THE KING OF FIGHTERS 2002

Oh my oh my. I can't really complain since I got this for free but I'll leave this here as a warning: this game is the laziest port I have ever seen. So lazy, it's not actually a port. The game is actually an arcade ROM wrapped in a crappy, useless user interface that doesn't even let you set basic options. The core game is the kof2002.zip + the Neogeo firmware files that you can actually run with an arcade emulator. Because emulation is a gray area, I support legally acquiring the ROM. But emulators do a much, much better job at running it than the included launcher. So if you payed money for this (sorry!) try using MAME for your now legal KoF 2002 ROM. There you can set ALL options and dip switches and so on.

The game starts and you have a very, VERY basic menu. You see a section of Options, and here starts the awful: NO KEY BINDING!! The "Game Controls" option will show you just an image of the keyboard controls and THAT'S IT. The "Game Options" are basically the "dip switches" of the rom, then you have the option to toggle the fullscreen mode on or off, the general volume, and NOTHING ELSE. Also, for some weird reason, to scroll up and down the Game Options, you must use left and right, up and down change the values of each. There's an save state feature, tagged as "Save" and "Load" options. The performance of the emulation is ok though, but it is incredible that a free emulator can offer a waaay better and intuitive experience to the player, ratter than an official package. Shame. You should grab the files in the instalation folder, they're kof2k2nd (game), kof2002 (parent file) and neogeo.zip (bios file), have them together in a folder, get your favourite free and legal emulator, launch the game, configure everything at your pleasure, and enjoy it as how it must be: as a great fighting game. Btw, here's K9999. It's something.

A shoddily made emulator running the game. Due to it not regulating its own framerate, the game runs far too fast to be playable, on top of this, the controls cannot be rebound and the game has endless problems when not using the keyboard controls, if you even are able to (some people can and others cannot).

Although this port of kof has locked the controls, I have a workaround for this. First, you should have a mechanical keyboard featuring multiple layers that you can switch to easily between those to get different keymap. 1. Switch to a dedicated layer for this game. 2. Mapping some keys to what the game uses. map ↑ to W map ↓ to S map ← to A map → to D map W to J map X to K map C to L map Q to ; In this way, you have only to switch this layer when you wanna play this game

Such a simple thing that is not present in this game and so far the developer has not bothered to add this option via update.