The King of Fighters: Evolution

The Good
This review will mainly cover the differences between King of Fighters '99 and this Dreamcast port, so those who know nothing about the original will get little out of this review. The game is basically KOF99, the same combos, characters and stuff is there, nothing of gameplay nature has been tampered with. There's some new stuff though, all the backgrounds is now rendered in full 3D (there's a couple of new backgrounds too), and they look just lovely. I like the way they managed to capture the 2D feel of the original backgrounds but still make them look so much nicer. The character graphics is still the same and they make look a bit pixelated against that highquality background (they have been however given a little 2d filter to make it "seem" better, though the actual effect is little). The main new feature is the addition of new strikers, you start with two additional (Vanessa and Seth, which are actually fully playable characters in KOF2000) and can gain many through getting points in the game and buying them. They aren't exactly any big addition, strikers have mostly been hated by most KOF fans for being easy to abuse, the only good thing with the strikers is that some of them have really amusing attacks, like the Fio striker (based on a character from Metal Slug) walks into the screen with a gigantic cannon from a tank and slams it on the opponent. So the new strikers are basically nice for a little laugh and you may want to just avoid them completely afterwards.

Perhaps the coolest new addition is that the music is competely redone . SNK has a tradition of making arrange soundtracks of most games they make, with completely redone music in high quality, and the music in this port is essentially the arrange soundtrack. And it sounds niiiiice. I really loved the original music of the NeoGeo version, and hearing this new music just kicks ass.

Yeah, it's also possible to select the boss (2nd form) in the selection screen in this version, kind of nice to use once just to behold his beautiful supers. But he's really no good character to play with since he's insanely overpowered (he is a boss afterall).

The Bad
There's really nothing bad to say about this port. There's no feature which have been lost. If anything, the only bad thing is that playing this game with the standard Dreamcast controller is a pain in the ass, you really need to get something new to play this game properly (an arcade stick would be an extra plus)... but then again, that's a gripe with every Dreamcast game (damn you Sega for making such a crappy controller!).

The Bottom Line
The game doesn't contain enough new things to interest gamers which already own the original KOF99 for the NeoGeo (unless you're diehard collector), but it's certainly a nice object to get if you're a person which can't afford a NeoGeo (which is the most expensive console ever made, heck, the games cost about 100-300$ each) and have played and enjoyed the game on the arcade. You'll even get a version which is a little better than the original.

The Good
Since I've already written a review for the Dreamcast version I'll not bother to again write all the features that Evolution has compared to the original '99 version, instead I'll just skip right ahead to the bad section and describe why this one sucks so bad compared to the Dreamcast port.

The Bad
I'm surprised how many things they managed to do wrong in this version. Okay, where to start... first of all, they've perfectly managed to ruin the graphics somehow. All the character sprites are totally messed up, I tested the game on multiple computers just to confirm it wasn't my hardware's fault, but it really happens on every machine. Which is total shame, they can't even program a routine to properly draw sprites.

The music don't loop perfectly anymore, it just fades out and restarts. Which is plainly odd, they already had the code in the Dreamcast version to loop it perfectly, but still they decided to somehow mess it up.

The controls are... weird... I've only managed to play the computer version with a keyboard so I don't know if a pad will work perfectly or not. But I did compare the controls with playing the original KOF'99 on an emulator and the difference is huge. In the emulator I could with ease do half circles on the keyboard to execute special moves... in the computer version it's completely impossible. With struggle I manage to execute the quarter of a circle to do a fireball, but nothing more advanced than that.

The Bottom Line
Well, the game is just bad compared to the Dreamcast version. If you're going to buy KOF Evolution then do not buy this version, it's totally awful compared to the DC version. It's a mystery how they managed to mess up this version so much when they already had a perfect port.