While this is a very well designed game, there are some problems. The most obvious are the graphics; they looked great back in 1998 and are at least acceptable even now, but it feels cheap when you consider Street Fighter II HD Remix had all new sprites. Next, this is a very lazy port and only a few special features from previous editions of the game are here, primarily hailing from the PS2 version of Ultimate Match. The laziest part of all however is the victory quotes screen, which is completely in Japanese. They didn’t translate it at all! Granted, SNK barely ’translated’ these in the past, but we’ve gone from having hilarious nonsense like characters calling their foes "dweebenheimer" to having Japanese text all over the screen. I’d love to know how that got past Microsoft’s certification process...

There is one other issue, though it’s only partially SNK’s fault: Online play is virtually deserted. This isn’t because their online code is bad; it works about as well as Garou provided you play against someone with a roughly 120ms ping or less, but that’s often not the case. SNK and Microsoft opted to release this around the same time the highly anticipated BlazBlue also came out, and the result is that most of the people playing this game are from regions where KoF is more popular. Specifically, most of the players I’ve seen are in Brazil, Japan, Mexico, and so on, resulting in unplayably high lag. I’d love to play against them since they understand the game better than many US fans, but it’s just not going to happen with a 300ms+ ping time making it unplayable. With everyone in the US playing BlazBlue instead, I’m left with very few opponents, and that’s a serious problem.

That said, KoF ’98 Ultimate Match is a lot of fun despite its age. It’s a genuinely competent 2D fighter with a great roster, excellent music, and a good engine that discourages ’fireball keepaway’ play. And if you don’t want all the Ultimate Match additions, the original KoF ’98 is included as part of this game if you pick ’NeoGeo Mode.’ So long as you have some people to play with, $10/800 Points is a bargain. On the other hand, if you have no opponents, I will have to advise you to steer clear since playing against an SNK style AI isn’t fun at all. Still, this is the definitive version of a great game, and any fan of the 2D fighting genre should pick it up.