news45

Done on 3/21/98

SNK Lands 5 Major News At The Tokyo Game Show

While Pictures from the Tokyo Game Show (TGS) are still in development at the Madman's Cafe Laboratory, many startling news were announced by SNK. NOTE: While the Madman Will be concentrating on specifics at the Tokyo Game Show, a more general and complete report will soon arrive in the Tokyo Online Magazine site, where the Madman is the senior editor. This time around, the "Human Encyclopedia of Anime" Hitoshi Doi is honored as guest writer. Don't miss out on this big chance The Address of the site will be announced as soon as the site is ready. Now On With The News!

King Of Fighters 98' First up, SNK has finally announced in the very general public of their decision to release KOF98' this summer. It is not yet clear as to which machine it will play on if the game will be 2 or 3D. A short 15 second promo made up of previously used pics of Kyo and Iori was shown at stage, suggesting that at least the two are in the game.

King Of Fighters 97' First up, as many players of KoF97' always wished, the Orochi is finally playable... but only in the Playstation version of KoF97'. While this is very good news for Playstation owners, as usual the PS version has one big flaw- there are many missing frames. While it may not be heavily noticeable to players who have only skimmed through the game, even novices will figure out that there are massive frames missing when a big character such as Chang is present. While The Madman had asked SNK Reps if the Orochi was usable in the Saturn version, the answer was "no" after a pausable brief moment. The Saturn version of KoF97' is about as well done as its previous conversion- KoF96'. That is to say the game's animation frames are fairly much perfect, but some voices are shortened or missing. For instance, Yamazaki seemed almost perfect during the Demo play until his Sadomaso had Executed with a short voice rehashed from another move. Also, the game is 1 MB cart compatible and will have no special effects even if the 4MB is used.

Real Bout Special -Dominated Mind

While there were many displays of the cart version of RB2 for freeplay, what was more of an interesting news for the Fatal Fury series was the announcement of a game once thought to be only a rumor- "Real Bout Special -Dominated Mind".

While the game may seem like a total rehash of RBS, there are many additions exclusive to this game. For one, full screen animations done from scratch are displayed in the opening and within demos, the game has an original story, and there is a new character "Alfred".

Alfred is a projectile-less character which has special moves that leaps him forward or shoot out a short-range wave in front of him, making him resemble a fighting pattern mix of RB2's Xiangfei and Rick. In other details, the character select screen is totally new and the line system has been dropped- the game is a totally flat plane system now.

As the name of the game suggests, RBSDM seems to deal with the control over characters. While the storyline is not all revealed, I did see a blond tall female character besides a rather hypnotized looking Billy Kane, although SNK did not respond to who she/he was.

Athena Projects

In strikingly Sudden News, SNK has announced a sudden decision to create a 3D Computer Graphics rendered adventure game based on Athena Asamiya. Still under development, the game is being created between SNK & Umekobo and is currently called "Project Athena". So far the game looks like it mainly takes place in a Japanese Highschool, but there were many gigantic robots coming in the way of Athena.

If this sounded like very surprising news, what was even more startling was the announcement of an Athena Asamiya TV Drama series. Not much was said about this since the show is still under development, a very short promotion commercial was shown in the big screen for its announcement. While SNK did not have its extravaganza with the voice actors & actresses as they did last year, a illustration set was given to visitors who were lucky enough to get on the line which vaporized in 20 or so minutes.