White Man

This. I'd rather get something I can actually use as far as physical extras go instead of a fancy box that's just going to take up a ton of room on the shelf. Oh well, a keychain is still neat, and the other bonus items sound solid. At least it doesn't come with a poster. (Pro tip for guys in marketing: Once a paper poster has been folded, I don't want it anymore.)

On the one hand, I hear exactly where you're coming from. On the other hand, I'm simply thankful to have an anime fighting game where the majority of the fanservice characters are legal.

So long hair + a slender build = effeminate? Naw man, he's oldschool goth rocker all the way.

All other 2D fighters are merely gateway drugs into GG. It's the high you really want, but you have to work your way up to it or else you wind up like Uma Thurman in Pulp Fiction.

Plus R was released on the Vita as a stand-alone title, no patching required.

I don't disagree with you. Faust's Scalpel would be awesome right up until the moment you accidentally walk through a metal detector at an airport with that thing in your pocket. On the bright side, you'd have a great story about that time you got waterboarded by the TSA because none of the agents bought your story about a video game where you play as a mad surgeon who wears a paper bag on his head.

If anybody gets their hands on one of these, I'll trade with you for the Rachel Alucard Nendoroid. Factory-sealed in the box, baby!

It's not a Guns N' Roses song, but I expect at least one combo video featuring Elphelt set to "White Wedding" by Billy Idol. Hell, I'll make it myself if I have to. For those of us who can't read Japanese, would anyone be so kind as to translate what's going to be included in the Famitsu DX pack? Or what the Famitsu DX pack even IS for that matter?

Still not a fan of Elphelt's design, but I will say this: Assuming she is yet another clone of Aria, it's kinda cool how her and Ramlethal have this good girl/bad girl motif going on between them. I also like her totally random fascination with bush dogs.

I can't believe they didn't do any CP 2.0 testing at Arc Revo. You've dozens of the best BB players in existence right there, it's the perfect opportunity to get solid gold feedback on your game. Total wasted opportunity.

Welp, I don't like the new character's design. I like the concept behind her design, but the execution simply does not look aesthetically pleasing to me. I'm glad her color scheme at least looks better than it did in the story mode screencaps, but otherwise, this is easily my least-favorite GG character design as far as appearance is concerned. HOWEVER! I'll give her a chance based on the fact that her play style could potentially turn out really cool. I've always wanted a GG character who uses firearms, but secretly worried they would either center around stupid projectile spam or wind up like Noel with guns that only serve as decorations. It sounds like the devs figured out a third route that allows for actual shooting attacks without any Marvel-esque bullshit, so I'm pretty excited to see this in action.

Not entirely sure if serious... (Nintendogs is an unflattering term used to describe overly-enthusiastic Nintendo fans.)

The purpose of a dream match title is to make a game combining a bunch of different characters that couldn't normally appear together due to their conflicting placement in the games' canon storyline. Not only does every character in XII reappear in XIII, but XII has one of the smallest rosters of any numbered KOF game, essentially making it the opposite of a dream match. XIII is what XII was originally intended to be. SNKP was running desperately low on resources at the time, to the extent that the only way they could continue development was to release their work-in-progress to the public. The engine was still being designed at the time; all the stuff you mentioned was either the result of a rushed development cycle (Liz and Mature were added because they happened to be finished as the home port was being finalized) or a planned gameplay feature that ended up being removed from XIII because everyone hated it in XII (such as the CC system).

While I strongly disagree with XII being a dream match game (non-canon =/= DM), I would like to see them progress the plot. The problem with this recent trend of fighting game reboots is that the rosters tend to stagnate. Let's keep things moving forward and introduce some new characters! Evolve the series! People are still playing '98 and 2002:UM anyway, so it's not like KOF needs another dream match title right now.

Well I for one am flabbergasted. Truly, this is a rare misstep by the paragon of journalistic professionalism that is the gaming news community.

BlazBlue already has fewer universal mechanics than most fighters. Movement, defense, HP, negative penalty, heat gain, fall speed, OD duration, probably more stuff I can't think of off the top of my head... All character specific. Blocking and the barrier gauge are some of the only mechanics in the game that are truly universal.

Seeing all the hype boners over this trailer reminds me why I love Nintendogs so much. "A whole minute of pre-alpha footage of a dumbed-down Tekken 6 with Pokemon skins?! BEST GAME EVER WHOOOOOOO!!" This has the potential to be pretty cool, but I'm keeping my expectations low for the time being.

Project M is something of a unique case in that it's a bunch of people taking a game that wasn't built to be played competitively and revamping it so it can be played competitively. Granted, a lot of the new stuff they've added recently wanders into a gray area. When they started implementing things like alt costumes, new modes, new characters, etc, they essentially stopped "fixing" Brawl and began developing their own game... But I digress from my point. I personally don't see any problem with mods as such—except in cases where they allow cheating—but they do present an issue inside a community that demands product uniformity. People who play fighters want to make certain they're all playing the exact same version of a game, to the extent that genre fans often insist on arcade perfect home ports even when that means leaving glitches and exploits intact. A mod scene opens the door to a landscape of slightly different versions of a game being adopted by different communities, which is a nightmare scenario for fans of any game where precise mechanical consistency is vital for high-level play. Keeping a game on consoles is an easy way to ensure everyone is playing the same game, that being the official version as it was intended to be played by the people who created it. That by itself might not be a strong enough argument to keep a title from being released on other platforms, but it is one benefit of maintaining console exclusivity.

I'm really sorry, man. There should seriously be support groups for people who have experienced this.

So they're officially keeping the title In-Birth, huh? I wonder how many people over here are going to pass on the game because they think it's some kind of clandestine abortion clinic simulator.

You assume they just took their hands off the controller and didn't smash it against the wall.

Forgive me if this is common knowledge (I've been absorbed in non-fighting-game things this week), but have they announced the next location test for CP 2.0 yet? EDIT: Never mind, just saw this was recently asked in the questions thread (duh). Man, they're taking their sweet time with this...

I feel like CS1 Rachel was the result of some disagreement among the designers on what direction to take her character. She was extremely powerful in CT because she had a mean rushdown game and could go full offense, OR she could run to the corner and play keep away so effectively that half the cast had virtually no chance of getting in. They knew some aspect of her play style had to get nerfed, but it seems like they had trouble figuring out which direction to take her. Rachel's damage indicates they wanted to make her a pure zoner/trap character, yet her zoning game got hit hard enough that she couldn't rely on that either. Basically, they tried to tie one of her hands behind her back, and over the course of debating which hand, they ended up tying both.

KOFXI was pure excellence. It's like SNK looked at the gameplay in MVC2 and said, "What if we did something like that, but NOT horribly broken?" Classic KOF or not, the game's a blast.

More accurate version: Chronophantasma: Azrael, Terumi, Kokonoe, Bullet, Amane, Izayoi, Kagura, Celica, Lambda Ultimax: Yukari, Junpei, Ken & Koromaru, Margaret, Adachi, Rise, Marie, Sho Minazuki and another Sho Xrd: Sol, Ky, Millia, Zato-1, Faust, May, Potemkin, Axl, Venom, Chipp, Slayer, I-No, Sin, Ramlethal, Bedman So for the new character count, GG wins. Xrd is, after all, a brand new game—not an upgrade of an existing game like the other examples. I'm crossing my fingers for more console characters harder than anyone, but people seriously need to come to grips with the fact that ASW did not "remove" characters from Xrd because there was no preexisting content for them to take out. Everything in that title was built from scratch. And it's absurd to penalize a sequel for not bringing over 100% of the content featured in its predecessors. People would never expect that from any other kind of game that wasn't a fighter.