The King of Fighters '98 - Ultimate Match

A tenth-anniversary revision of a game that never really left circulation is a strange thing to attempt. KOF '98 had been the series' consensus favourite since the day it shipped, the plotless "dream match" that gathered everyone SNK had drawn up to that point and let them fight without narrative obligation. Rebuilding it in 2008 meant tampering with something people already considered finished, and Ultimate Match's answer was to add rather than rewrite: Geese Howard, Eiji Kisaragi, Shingo, the Orochi-possessed versions of Iori and Leona, until the select screen carried well over sixty fighters.

What survived intact is the thing that made '98 matter. Every character exists in two flavours, Advanced and Extra, and the choice is not cosmetic. Advanced gives you the running dash, short hop, three-stock power gauge and the quick roll that defined the series going forward. Extra keeps the older sidestep-charge system, with a hop that floats and a dodge that rewards patience, and it plays like a different game built out of the same sprites. Picking a team of three means picking three approaches to spacing.

The rebalancing is where the port earns its subtitle. Movement speed, invincibility windows and damage were all touched, some notorious characters trimmed, others finally made viable, and a fresh Ultimate mode layered supers on top. Purists argued about it for years and still do. What is not arguable is that the presentation got proper attention: redrawn stages, an arranged soundtrack with the option to switch back to the originals, and a training suite with the recording and hitbox tools that the 1998 arcade board obviously never offered.

SNK Playmore built it on Taito's Type X2 arcade hardware and brought it home with practice, survival and a colour editor bolted on, and the PS2 version was for years the most convenient way to play the definitive edition of the definitive KOF. It also shows the limits of the moment. Sprites drawn for a 1998 CRT sit on backgrounds redone at a higher fidelity, and the seam between the two is visible if you look for it.

That mismatch stops bothering you about thirty seconds into a match. The reason people kept coming back to '98 was never how it looked but how precisely it read your intentions, and Ultimate Match preserved that while making the roster absurd. Sixty-odd fighters, two movement systems, no story to sit through: it is a fighting game that trusts you to supply the reason.