SNK Arcade Classics 0 - Coming to PSP this April

SNKPlaymore has just announced the release date for SNK Arcade Classics 0 (zero) as the 21st April in Japan, and will be released for the PSP. I assume as with the previous collections these would make their way also to the West in due time, but as of yet i cannot find a Western release date yet.

As the title of the collection hints at, these will be a collection of their oldest games (before MVS/AES) and will have games such as Athena, Psycho Soldiers, Street Smart, and Ikari Warriors.

One thing i am a bit concerned with though is how well these will be ported to the PSP, i have read alot of negative reviews about SNKP's other collection releases and personally though SNK Arcade Classics Vol.1 on the PS2 wasn't ported very well.



Hopefully if the port is decent it should be good to play some of these old titles.

Check out the official website here for more details and a list of games which will be on this collection.

King of Fighters '98 Arrange Sound Trax

Randomly found this CD, which i bought in Hong Kong about 12 years ago, whilst looking for something else. Thought i'd back it up onto my laptop as the disk was pretty scratched and since i went through all that trouble anyway thought i'd might as well share it with everyone else.

Track details can be found on VGMDB, i believe the last song 'Present Holiday (Athena Asamiya)' on the CD is actually sung by Haruna Ikezawa (Athena's voice actress).

01 CIPHER (Title)
02 ESAKA (Kyo Kusanagi)
03 FANATIC WALTZ (Shermie of the Raging Lightning)
04 MAD FANTASY (Chris of the Flames of Destiny)
05 IN SPITE OF ONE'S AGE (Master Team)
06 Stormy Saxophone (Iori Yagami)
07 THE ЯR (Rugal Bernstein)
08 Showdown R & D (Omega Rugal)
09 ZERO (Staff Roll)
10 PRESENT-HOLIDAY (Athena Asamiya)

Anyway it's uploaded to Mediafire here, so enjoy!
(BTW the files are in wma file format, my Windows Media Player isn't working properly so i'm not sure if it was possible to make them into mp3 or anything else, so they were just ripped as wma.)

King of Fighters XIII Collection - Chibi Figure - A Quick Look/Unboxing

As previously mentioned i ordered one of the new KOFXIII figures from Playasia just before the New Year and received that this morning in the mail. Though i'd take a couple of photos and do a little 'unboxing of' video as the figure comes blind boxed.

Was a little dissapointed with the figure i got, i really wanted Raiden so i could make him dropkick the other little figures on my desk...Not too bad to get Leona though i suppose. 

The quality of the figure is quite average (not poor, not excellent), i think for it's size though it is fairly expensive though (£5 from Playasia) and thought it was more like a £2/3 figure. Not too bad, though not sure if i would buy any more. Maybe if the price drops a bit.

Anyone interested in buying them they are available on Playasia, i think it was about £7 including shipping for one figure.

Check out more pics below.

KOF94 - Neo Geo Station - Online Play vids

Played a few games against Jericho MPM the other day on PSN, thought i'd film and upload them.
Got the crap kicked out of me, since aside from the off the floor grab infinites i don't know much else about 94, but did learn some new things like Athena being able to have more than one fireball on the screen at once (o_O).

As we both live in London the connection was pretty much silky smooth, i've embedded a few of the vids in this post but you can check out the rest of the vids on my youtube channel.







Also SNKP have been uploading loads of vids to their Youtube channel, in particular the Magician Lord playthroughs are worth watching. (Considering how tough that game is, it's pretty cool to see someone playing through it with ease!)



Right now they have only uploaded up to stage 3, they also have videos showing how to beat Amakusa in Samsho and Rugal in KOF94. Check out the Neo Geo Station official blog to see more details.

No More 'Arcadia Magazine - A Quick Look'

Although it has made up a large part of my blog content i have decided to cancel my subscription of Arcadia Magazine. This is due to trying to put money aside to set up a fund to do a Working Holiday Visa to Japan.

As it seems lately the 'big' SNKP news is becoming less frequent it feels like a lot of money is being wasted importing the magazine every month for £15, which could be used for other things. 

Apologies to those who did read the updates i did regarding Arcadia, it's just not currently feasible.

For those who can read Japanese you can normally preview the next/current issue of the official website or follow their Twitter feed.

I did however order one of the KOFXIII chibi figures, which were recently made available on Playasia, whilst clearing out the remainder of my refunded store credit. Will take some pics when that arrives.

As for this blog itself, even though i will be busier from now on i will continue to update it when i can.

King Of Fighters 94 - Neo Geo Station - Another quick look

Thought i'd make a vid to show the different menus and options in the PSN port of KOF94, there's quite a few things there so the video is quite long.



One thing i did forget to mention in my previous entry was that this port actually has no practice mode. Even though it didn't exist either in the original AES/MVS versions, they did add it to the Orochi Collection and 94Rebout so thought it was a bit of an odd choice not to include it in this port.

Also another thing that was pointed out to me today was that you can actually save replays of an entire session and not just one match, a great tool for if you need to record matches or save matches to record later.

I've added some more videos from last night on to my Youtube channel, gameplay is alot smoother than in the earlier vids i uploaded. (Still not perfect but at least in some form playable.)



On an unrelated note, the next issue of Arcadia should have some sort of feature regarding KOF98UM:FE according to the Arcadia website. Will post up the preview images when they go up on that site.

And lastly NeoEmpire will be hosting a KOF02UM tournament at Ultimate Clash 4, which will be held on the Xbox360 version, on the 23rd Jan 2011. Check out the thread on NeoEmpire's forums for more details.

King Of Fighters 94 - Neo Geo Station - A Quick Play

So bought KOF94 on PSN after work today, luckily thanks to Gunsmith's post on Orochinagi i didn't end up buying the PSP version by mistake...

As a package it seems SNKP have put alot of work into bringing it on to PSN. There are loads of saving options, screen filter options, a sound test option, and a digital instruction manual which looks pretty good.

On the netcode, which is probably the main reason i bought this (already own 2 copies of it on AES, and REBOUT for ps2), it's a bit of a mixed bag. Against Gunsmith it was really bad, constant slowdown and input lag all over the place. (See video Below)



They have put some sort of ping filter in the network options though, so you can search for people with a certain set of criteria and you can also play the game at the same time. Though as of yet i've been unable to match up against anyone like this :(

I did manage to have a few playable (within reason) games after the matches with Gunsmith though, so the netcode isn't completely trash (just not very good).

Overall it's a bit difficult to recommend KOF94, it's a very old game, and i'd imagine most people would be looking for good netcode to play this (which is variable). I'd probably recommend 94REBOUT over this.

I do hope they will continue with the Neo Geo Station though, would love to be able to play some of the later AES games (like RB2, Last Blade, etc), and think it's a bit of a shame that SNKP keep churning out this same batch of games for every system.

A decent start to their PSN venture, just not quite there yet.