK’s take on a third strike. It’s got parries, extremely high powered top tiers, and is just really fun. I love the break system in this game. Every character has a specific special move they can cancel the beginning of allowing for some cool combos.
Art of Fighting 3 is another fun one. Plays a lot differently than other games at the time and the sprites are amazing looking. Not sure if it has a rerelease like Mark of the Wolves does? It is on fightcade however so it’s still pretty easy to get ahold of.
I forgot to mention that I had played Garou! I went through the arcade with B Jenet. I really enjoyed the feel of it. I’m never going to be a parry person, but I’m going to play more. I want to get the new one when it comes out as well.
I’ve also been playing King of Fighters recently!! The last week I did a casual run through the Orochi Saga on switch, doing a canonical run with Kyo, Benimaru, and Goro in all 5 games (plus some extra messing around). Benimaru is the star of the series, I don’t know why he never gets put on the box. Goro is also a big sweetie pie, it’s a shame they left him out of KoF XV. I also just love playing as Blue Mary, Leona, Shermie, Mai, Kasumi, and that absolute freak Ryuji Yamazaki. I’ve mentioned it in this thread, but how’s a guy like that going to enter a fighting tournament and not take his hands out of his pockets??
It’s also interesting to see how the series has evolved over the years. It really feels like every individual game is a step up mechanically, visually, or otherwise from the predecessor, and KOF98 really is a high point, and the PC ultimate match edition on steam is insanely impressive. With the training modes and stuff, I kinda want to learn KOF to get a lot better at beating the computer. It’s such a good series and it’s nice to give each one of them their own night to learn and play around for an hour or two. My only broad criticism is that the final boss is usually kinda cheap and such a big difficulty spike that it kills a good run, so you trade off playing on lower difficulties which makes the lead up to the boss less impactful.
I have never played 99-01 so I picked those up on sale on switch and I’m looking forward to giving them a shot next.
You’ll be happy to learn this is the criticism for all of kof since the series began - it’s because of the game’s arcade origins, and was designed to steal your quarters once you were committed.
I’ve been playing some Third Strike lately and I’ve been wondering: Is there any consensus wisdom about why Capcom leaned so hard into wiggly, creepy, off-putting weirdos to pad out the cast? Were they just really excited to show off the fluidity of the pixel animation (which admittedly looks amazing, of course)?
Was there any particular reason why we got the horrifying, stumbling Hugo? Or Twelve, who looks like a toothpaste monster? Or Necro, who is the one fighting game character I wish I could just remove from the game? Oro is weird. Urien is just a guy in underpants.
I don’t know, they’re all cool characters I guess, but they don’t really feel like anything that Street Fighter has done before or since.
Was there a particular character designer on staff who we can attribute these decisions to? I’m curious!
I don’t have the perfect answer here, and forgive me if you already know this, but Street Fighter 3 wasn’t originally supposed to be Street Fighter 3, and the devs seemed to have characters designed before Ryu and Ken came in, at least some, they say it was pretty quickly turned into SF3 though. The oral history on third strike Matt Leone did was great.
My understanding is also that the SF2 team was on alpha and it was a different team for 3s.
I actually really like Necro. His voice clips are the best in the game. He has suspenders. He has stretchy purple pants with piping on the calves. He has a little girl that runs out and gives a synchronized thumbs down. He sings like an angel.
My headcannon is that Necrosoft was named because Brandon liked the character so much in SF3.
Hugo is technically a guest character, but he’s a big jiggly boy. SF3 definitely has some weirdos in there, but as a weirdo myself, I appreciate it. And they were really swinging for the fences by not really having any returning characters outside of Ken and Ryu, but they’re the default.
3S has Chun-Li, but she wasn’t in 2nd impact or New generation, and Akuma wasn’t in New Generation either.
It was a huge risk for Capcom and it sort of famously flopped. Part of that was the fact that it was on the CPSIII which was pretty notoriously finicky, and another reason was the huge change in aesthetics and the lack of returning characters.
Seconding that Necro has the best voice lines in the game. Whenever I play with friends we are always going “outta my way” with the thumbs down.
By the way if anyone has played against a good Necro, holy shit he’s oppressive. There’s one or two people at my local arcade with reaaally good Necros who just two touch my Akuma with sa3 stun combos.
I think this is a commonly held belief but another cool thing about Necro is that he borrows a bunch of attacks/ concepts from the original SF weirdos, Dhalsim and Blanka.
Well I’m surprised and rather charmed by all the Necro love, so that much is cool.
I’ll admit, I was part of the problem when SFIII first came out!
SFII was probably the game I spent the most hours with as a kid, cumulative total. I also developed many thumb blisters with Alpha 3. But when SFIII came to arcades, I was just like… This looks weird. Took me years to warm up to it, and though I owned the Dreamcast version of Third Strike, I never really played it in a “serious” way until after SFIV was out!
