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King of Fighters 2000 & 2001

The Neo Geo home/arcade system was great for two things, fighting games and Metal Slug, and that’s about it. Luckily SNK knew this and in 1994 they brought a large compellation fighter with characters from each of their other fighters, like Fatal Fury and Samurai Showdown, and put them together in teams for their King of Fighters title. This game, meant to be a compilation, soon became the most popular game on the system, and eventually lead to a yearly release in the arcades, which offered new characters and slight increases in graphics. Unfortunately, the games hadn’t been coming to the console system recently, until now when SNK/Playmore is releasing their two arcade titles on one package with King of Fighters 2000/2001.

The first thing that must be said is that for the most part, this is a port of two arcade games from 3 and 4 years ago respectively, meaning the graphics are not up to par with the current games on the market for the PS2. What the series has always focused on was slight improvements and a changing character lineup to match the popular characters from the series and from other SNK series.

The basic game is your standard 2D fighter, but this time you pick your team of 4 fighters, three serving as your fighters coming in as the others are beaten and in the order you choose, the last one serves as a striker, a non-controllable but callable ally who helps out by doing some redesigned attack and is mostly used for continuing or starting combos. All of the basics of fighters are here, but the inability to use the analog sticks makes the controls a little stiff and doesn’t help in the overall arcade feel.

Both games are very similar, with almost identical characters and only a slight improvement in graphics with the 2001 title. The 2000 title has a counter mode which changes gameplay a little, but mostly gets in the way of the now mundane gameplay. Both games also offer unlockable characters, as well as other secrets, such as introductions and videos from previous titles in the series. These are unlocked through the party mode, a never ending series of battles where you unlock secrets every 10th-13th battle. This mode is very slow to increase in difficulty and doesn’t offer much in the way of enjoyment, as it is tedious and boring after a while.

Unless you’re already a great fan of 2D fighting games from such developers as SNK, Capcom, and Sammy, you probably won’t be too impressed with The King of Fighters 2000/2001’s presentation. The original games were released two and three years ago, respectively, on aging arcade hardware that is considered by many to be obsolete. Individual characters have their own individual charm, but the low-resolution special effects and decent-but-not-stunning animation on most of them don’t hold up well to modern PS2 games. And since the KOF series has always been a yearly series that has focused on gradual improvements over revolutionary changes, unless you’re already a huge fan of certain characters, you may find it disappointing that several of them seem very similar between the two games. In addition, both games’ background stages, which were already bland and uninteresting to begin with, have apparently been anti-aliased to smooth out pixilated lines and edges, but as a result, the games’ background stages look blurry and ugly. Fortunately, the games at least sound better than they look. Both games’ soundtracks appear as arranged versions, and feature uninteresting techno music, but they’re otherwise intact. Both games also feature a great deal of recorded voice speech that helps give each character lots of personality.

Overall, despite the limitations of the older port titles, the package is a good value for any 2D fighting fan. Finally having one of the better fighting series available on a newer console, as well as getting two games for the suggested retail price of $40 makes this game a great release for the company that won’t die. While not a mind blowing title, the decent gameplay means that we can probably look forward to future titles from SNK, maybe a update on one of its other series, a new Samurai Showdown or a Fatal Fury (we are already getting a newer Metal Slug).

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Tags: King of Fighters 2000 & 2001

Posted by Andrew on Jan 8th, 2004 and is filed under PS2 Reviews, Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can post a comment, or trackback from your own site.

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