From the Vault — originally published September 1, 2009. Some links, videos or prices may be out of date.
The patch that has been long awaited by King of Fighters XII fans finally was released yesterday for Playstation 3. The aim of the patch was primarily to fix the below sub-par online performance of the game at release. Fans have waited about a full month since the launch for this “Jesus” patch. The verdict is that it does increase the online performance. What was a pretty much non-playable online mode is now a playable mode though still frequently laggy. So yes, the patch did help, but no, The King of Fighters XII on PS3 post patch is still not up to par with Street Fighter IV’s online performance for example and don’t even try to compare it to Blazblue.
Playing the game with the 1.02 patch for a few hours I found more foreign players playing from Japan, China, Spain, and Latin America than I did encounter from the United States. Connections are either blue, yellow, or red to indicate signal strength though I found no blue players at all online. I played some good matches with “yellow” status players though still many matches with “yellow” players were still riddled with input lag. In short yes, the online is better but its not great. I would say this patch brings the game’s online performance from unacceptable to marginally acceptable/acceptable. You will encounter good matches though you will encounter input laggy ones randomly with those that should be fine.
I think there is hope for the game though at this point because of the fact that this patch only marginally fixed an issue (that should have not really been an issue) and did not add any content or functionality the future of the community behind King of Fighter XII looks bleak. I imagine that if the development team had the budget to add additional features and content they would have and with poor sales I don’t foresee and influx of cash to SNK to make it happen now post release. I would love to be wrong about this. Ignition Entertainment did a great job promoting the game. The King of Fighters XII tournament was very well executed. Ignition even gave fans the opportunity to vote on the box art. If you can snatch up a copy for a third of the retail price I say go for it. With all of its gimped modes this game perhaps should have been a premium downloadable only title. Hopefully we will see more improvement and content updates for fans that bought this game though don’t hold your breath.
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