King of fighters or Za kingu obu Faitazu in Japanese, and officially abbreviated as KOF. It’s a series of fighting games produced by SNK Playmore, formerly known as SNK. Originally this fighting games series was developed for SNK’s Neo-Geo MVS arcade hardware. It served as the main platform for the series until 2004, when SNK retired the MVS in favor of the Atomiswave arcade board and moved the series to the Taito Type X2, and released King of fighters XII. Original King of Fighters and ports of the arcade games have been released for the Neo Geo Pocket, Game Boy, Neo Geo CD, PlayStation and PlayStation 2, PC, and Xbox. Most recent games of the series are KOF: Maximum Impact series.

In a fighting game player faces off against each other or against computer-controlled characters in close combat. Main difference between fighting games and beat ‘em up games is that players are of approximately equal powers to the opponents. Fights are self contained matches involving only number of chracters.Most of the fighting games include life bars and fights that lasts for odd number of rounds. Many concepts are common in most of the fighting games. Most common of them being Health, usually in the form of a rectangular “life bar”. Combos which include several attacks chained together. Special moves is another example.

Initially story of the first game of the series follows Kyo Kusangi, a young high school Japanese boy who enters The king of fighters tournaments. Being the heirs of the ancient Kusangi clan, who weilds pyrokinetic powers, Kyo manages his powers to win the tournament along with his friends. His team then meets the host of the game Rugal Bernstein, who is a powerful criminal. This freak criminal wants to meet worthy opponents to kill so that he can turn them into statues in order to remember his ruthless victories. But in turn he is defeated by Kyo. In the late version of the game Iori Yagami a fighter appears aiming to kill Kyu kusangi and destroy his clan as a revenge to from his clan. The main theme of the game revolves around the characters of King of Fighters having their own reasons of entering the tournament. King of Fighters ‘95 allowed player’s to create their own team of three members. This feature was new to players and they were given a chance to enjoy a longer fight and with different players in a single start. King of fighters soon became a favorable game of the era and its character’s also become famous all over the world. Many of its characters got listed in all time favorite gaming characters.

Fighting games saw a decline after enjoying a great success over a long time of period, both commercially and critically. And in the latter part of the 90’s fighting genre began to decline popularity, with several franchises facing failures. This also cause downfall of KOF series, as its new produced games were no longer considered as trend setter. There sales dropped down. To overcome the decline many gaming companies released their new games loaded with more players and more moves. But this doesn’t prove beneficial either. Although some experts think new games saw more loss because of increased complexity and specialization. This complexity shut out casual players and the market this genre became smaller and specialized.

King of fighters gave the players a new way of competeting each other. Its long fights were intresting, but with change of time people changed their mind and they were looking for smaller and less complex fights and a game was waiting for them. TEKKEN series was one of them. In order to gain the market again SNK has launches a new version of KOF as king of fighters XII which is gaining market and critics both. Let see how much can it success in bringing back the fame of SNK. Even though KOF is not as popular as it was in its day’s of launch, but still it will be remembered as a trend setter for fighting games.

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