~ KOF Is Here Again ~

Now that I'm able to practice KOFXIII, I don't think I'm going to be playing much of anything else for awhile.

Having not played it since April, I had forgotten a lot. While it didn't take me long to remember HD combos, it took me a few days to remember how to hit people. Once I went to RAMNation the gears started turning again and by the end of the night I was right where I left off months ago; mashing j.CD and hitting people out of stupid rolls.

One of the things I like about KOFXIII (and one of the reasons I fear for its life in the US) is that you can't bullshit your way out of the neutral game. It's not like UMVC3 where you just teleport or AE where you just divekick; you need to know your active and inactive hitboxes in order to win. You see a lot of CVS2-style footsies where people walk/run forward and then block low, which is exactly how I like the neutral game to be. The only real caveat to this is hops, but those are easy to beat as long as you know they're coming.

The one major problem I had with the arcade version of KOFXIII was that many of the characters simply weren't fleshed out. They had a few go-to pokes, maybe a good jump in, and one or two HD combos worth doing. What made that particularly annoying was that you had characters on the other end of the spectrum who simply had too many options (K' comes to mind) and then you had characters who were good for stupid reasons (Raiden and Elisabeth), neither of which were particularly fun to fight against.

Although the system changes made in the console version were all for the better, what really sets it apart from the arcade version is the revamped roster. So far, I can't say I've seen a single character that's as incomplete as arcade Mai or as braindead as arcade K'. The jury is still out, of course, but things are looking good.

Other significant improvements over the arcade version are the fixed width of standing inactive hitboxes and increased meter gain. Due to the width of the standing inactive hitboxes in arcade KOFXIII, crossups were particularly ambiguous and sometimes the attacking player would land on the side opposite of which he hit. This was particularly annoying for characters who confirm into command normals since, well, you don't know which side you're on until you hit the ground.

Increased meter gain is self descriptive, but it's easily the best change made to the system. Once people start doing HD combos with consistency, matches are going to be considerably shorter.


The port is arcade accurate and looks fucking amazing on a decent display, but it is lacking in features. Training mode is ripped straight from the arcade version, which is great if you want to practice combos and nothing else. However, the lackluster action settings don't make up for the lack of a record function, making it more or less useless for anything else. NEVERMIND, it does have a record function, you just have to manually map unused buttons to record and playback. I wasn't able to find it in the training mode menu and just assumed it wasn't there. I never had to set my buttons yet (just watched other people do it) so I didn't notice that the record and playback commands were there. MAH BAD.

Another annoying thing is that the game uses The Wrong Kind of button config, where you hover over a button and scroll through a list of commands to map it. The Right Kind of button config can be found in Guilty Gear and Blazblue, where you hover over a command and press the corresponding button to map it. In a tournament environment where everyone uses their own controller, this saves a tremendous amount of time and frustration. The fact that a game released in 2011 has the functionality of a game released in 2001 is just irritating and it's an appalling show of laziness on SNKP's part.

As predicted, the netcode is garbage. They announced just a few days before the game's release that it was using the same netcode as KOFXII. I was able to find one person with a 3 bar connection, and even then there were at least 5-6 frames of lag. Let's not even touch 1 or 2 bar connections.

On a final note, I'm pretty irritated this port doesn't support 4:3 native, when not only does the arcade version of KOFXIII support it, but so does the console port of KOFXII! Once again, SNKP shows just how clueless they are when it comes to porting games. At least they didn't force a sprite filter like they did with KOFXI, lol.