I remember being in Philadelphia, down on South Street. There used to be this rad game store called Got Game? Used to have all sorts of rare video games and imports. I was in a fighting mood craze, having picked up Marvel Vs. Capcom 2, and remember seeing Fatal Fury: Mark of the Wolves. Having always been a Capcom guy, I had never paid much attention to the SNK
Bringing it home, I remember loving it. In a world that was pretty much switched to 3D, and fighting games (except Soul Calibur /love) were slow and plodding, Garou (Japanese title) was fresh, fast, and exciting. While there were similarities to Capcom fighters, there were indeed differences, many of which I liked.
Over the next few weeks I bought Capcom Vs. SNK 1 and paid 70 dollars to get Capcom Vs. SNK 2 imported from Japan.
From that point onward, I’ve always had a thing for fighting games, even more than playing Super Street Fighter II on the Genesis. If it’s a fighting game, I’ll pretty much pick it up, (sigh, even the DOA series /shame). While I like other games, fighting games tend to hold my interest more. Maybe because of my short attention span, I don’t know.
Fast forward: 2009. The year of the Fighting Game. Shall we run down the list?
Super Street Fighter II Turbo HD Remix (okay, it was 2008, but December, close enough).
Street Fighter IV (the holy grail)
BlazBlue
Garou – Mark of the Wolves (XBLive)
King of Fighters XII
Marvel Vs. Capcom 2 on XBLive and PSN. (though fucking Microsoft has an exclusivity so it’s not on PS3 yet. bastards)
Tekken 6 (October)
I very well may have missed one (and Soul Calibur IV was in 2008 and was disappointing, so bleah).
2 weeks ago, I went and picked up KoF XII for the PS3 (woohoo getting it early, or so I thought). I went home that night, played a little bit on the lackluster arcade mode (it has the AI of mentally retarded rabbits), then went online….
I sat through a 4 minute slideshow. The person I played apparently was used to the lag, and destroyed me.
Every match online since then has been a similar offering. Slow, laggy, unplayable, unless your used to play everything back in 1997 on dial up. Now, since I get it early, and so did a number of other players, Ignition stated a patch would be online on the release date, (July 28th) would fix the online issues. Sure, there was a patch, a 700 meg one. What was this? Oh, it’s the fucking isntaller off the goddamn disc. Thanks SNK, that’s really fucking helpful, my games installed already. Guess what, post patch, still a slideshow.
Has SNK ever heard of a fucking QA team? Load testing? Do these terms make any fucking sense? Hello?
So now, KoF XII since on my shelf, unplayed. There’s no point in playing the Special Olympics arcade (never been a fan of unlocking digital art to look at on my tv, the practice mode has a fucking awful menu system, and the online, well, SNK’s last great idea was to check your NAT settings? WTF? I’ve been working in IT for over 12 years, and this is not a NAT issue. How come SFIV and BlazBlue play amazing (even SoulCalibur IV is acceptable online) without me having to jack with my NAT settings? Guess what SNK, fuck you.
It’s just sad really. SNK released a possibly great game during a great time. There has been this huge resurgence of fighting games, with old players and new players coming together. (This was the biggest EVO ever, what’s that tell you? For those that don’t know, EVO is the largest Fighting Game tournament in the Country, possibly the world. For SFIV alone, there were over 1,000 competitors). Yea, it’s missing some of my favorite characters, Mai and Vanessa, but I’m okay with that. What I’m not okay with is a broken game I spent 60 bucks on.
I think this may have ruined SNK. They spent 4 years on this game. Instead of putting it on the PS2, they actually put the effort into putting it on the 360 and PS3. They used Twitter and Facebook to promote the hell out of it. It’s been hyped for months, and they fucked up. Big time. So what now? Do they patch it? Do they just let it die? I think they are going to have to patch it, but by the point a patch comes out, will anyone care? Reading forums, people are saying to bring it back to the store, get your money back, it’s that bad. I’m not ready to do that yet, I’d like to see a patch, a real patch that makes online play worthwhile. I’d like to see some DLC with new characters (though you’d better make it fucking free or cheap as fuck, after this rip-off).
What galls me though the most, is reading the tweets from #KOF12. They are all reviews, with decent to high scores from various publications. The last announcement about any type of fix for the online was 5 fucking days ago (and it was about the bullshit NAT “fix”). 7 tweets have been made after that, with no other mention. Hey dickheads, get me a patch. I don’t give a flying fuck about your review scores, fix my fucking game.
So there you have it. Kof XII, in a nutshell, is a piece of shit. It’s pretty if you like hand drawn art, that’s a smooth 60 frames per second. (I am curious though why all the filters make it look worse, and not better, meh). It has an arcade mode that you can win by pressing one button over and over, and a totally broken Arcade Mode. It has some great ideas, and could have been a great rebirth of a once great series. Right now though, someone is using a copy of it to put the last nail in the coffin.
If anything changes, I will add to this post later.
-syn1c
-And for reading this rant I leave you with this gorgeous image of Mai. This is probably going to be my new stick art once I get off my lazy ass and design it.
Post a Comment