The King of Fighters 2001Spend some time with it and you’ll eventually realize that it’s one of the deepest, most technical 2D fighting games ever made. Arcade Game developer SNK officially went
out of business in 2001, but that hasn’t seemed to slow down what is
apparently a new generation of games for the company’s NeoGeo arcade
hardware. One of the last projects the company was working on was The
King of Fighters 2001, the latest edition in SNK’s annual fighting game
series, along with a new developer, Eolith. And while certain aspects of
KOF 2001 may seem very different from previous games, spend some time
with it and you’ll eventually realize that it’s one of the deepest, most
technical 2D fighting games ever made. It’s no secret that SNK’s NeoGeo hardware
is old. Over 10 years old. That’s why its games still use
low-resolution, hand-drawn sprites for its characters, rather than
switching to a 3D engine or at least using high-frame-rate,
high-resolution graphics. The age of the NeoGeo hardware seems painfully
obvious when you look at KOF 2001′s shoddy background stages, which
look generic at best and ugly and pixelated at worst. But over the
years, SNK’s artists have perfected a bunch of visual tricks to help add
detail to their characters and give them lots of personality. And KOF
2001′s characters have lots of personality as much as you’d expect from
SNK, a company with a history of making some of the most distinctive and
memorable 2D fighting game characters ever. You’ll see it in your
character’s win poses and taunts and in other extra animations. It’s
true (and unfortunate) that KOF 2001 reuses a lot of old character
animation from previous games, so that some characters especially the
newest ones–look better than others. But most characters have at least
some new animations, win poses, and special attacks–more than enough to
make each one more interesting than they were in the previous game, KOF 2000.
