Fatal FFFFFUUUUUUUUUU

I know I'm a few weeks late to the party with this one, but apparently some Chinese hackers discovered references to some unused characters in the King of Fighters XII code. These include Vice, Hwa, Takuma, Mai, King, Yuri, Billy Kane, and a few alternate characters, like "Dark Ash" and '98 style Iori. So, three comments on these:

(1) Still no NESTS saga love? I know this makes me a heathen, but I really started to get into the series around '99 and '00 - objectively not the best games of the series, but I like their style a whole lot more than anything '98 and prior. The game needs some K', Kula, Vanessa...and I wouldn't complain about Whip, either. (Needs more of the Mark of the Wolves folk, too, but that should be a universally understood fact.)


(2) Hwa? That's not an interjection, that's the name of the Muay Thai kickboxing guy, Hwa Jai, back from the original Fatal Fury. Of course, the series already had a better Muay Thai fighter with Joe Higashi. He was so lousy that he was one of the few characters, along with Michael Max and Richard Meyer, that never appeared in any of the later games, even when a bunch of them were resurrected for Fatal Fury Special. Even those guys got spiritual successors in later games - Axel Hawk for Michael Max, and Bob Marley Wilson for Richard Meyer, officially making Hwa Jai the most bitch useless character in the series aside from that one dude that existed solely to get pummeled in the intro to Real Bout Fatal Fury 2. So, why him? EDIT: Sotenga informed me that he does make cameos as Joe's trainer, but that would've totally ruined my joke!

(3) Everyone's spazzing out about DLC in fighting games, because the prospect of having characters sold to us piecemeal is infuriating. And yet I'm hoping SNK will be a bit smarter here. They've already realized that the whole "yearly upgrade" thing just isn't working any more. Maybe they're looking at Guilty Gear and seeing all of the incremental updates, and hopefully realizing that there are now better ways to sell fighting game updates than forcing gamers to buy, roughly, the same products over and over. I really wouldn't mind if they released a pack with, say, 9 new fighters, a few new backgrounds, and additional modes, and charged, say, $20 for it. Maybe do the same thing every six-to-nine months, and perhaps release some fully upgraded retail versions at budget-y prices, to keep newcomers up to par. There are a only a few other games doing this right - I'm not huge into Fallout 3 but their approach to the extra packages sound pretty good, as do the additions to GTA4. But it holds lots of possibilities for fighting games, way beyond paying way to much money for downloadable keys to unlock something useless like costumes.