Two weeks ago, SNK launched Real Bout Fatal Fury 2 on Steam as the first in its new “NeoGeo Premium Selection” line. Now, another classic fighter gets the same treatment: Kizuna Encounter: Super Tag Battle. Its normal price is NZD $28.99, but it’s got a 25% launch discount until October 19.
NeoGeo Premium Selection brings classic arcade games to PC with updated features: practice mode with a hitbox viewer, an art gallery, a jukebox, and online play with rollback netcode. For the fighting game fans who these releases are primarily aimed at, that last one is the most significant: without getting into technical details, rollback netcode is widely considered the best way of mitigating the effects of latency in a genre where input delay can be detrimental. (If you’re interested in the technical detail of how this all works, Ars Technica has an excellent explainer.)
Originally released for the NeoGeo arcade system in 1996, Kizuna Encounter is notable for being one of the first – if not the first – fighting games to use mid-battle character switching. Team-based games like The King of Fighters had been around for a few years by this point, but Kizuna went one further by letting you swap characters on the fly. Punk-ish character designs and a heavy emphasis on atmosphere in stage backgrounds also helped the game stand out, even from SNK’s other fighters.
These NeoGeo Premium Selection releases join a growing trend of arcade ports with a focus on adding features that have become fairly standard in modern fighting games. We’ve seen the same kind of approach with Capcom’s fighting game collections and updated versions of games like Guilty Gear XX, too. At a time when the competitive scene is thriving more than ever, and even lesser-known games are finding audiences through community efforts like Fightcade, it’s great to see publishers stepping up and putting effort into official releases like this.
SNK presumably has plans for more Premium Selection releases, and Kizuna Encounter arriving just two weeks after Real Bout Fatal Fury 2 hopefully suggests a fairly regular cadence. If I can make one request: The Last Blade 2, please!
