King of Fighters Zillion [MUGEN GAME] - A Quick Look

I came across this MUGEN game, King of Fighters Zillion from MUGEN CHINA, last week and downloaded a version of it i found on google but totally forgot about checking it out until today.

Thought i'd share a little of my opinion of it so far.

Firstly a problem i found with it was that sometimes it wouldn't let me press ESC to exit, this caused a problem for me writing this as i wasn't able to easily screenshot many images, instead i had to manually enter Task Manager each time and end process.

(Though this is probably just be a personal problem with it running on my laptop and not the creator's fault.)

Other than that the game seems pretty well designed.

As you can see in the above image of the character select screen each of the character's profile image is really well drawn (i'm not sure if they are original or stock images, they are great either way), and there are loads of characters to pick from.

Even characters who have never existed in a KOF game before have been put into it, for example Alfred from the Real Bout games,Syo who was i think Kyo's striker in 00, and XII's version of Iori.

Some characters were not available to pick however, i'm not sure whether they have just not been released yet or if i am playing an old version, but there are quite alot of characters still.

Gameplay wise the game feels a little floaty like XI but the impact of hits feels alot more solid like the older games, if that makes any sense.

In terms of the games system it is quite complicated and i'm not too sure i've got my head around it yet. 

When you first start up you can pick out of Single, Tag, and Team (up to four characters), then this is where it gets a bit crazy...

Normally you would assume these would be separate game modes, however these are all integrated into one game (like how you can pick EX/ADV in KOF98).

Single mode you pick one character and can lose two times, Tag mode you get two characters but you can lose BOTH characters two times, Team mode you can pick between 2-4 characters and each can lose one time.

There doesn't seem to be a ratio in place to make picking one character stronger however.

Now the strange thing here is that when you lose a character in Tag mode but then win the round, that character that died comes back with a little bit of health...So just from an initial impression i think Tag mode may be the best one.

In tag mode you also get access to a striker attack (activated by B+C) and a faux focus attack (which i think was either C+D or qcf+CD).

In team and single mode however you get something similar to BC combo mode.

Just defend and Super cancels are available to all three modes.

For a MUGEN game it is actually very good and probably one of the best ones i've played in a long time.

I know alot of hardcore fighting game fans shun MUGEN because of some of the crazy stuff people come up with but i think this is well worth a try if you like KOF games. (Particularly since it's free :P)

Honestly though i do hope SNKP come up with something similar for their next UM game (if they continue that series), where they include EVERY character, i'd always thought Neowave should have been a mixture of EX/ADV/BC instead of having a system from Garou MOTW... :-/

I'm still more of a fan of the old KOF games so it would be sad to see the old sprites/systems abandoned.

The file is too large for me to upload to Mediafire but if you google 'KOF Zillion Up 4.1 - 2010 download' you should find it easily enough.

Give it a try and let me know what you think.

Random gameplay video from Youtube:



[Edit]: 

 Download link for Version 4.1 of King of Fighters Zillion can be found on Megaupload here: http://www.megaupload.com/?d=6SI56QIU