KOF EX: NeoBlood Preview

By Andrew Seyoon Park, GameSpotPosted Nov 14, 2001 5:54 pm PT

The now defunct flagship game series from SNK is headed for the GBA. We go hands-on with an early build.

The Metal Slug 4 and Sammy's upcoming GBA fighting game, KOF EX- NeoBlood.

We noticed immediately that the only two music tracks in the build so far are both from KOF 2000 , but unfortunately, both tracks sound like they should be coming from an 8-bit console, not a 16-bit handheld. KOF EX also features voice samples that are lifted directly from the original NeoGeo games, and though they seem a bit scratchy, they're certainly better than the music at this point.

Otherwise, this very, very early build of KOF EX we've received bears an obvious resemblance to KOF 2000 for the Dreamcast. It has the same menu screens and features at least one of the Dreamcast-exclusive background stages--the castle wall stage--though unlike the one in the Dreamcast version, the GBA stage is a static, 2D backdrop, not 3D. And like KOF Evolution for the Dreamcast, KOF EX is intended to be a port of The King of Fighters '99; it features all of the same characters with the same portraits as in the original NeoGeo game--shrunken down and displayed at a lower resolution, of course. KOF EX also features one notable addition to its cast: the legendary villain Geese Howard.

Geese is back!

Geese looks exactly as he did in The King of Fighters '96, the older NeoGeo fighter, and all of the game's other characters look as they did in The King of Fighters '99. That's because developer Marvelous Entertainment has simply ported the original NeoGeo sprites into the game--after shrinking them down and cutting some frames of animation. The gameplay in the early build we have seems noticeably slower than the gameplay in most recent KOF games, partially due to these animation cuts. In addition, the game features an all-new female character named Moe Habana, a teenage girl who bears more than a passing resemblance to Capcom's Street Fighter Alpha character Sakura. Moe has a three-part punch attack, a flip-kick attack, and a two-part hopping punch attack. She also has a hop kick that can be performed by pressing the control pad forward and pressing "light kick." Unlike longtime KOF protagonists Kyo Kusanagi and Iori Yagami, Moe doesn't set her opponents alight with fiery punches and kicks, but some of her special attacks do produce bursts of cherry blossoms on contact.

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