King of Fighters XII screens reveal new anti-aliasing feature

by JC Fletcher on Mar 16th 2009 10:28AM

Click to embiggen.We're happy to be able to bring you these exclusive screens of King of Fighters XII, if only because it meant we got to look at screens of King of Fighters XII. Seriously, look at this thing. We couldn't be happier that SNK Playmore got the money together to make an HD fighter. Thanks, Doki Doki Majo Shinpan!

As far as we know, these are the first screens of the Xbox 360/PlayStation 3 version, and for the most part, they look exactly like the (amazing) arcade game, with one small difference: the North American console version has an optional anti-aliasing filter for the character sprites, which is enabled in all of these screens. We think that the new art looks wonderful without any extra smoothing.

KOF XII is scheduled for a worldwide July release.

King of Fighters XII (March 16)

Tags: fighting, ignition-entertainment, king-of-fighters-xii, kof, Microsoft, snk, Xbox-360

Reader Comments (53)

If you ask me, I'd rather see a mess of pixels rather than smoothing. Most "smoothing" techniques leave a blurry and unrecognizable mess, in my opinion.

But, coming from an old-school arcade gamer like me, I think EVERYTHING would be better with pixels.

when's the XBLA version of '98?

Looks gorgeous!

Best looking 2D fighter ever? Quite possibly so.

Whoa whoa whoa there.
You're side-stepping A LOT of beautiful 2D fighters without thinking about it.

-Garou: MotW
-Last Blade I/II
-Street Fighter 3
-SSF2THDR
-Guilty Gear series

This looks very nice, don't get me wrong. I want to see if it's animated as well as a game like Guilty Gear of Third Strike though before calling it "the best looking 2D fighter of all time".

You forget that every single character animation in this game is hand-drawn. The games you've listed don't have that. KOF XII does not utilize ordinary sprites.

"-SSF2THDR"

That one doesn't belong in that list, ugh.

"You forget that every single character animation in this game is hand-drawn. The games you've listed don't have that. KOF XII does not utilize ordinary sprites."

......what in the hell are you talking about?

bm, you obviously don't know anything about this game yet. Don't bother joining any discussions then; you'll only appear as being ignorant.

"You forget that every single character animation in this game is hand-drawn. The games you've listed don't have that. KOF XII does not utilize ordinary sprites."

I realize it's 100% hand-drawn. So is the Guilty Gear series.

I stand by my original argument; let's see how well the game is animated. It could look that impressive in still pictures, but if the animation is whack, then Guilty Gear still holds the crown for the best looking 2D game not only based on hand-drawn merit, but also animation.

I can name plenty of fighting games that may not have looked as good as others, yet they had much cleaner, fluent looking animation. 2D still screen shots - sorry, I don't get my panties in a bunch over those. Show me some high quality video of some actual matches, with characters that (in KOF) are highly detailed in their animation (characters like K', Shermie, Yamazaki, and K9999 come to mind) - and THEN I'll say it's the best looking of all time.

Don't get me wrong, I have HIGH hopes for this game, and I love SNK more than most people... I'd MUCH rather play a KOF game on Xbox Live than a Street Fighter game (even HDR). I hope SNK gets off their butts and HD Remixes Last Blade 2 or comes up with part 3 finally.

OK nvm.
I just watched some HD cam footage off gametrailers and yes it's the most beautiful 2D fighter ever.

are you dumb, guilty gear has among the worst animation of all 2d fighters. the game had high resolution sprites but piss poor animation.

I can see why bm got downrated but, even with his change of heart, I don't see why zero2dash is getting flack. I'm going to check out some of those games just for the pretty pictures.

"are you dumb, guilty gear has among the worst animation of all 2d fighters. the game had high resolution sprites but piss poor animation."

BS. Milia's hair was animated more thoroughly than half the characters in Zero 3. Potemkin was also highly animated.

You have no idea what you're talking about. It may not have been SamSho 3 or 4 but GG is heavily animated.

As for being voted down, I could care less. I'm sure I'm being voted down by a bunch of idiots who have probably never played half of those games yet they claim to be fighting game fans themselves.

Bet you downvoters never owned an import-friendly Saturn, did you? No. GTFO you don't even know what a GOOD fighting game is.

To anyone that said about the animation of this and street 3 ... they are both animated drawing above simple modeled but awesomely animated 3d models ...or at least the most dificult animations (it is easily noticeable if you look at most elena's animations and have a considerable xp of animation)

Of course the animation and specialy the final result is awesome (a similar effect was used in classic 2d movies like Snow White, with real people instead of 3d animation)... but still ... i would say that the animations are half hand drawn half 3d models.

"bm, you obviously don't know anything about this game yet. Don't bother joining any discussions then; you'll only appear as being ignorant."

Wow, you're a complete fucking idiot. Congratulations. I know exactly what I'm talking about, you on the other hand are pulling random shit out of your ass. The games he listed aren't hand drawn? Get some fucking glasses. Unless you count pixel art as not hand drawn, in which case, please do remember that KoFXII's sprites are still pixeled, just at a higher res (and yes, I know they used 3d models as a base, which would make your comment even more baffling).

God, the idiots on the internet.

In embiggening this picture, I've embiggened my heart!

The smoothing doesn't seem too bad unlike other filters I've seen...namely on SNK's recent ps2 ports. Can't wait for this!!

*cough*Blaz Blue*cough*

Do you want some nite quill for that cold of yours?

2-D is BACK...back and STRONG!

I am Salivating... 2D fighting WILL NEVER DIE.

As for best looking 2D game ever, I will wait until this comes out to compare this and SSF2T:HDR. But it looks to be a good contender for the title.

Dude, are you kidding me?

THIS and SFII Turbo HD remix? Bitch, please.

I don't understand... anti-aliasing is a technique used to display lower res images on a higher res screen with smoothing.

I thought this was completely drawn in HD? Are we just talking about 720p to 1080p upscaling? If so, I'd rather just see the sharp 720p images.

Or did they draw it at an incompatible resolution for the consoles? I hope not... games like Street Fighter Alpha and Neo-Geo fighters always look like crap on PS2 because the resolution doesn't quite match up.

Wrong.
Anti Aliasing is when you "blur" the edges of sprites so that when zoomed out they seem to be completely smooth, even though they're jaggy (they're made of pixels, after all). It's just something to make the sprites look better overally speaking and not a method of upscaling.

Do you mean "zoomed in"? I guess I could see what you're saying if we're talking about the camera zooming in and out on the combatants based on how far away they are from each other. I'm used to playing Capcom games so I don't see this much... but I remember Samurai Showdown does that and the characters get blockier as they get larger (obviously).

If that's what we're talking about, it sounds like a pretty cool feature.

KOFXII does have zooming, like several older SNK fighters, but that's kind of beside the point. The sprites are not drawn in the same resolution as the backgrounds and interface, something that's quite apparent when looking at screenshots. I'm guessing the arcade version has anti-aliasing for the sprites when they are zoomed out, but this new option applies a blur filter to the sprites whether they are full size or not (well, presumably).

For a lot of these 2-D fighters, I would love to see some background interaction. For example: Street Fighter 4, i wanted to see the volcano explode onto the players breaking up gameplay. Or in this picture right here, it would be cool to see the snake spits venom at the combatants.

Freeze, smash bros ....

Smash bros, Freeze

No stress about this AA stuff, it's an option, so if you don't like it, turn it OFF! :)

any chance of a remake of the old KoF on PSN and XBL before they release this? BTW what is anti-aliasing?

Looks good... also... console exclusive characters on the way..! I'm guessing Mai and/or Vanessa will make an appearance.

http://www.iplaywinner.com/news/2009/3/16/king-of-fighters-xii-console-exclusive-characters-online-opt.html

Hah, I knew it. They can't leave Mai out.

AHH!!!!, this hard KoF XII or BlaZBlue >.<

I think the one with the better Online wil the winner for me.

There there -Jad- ...
Let me help you out here my friend...for these two, you must find a way to have both. See...now that wasn't so hard now was it?

Hell YEAH! I haven't bought a new KoF since 99 on the ps1 but I'm gonna be all over this like frosting on cake!

Ew, anti-aliasing. Sorry, this looks bad, I thought these had been drawn, scanned and painted in HD+ so they'd look smooth no matter what. I can totally see the smudgy pixels on the third shot. I hope it doesn't bother me so much in movement (probably won't).

You can always turn the smoothing off (at least, you always have been able too...). If you demand that amount of perfection from hand-drawn and animated, high-resolution pixel art, you'll have to wait until 4320p is standardized. Hopefully by then the global economy will have been stabilized, and a relatively small company like SNK Playmore can afford to pay a single man to draw the 30 or so character sprites and their frames of animation over the six year period it will take him if he puts in the standard 200 hour work week.

Gato, Gai, Eiji, Takuma, Heidern, Yamazaki, Mai, Billy, Mary, Geese, Rock, Freeman and Oswald. If SNKP adds those characters for consoles I will but 5 copies of this game!! And even though SNKP doesn't have the full rights to K9999 and Angel....you can't help to think that if anyone needs to be in high-def (besides Mai lol.) its got to be Angel (^_~)

Those are all characters I'd love to see (and totally wish were in the game), but I'm more than willing to wait until XIII (which will pick up the story from XI and '03 anyways) for my favorite characters to make it into the game. Let's not take the chance of unbalanced characters rushed to make it into a console port when the arcade version isn't even finished and launches a mere three months before. We Outlaw Team fangirls demand only perfection from our Billys and Yamazakis!

Also, throw in Goenitz for fun!

K9999, Angel, Vanessa & Duck FTMW

But on a serious note this game definately looks promising, hopefully a demo will be planned so we can see if it plays as well as it looks......

i suppose its time to finally buy a joystick........

As usual, the anti-aliasing option does nothing but make things look worse.

where is the dam wii version of this, I believe this should be a wii exclusive.

Its so good to know that things don't happen the way you believe it should....pfftt. "Wii exclusive"...you must be just kidding.

Game looks wonderful we all knew this already. But goddamn PS3F, GameInformer has a bunch of new info on the game and the best you can post is graphic shit?

http://img252.imageshack.us/img252/7706/picture18.jpg
http://img252.imageshack.us/img252/1429/picture18f.jpg
http://img156.imageshack.us/img156/2144/picture182.jpg

Now THIS is news worth. Thanks

Thanks for this article! my game informer hasn't arrived yet but I'm looking forward to it! =)

This isn't antialiasing. This is bilinear filtering, which is the same thing done to textures in 3D games when they're scaled larger. This is no deal, and in OpenGL this is basically the equivalent of adding one line of code:

glTexParameterf( GL_TEXTURE_2D, GL_TEXTURE_MAG_FILTER, GL_LINEAR );

Tada! Now you too can add blurriness to game sprites!

Antialiasing is the sampling along the edges of objects to reduce "jaggy" stair-step artifacts created when edges aren't parallel to the display grid. It has nothing to do with scaling the image up.

Hmm... I think they look fine already to be honest, but it's nice to have the option. I usually prefer the blocky-ness to having it blurred anyway though.

Also, those legs ;-;

Sold... (h)

Ew, looks like any run-of-the-mill bilinear or trilinear filtering, so no. Not even "no, thanks". Just no.

*bilinear or bicubic filtering

Sorry.

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King of Fighters XII screens reveal new anti-aliasing feature

King of Fighters XII (March 16)

Reader Comments (53)

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