N-Philes

For some inexplicable reason, I'm always drawn to cheap games. Dirt-cheap games. The games that most believe belong mashed between car mattresses or forgotten in the back pocket of some jeans that your mom carelessly washes without spending one second, just the ONE SECOND necessary to find that her son left his game in his pants and remove it before the churning chemical liquids maliciously burn away at the precious cartridge until... I'm sorry. You get the idea. I suppose this curiosity for cheap games stems from my assumption that many people who buy games are stupid, and stupid people invariably return things for others to pick up at excellent prices. King of Fighters EX: Neo Blood (henceforth referred to as KoF... the rest is a mouthful) is precisely one of these games, and despite some of its shortcomings, offers an excellent brawling experience on the Game Boy Advance.

The first thing noticeable once the game boots up is the classic pan-across-characters fighting introduction and some demo fighting, coupled with some of the most primitive Game Boy Advance music ever to emit from a Game Boy Advance. It caught me off guard for the first few minutes of play; I could sense something didn't make this feel quite like a recent title, and sure enough, it dawned on me that the blips and bloops could almost have been done on the original Game Boy's hardware. To be fair, KoF was a launch title in 2001, but the music definitely takes a back seat to the rest of the game.

KoF comes equipped with the standard choices of game modes, including Team Play, Single Play, Practice, Endless Survival, Team/Single Battle, and a time attack mode. Team play offers the most fun if you can set aside about 30 minutes to play all the way through the other teams. By assembling a dream team of characters, you choose their order of play for each match and pummel up through the ranks to the boss himself. There, some story about the Orochi power is revealed that left me clueless as to what the characters were talking about. It's a fighting game though, so who cares?

The actual fighting mechanics in KoF are top notch. All character moves are intelligently plotted to the D-Pad, A, B, L, and R buttons while a character moves list (handily accessible at all times from the pause menu) lends a much needed helping hand to players like me with little memory retention for such things. Within about an hour of playing I could pull off Kyo, Terry, and Mai's moves like nobody's business, but somebody more devout could pour quite a bit of time into perfecting the techniques of all (or even just a team or two's) characters.

How badass are those techniques, you ask? The melee moves all occur elegantly and, most importantly, they connect like they should. Instead of venting frustration at the gameplay mechanics, players can only blame themselves for an inability to connect (or deflect) with the right timing in KoF. Each lively character model feels like they offer a human response to all types of attack. Some fighting games have little correlation between the moves occurring and the damage inflicted; thankfully KoF suffers none from this syndrome. I am very impressed with the physics of such a seemingly neglected Game Boy Advance title, as they are some of the best I have encountered, especially for a portable.

In addition, the wonderful animations, special attacks, and character voices make up for the completely static backgrounds and rusty music with flashy fire graphics, energy bursts from punches and kicks, and screams. The only things essentially differentiating the audio from a Game Boy track are these move screams, but thankfully they're authentic sounding and never nerve racking, as some (typically a woman's) are in some fighting games *cough*Chun Li*cough*. The character models deserve more credit as well, since they are all meticulously detailed (and the ladies well-endowed, if I do say so myself). I would have preferred slightly fewer typical tall, skinny white guy characters, but out of a cast of 26 (8 of which are unlockable), this can easily be overlooked. The effort Artoon put into the elements of KoF directly relating to fighting really pays off, pushing the game that little extra to give it special consideration among the Game Boy Advance's library of fighters.

King of Fighters EX: Neo Blood offers plenty of fun dished out from the house that SNK built. I doubt a better portable fighting experience can be had, especially for the $12.99 or lower asking price. Besides, owning KoF is the next best thing to being the staffer of a Nintendo fansite who owns his own fighting arcade machine. Sorry, I could not resist; in all seriousness though, Kings of Fighters EX: Neo Blood easily fills the fighting game void in your Game Boy Advance case without emptying your wallet either.