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I’m not sure if it’s a lack of new ideas or a love for the oldies, but developers seem to think it’s a good idea to re-release or remake games from the past. King of Fighters 2000/2001 happens to be *big surprise*: a re-release of King of Fighters 2000 and 2001 in one nice little package. No one raved about them when they were first released on Neo Geo, no one is going to rave about them now. Read on to find out why some games should just not be re-released.

For the most part, one would think it would be hard to write a singular review for 2 games, but thankfully KOF 2000 and KOF 2001 happen to be pretty much the exact same game with different menu screens! (for those of us keeping count, that’s a hit against the games) King of Fighters 2000 features slow, uninspired gameplay with boring combos, and special moves that will leave you looking around for your copy of Marvel vs Capcom 2 within your first 20 minutes. King of Fighters 2000 features a whopping 35 characters, which ain’t too shabby but when all 35 characters are uninteresting and lack any really eye catching characteristics.  You tend to think 35 may be too many. King of Fighters 2001 features the same gameplay issues but has 5 more characters for a grand total of 40! Again, you won’t care since you’ll never play the game long enough to get through half of them.

Anyone who played these games on Neo Geo already know exactly what to expect out of them, but for those lucky souls who didn’t, let me elaborate: both 2000 and 2001 are basic 2d fighters that play almost exactly like the capcom vs series. You can play either a team battle or one on one, which isn’t really one on one at all because you get an extra character to back you up and take cheap shots with the press of a button. The fact that it was originally released on Neo Geo doesn’t help things either, since the tech specs on the handheld were so low.

Both games share the same character animations (for those in both games) and same moves for each character. This makes 2001 seem like more of an expansion than a sequel. The animations are choppy and have a terrible frame rate, especially when compared to some of the latest 2d fighters in the PS2 lineup. The backgrounds of the fighting areas have very short, repeated animations that get stale within seconds, but since you should be concentrating on the characters and not the background, I guess it’s a minor issue. Nothing in either game looks very good. The models have seen no improvement from their Neo Geo days, and the backgrounds feel rushed since there really isn’t much to any of them.

Sound quality is another area the games are lacking, with cliché sounding taunts at the beginning of each match, a very boring generic rock soundtrack and stale attack sounds. The obvious blame for this is, again, it’s Neo Geo origin. None of the audio in the game is noteworthy in any sense. It almost seems like the way the game sounded was secondary to what it looked like or how it played (and considering how ‘great’ those aspects are…) making for a lacking experience in pretty much every corner.

King of Fighters 2000/2001 may have been a lot more impressive if it were released as a GBA port, or maybe even an N-Gage port, since N-Gage is lacking a fighting game thus far. But as it turns out, KOF 2000/2001 is completely unimpressive, and lacks in every aspect. If the developers had taken some time to improve the overall game before releasing it on a competitive behemoth like the PS2 (improve the audio/visual quality) then maybe we could have had a good thing going here, but as it stands, there’s no reason for you to spend money on this 2 disc compilation.