#832 King of Fighters Neowave (PS2) Boss: Young Geese Howard playthrough.
0A playthrough of the final boss Young Geese Howard in the PS2 port of SNK’s The King of Fighters Neowave.
Neowave is a ghastly, abominable title. An ugly, superfluous wretch of a game, it did at least lay the ground work for an important title coming up next.
Neowave is the first Atomiswave board game I get to cover, and unfortunately, it’s not exactly a good first impression for the arcade board. The Atomiswave was the successor to the Neo Geo MVS, even utilising cartridges of its own and being a very collectable and accessible system. Many interesting and important titles were released on it, including some great continuations of series coming up, as well as a few unique fighting games and even one very short series. The Atomiswave was very much the last hurrah for SNK as a hardware developer; after this point, like so many other companies, they jumped ship on the Taito Type X, which saw the birth of many different fighting games itself, and the continuation of some classic series including KOF.
The Atomiswave is a fascinating board therefore, given that saw the release of a number of gems, most of which luckily ended up being ported to the PS2. Like everything always did back then. In recent years, the Atomiswave has become emulateable by way of the emulator Demul, though said emulation is rather consistent and unoptimized, requiring a powerful rig in order to run correctly. Even if you do have a good computer, the program runs into many issues and can crash on a whim for no reason, reminiscent of Nebula’s Model 2 emulator. Like that emulator however, it’s the only one we’ve got for it, so there’s not much which can be done for it. At least it can be emulated, I suppose. That said, given that I just don’t care for Demul too much I will be keeping to ports when I can, which is most of the time luckily.
The innately inaccessibility of the Atomiswave titles (compared to how a Neo Geo emulator will run on anything nowadays) means as a result that all of its titles have something slightly special about them. The final chapters in those long-running stories which you just love, or at least the penultimate or definitive entries for that series. If anything, they tend to represent the peak of the genre of which they’re representing, as we’ll see with other titles on the board, and there is something of an esoteric joy about being able to cover some of the obscurer or less renown titles.
Neowave is not one of those games however. As I said, Neowave is a groundwork title. In regards to the Atomiswave, is the outpost settlement on the frontier which will eventually become a booming metropolis, so long as it develops properly. Indeed, Neowave is little more than a modified version of KOF2002, set to run on the Atomiswave in order to test the capabilities of the board. Given the great things this allowed them to do afterwards it was certainly worth it on the whole, but it remains as a reminder of the ugly experimentation which is needed in order to create the beautiful masterpiece. Reality is unflattering, I suppose, and Neowave is just a sharp reminder of that.
Visually-speaking, it’s pretty horrendous. Gameplay-wise, it barely functions. It almost looks like a parody of itself, basically being a glorified prototype unleashed upon the world, presumably to raise cash to fund further projects.
There is one saving grace to this title, and it’s only a saving grace before you actually play the game itself. KOF Neowave sees the return of AOF2 Geese Howard for its boss fight, complete with his special moves and quick and powerful moveset. There’s a slight problem with that however. Geese here was made unlockable in the arcade version, which means…he’s actually toned down from his boss version. Which means, after everything else which is horrendous and unlikeable about this game, it doesn’t even have a fun broken boss to fall back on. Instead, what you get is a bland, toned down Young Geese who barely functions, with a delayed heavy reppuken, an air slash which hits once as opposed to the multiple times of the boss version, and in general feels extremely underwhelming to play as. Young Geese is horrific to fight against he was back in AOF2, and there’s no real joy from playing as him either, especially for someone such as myself who was hoping for the same fun I had with the character back in AOF2. A waste, really, like the entire of this anomalous title.
Indeed, Neowave is little more than an experimental oddity in this day and age. Luckily, however, its experimentation led to one of the (if not the) best games in the entire King of Fighters series, which I’ll be looking at next.