Why Was KOF '94 Not Ported To SNES or Genesis?

[IHatedSega]

Other NEO GEO games were like Fatal Fury, Samurai Shodown and Sengoku, so why not King Of Fighters?

[FrankSerpico]

There's absolutely no way they could have brought a game with that roster to either system without gimping the hell out of it. SSF2 required a 40 meg cart just to look decent on the Genesis, and it was far from arcade perfect

[wiggyx]

^^^ This.

Anyone remember Alpha 2 on the SNES? Dear lord, what a mess.

[Tron 2.0]

That's not a high meg kof,but there's no way all of it's animation could have been fit in.

[Edmond Dantes]

After all, even the games the OP named were gimped a bit when ported to home consoles. KOF would've probably combusted your SNES.

[c0ldb33r]

It would have needed to be a 32X CD exclusive.

edit: Actually, that sounds awesome :)

[wiggyx]

^^^ Totally OT, but I love your avatar LOL

[kedawa]

FFS was actually fairly complete on SNES, but as has been pointed out, KOF 94 would have needed a lot of memory space, and I don't think Takara would have risked producing such an expensive game, especially near the end of that console generation.

SF Alpha 2 could have been far better than it actually is. The ROM encryption just cripples performance.

[IHatedSega]

Yeah, characters can take up that space, but I wonder sometimes why RPG's can be so big but not fighting games on the SNES. That opens up a big technical thing, but Im interested in hearing a storage space lesson. And I should have asked why not on the Sega CD instead of the Genesis, good god I hate the sound card for cartridge Gen games. If I play SF2 on it, I mute it.

[Jack_Burton_BYOAC]

Yeah, characters can take up that space, but I wonder sometimes why RPG's can be so big but not fighting games on the SNES. That opens up a big technical thing, but Im interested in hearing a storage space lesson. And I should have asked why not on the Sega CD instead of the Genesis, good god I hate the sound card for cartridge Gen games. If I play SF2 on it, I mute it.

RPG's may have a lot of sprites spread out over the course of the game, but they have the luxury of only having to load a few of them into memory at once.

Fighting games typically need access to a huge volume of sprites at once since most fighting game characters have multiple times more animation than a platformer or rpg sprite.

KOF 94 could certainly have been ported to the SNES or Genesis, and it would look and play about as well as Fatal Fury or Art of Fighting. However, the cartridge would have required so many extra ROM chips that it was economically unfeasible. The game would have cost something like 100 dollars.

If you are curious about what King of Fighters might look and feel like on a lesser powered system there are a few handheld ports like King of Fighters EX on the GBA.

[IHatedSega]

yeah Ive played the gameboy ones which really didnt have color, not having color isnt an option with a SNES game, so I didnt bring that up as a comparison. I think those are good enough early handehld fighters, Street Fighter 2 on the Master System I think is pretty cool for what it is.

[kedawa]

SMS Street Fighter II is interesting in some ways, like having clearer voice samples than the Genesis version, but as far as 8-bit fighting games go, it's at the bottom of the heap. Check out Fatal Fury Special and Samurai Shodown for the Game Gear and TMNT Tournament Fighters for NES. Those games are solid.


The game would have cost something like 100 dollars.

Exactly. You might be able to get away with that for a big name RPG, but hardly anybody wants to shell out that kind of money for a fighting game that gets yearly updates. For the record, I would be in the minority that would cough up the dough, because I love KOF 94.

[T2KFreeker]

It would have needed to be a 32X CD exclusive.

edit: Actually, that sounds awesome :)

I approve above comment and seriously agree!

[Steven]

KOF 94? No offense, but I was a lot more saddened by the fact that SNES owners never got Darkstalkers. I guess the animation was just on a whole 'notha level, even if it did come out in 1994.

BTW, am I the only one who enjoys the SNES port of Alpha 2? I actually think they pulled off a hell of a programming job on it, despite the brief load times. I mean, it's pretty good considering the hardware limitations.

[kedawa]

I didn't find it impressive at all.
Alpha 2 is sluggish even on the highest turbo setting, and it just feels off from the arcade game.
Super Street Fighter II, also a CPS2 arcade game, does not have that problem on SNES.

[Jack_Burton_BYOAC]

yeah Ive played the gameboy ones which really didnt have color, not having color isnt an option with a SNES game, so I didnt bring that up as a comparison. I think those are good enough early handehld fighters, Street Fighter 2 on the Master System I think is pretty cool for what it is.

Didn't have color? I was talking about the Gameboy Advance games:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uM4ssW76i7w

The GBA's specs are overall a bit better than the SNES. I'd expect an SNES version to have a more muted palette, but better sound.

Also, there is a hacked ROM out there called King of Fighters 2000 for SNES. It features some downscaled versions of KOF characters, so you can get a feel for what the difference in quality might have been.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uQV8A6XFQhE&feature=player_detailpage#t=191s

Although, I'd really expect a completely redone game rather than a port if this thing had actually happened.

[IHatedSega]

KOF '95 was ported to the GB by Takara. It was black and white, had a good roster, for a GB fighting game its fun to mess with every now and then. There was also Heat of Battle.

The GBA roms I got are buggy so I havent really played them.

I think Alpha 2 on the SNES has bad controls, but its graphics are great. :) Ill just stick with the PS1 version though.

[wiggyx]

I didn't find it impressive at all.
Alpha 2 is sluggish even on the highest turbo setting, and it just feels off from the arcade game.
Super Street Fighter II, also a CPS2 arcade game, does not have that problem on SNES.

SSF2 didn't have nearly the frames of animation that SFA2 did though.

[PC-ENGINE HELL]

The Pc Engine/Turbografx 16 could have done a decent port of KOF 94 on Arcade Card CD. Its the only 8-16 bit system to produce high quality Neo ports, though it only has a few and never got a chance to shine completely in that respect.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EvRVhtetvQs


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3GSZMqP2yEc


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WJ85OcZBWu8

[IHatedSega]

Darn it, youre right. :/ And probably the 3DO.

[kedawa]

SSF2 didn't have nearly the frames of animation that SFA2 did though.

I don't know about that. SFA2 has smaller movesets than SSF2, and the animation isn't much better. There are no close/far standing normals in SFA2, but there are a few more animations per character for stuff like tech rolls, so I'd say they're about the same as far as character sprites go.
If anything, it's the more detailed backgrounds and flashier presentation that would eat up ROM space.
The audio certainly isn't any better.

[Kitsune Sniper]

The GBA roms I got are buggy so I havent really played them.

They're just like that on the real thing. Damn games are awful.

I think they could've pulled off KOF '94. Make the sprites a little bit smaller, add a dash of data compression, and it might have worked out just fine.

[Frankie_Says_Relax]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=skUOf_ctDCA

Discussions like this make me think, some...person(s)...ported Street Fighter Alpha 2 to Famicom/NES.

It's pretty terrible, but it's something that COULD have with a bit more polish, been a legit commercial THING of some sort in the NES era.

How hard would it have been to "fake it" with KOF on SNES?

Sure, it would have been an abomination of sorts, but look what Capcom did with the Vs. games on PS1.

Strip the roster, kill the animations, make it so it was only single fighter mode ... some kind of ghetto cramming to get it down to where it was SOMETHING playable on the system.

[IHatedSega]

I actually played a rom of Street Fighter 3 on NEStopia, holy crap its bad.

[Parodius Duh!]

Theres literally 5,000 different Street Fighters, Mortal Kombats, King of Fighters, etc... ported to NES/Famicom via pirates. All are god awful.

[IHatedSega]

Oh god how could you do a fatality with 2 buttons??????

Gonna check out the gameboy versions now....

[Bazoo]

Theres literally 5,000 different Street Fighters, Mortal Kombats, King of Fighters, etc... ported to NES/Famicom via pirates. All are god awful.


TMNT Tournament Fighters for NES was really good though. I've always wondered why no one just hacked Street Fighter characters into that or used the engine as a guidelines or something...