So I walked into the Tilt arcade here in Portland and there it was. KOF 12 arcade machine. No marquee and a really beat up cabinet. The machine was a 4:3 SD monitor from what I could tell not sure what resolution. The game was set to 16:9 and the aspect ration was correct. Even at probably half resolution this game looked great. The way I played it the pixels still were similar to SF3 TS, but I think this is due to the display. This is truly the ying to SF4's yang. Having both in a 6 month time period is amazing for fighting fans everywhere.
The animation in the backgrounds was really good. Sometimes nearly 100 character sprites or more are moving around. Sometimes duplicated animations or mirrored sprites take away from the overall wow factor, as you can see where they had to make concessions. At the same time its kind of cool in a way and a throw back to 2D fighting games. The actual backdrops are nicely designed but don't animate quite as much. really good colors though, the sky blue is really awesome, almost as good as Sega blue skies
The version available may be a demo from AOU. It was a 3vs3 time attack mode and that was it. Of course vs mode is available whenever someone enter in. Basically it was 5 sets of time attack which each featured 3 characters per set. Once completing each set you can either retry for a better time or move forward.
I haven't really played the series much wish I could tell old KOF players whats new. For me the fighting was really nice, small move lists with tons of variations on the moves depending on execution and timing. I tried about 10 characters and they all were quite different from one another. One was like a mix of Dhalsim and Akuma with stretched limbs and teleports but pure evil looking. One thing I noticed is this game really makes you want to rush the opponent. Aggression was fun!
took some crap pics with my cell phone but can't figure a way to get them off of it.
