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Price: £19.99 Players: 1-online Widescreen: Yes Vote and comment on this game: View Comments The Orochi Saga was nothing I'd heard of prior to playing this, but I was pleasantly surprised at what is essentially a button-mashing extravaganza. This collection brings together a series of King of Fighters games from the 94-98 era. These are old Neo Geo games which looked like the absolute dog's bollocks when I couldn't get such graphics on my PC at the time and I desperately wanted its arcade quality graphics, but the console's games cost tons of money to import - around £300-400 a pop and the console itself also cost a similar pretty penny. Of course, they're all much of a muchness, but as I went through them, '94 was great fun; '95 and a couple of the others had longer loading times on occasion; in '96 - Big-breasted Mai said, "You did quite well. You actually touched me." F'nar, F'nar :) For '97, there were no amusing winning quotes, but they were back in '98.

Other than playing with Mai's assets, I thought Chang Koehan, the big guy with the chain ball, is one of the best fighters I've found, swinging the ball around - Well, except for when someone ducks(!) Battle-wise, I found it was best to jump about a lot to avoid the baddies. When you can get some punches and kicks in, land a few and then get the hell out of there again so you don't get pummelled in return. It's also fun to watch women beating each other up. It's like a Friday night catfight in Manchester town centre! Graphics can be viewed in 4:3 mode, "original pixel" which makes it a smaller windowboxed image (not good as it's too small), "fullscreen" - which just stretches the image sideways, or "Smart Stretch" - which doesn't seem to be any different to these eyes. There's also fantastic split-stereo sound FX when that counts. I expect that the quality is exactly what I would've seen on the Neo Geo, given what I can see on the PSP, so if that's what you're looking for then they're spot-on, although compared to top-notch PSP titles they don't really compare. Still, it's the former of these two that you're really interested in. That said, this title is great fun overall, but I'm very concerned about playing so many games of this on a handheld console as it'd knacker the controls through repeated use, so be wary about that. However, be making a purchase if you have a penchant for the whole series then you'll appreciate the slight differences between them.

King of Fighters has various difficulties, a training mode, online options if that's your thing, and also challenges. In the case of the latter, there's a separate option for a test of the different punch/kick combinations. Rewards include art galleries and new music. There's a lot to get for the completist, here. Examples of the challenges include: Blind fighting: you can't see power bars, timer, etc. Just got to keep going! Hmm... just makes it annoying, really. 3-hit combos: only 3 hits makes any effect. Bit of a button-masher, this one... which I'm usually rubbish at, as I just want to go in all fists blazing. Attack/retreat: alternating between both. You only get any effect when the one selected appeared, so when having to defend yourself during 'retreat' you won't hurt your opponent. Of course, they can get you at any point! At this point, I stopped being challenged. Let's face it - I'm rubbish at the challenges :)

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Review copyright © Dominic Robinson, 2009.