Well, this certainly snuck up on me!  The rumored HDr patch went live already, and has a number of bugfixes to help ease the pain on playing online.  Details can be found here, but I’ll talk about them in a moment.  Before you get your hopes too high, this patch did not adress any game balance issues that the game may or may not have.  Many people believe that Akuma is very good.  Others believe he is too good.  And believe me, there is a huge difference between ‘very good’ and ‘too good’.  With that out of the way, its nice to note that they claim to have fixed the lifebar freezing issues on both systems.  A lot of issues with disconnecting and desyncing of online play related to choosing the start-button colors of your characters and/or playing as Vega (claw) have been fixed as well.  A number of other small issues have been touched on, but all in all, this patch is just to make your online experience with HDr a lot more headache-free.  Its a little overdue, sure, but better late and right than early and disasterous.

GameStop’s POS is reporting a July 7th release here in the US of A for the King of Fighters XII (thats 12, kids).  You may be wondering how SNK went back in time, taking us from a game called King of Fighter ‘94 all the way down to a paltry number like 12.   Well, it seems that the KoF games used to be numbered by the year the came out in, all the way from KoF ‘94 through KoF 2k3.  After that, the games stopped coming on a yearly basis, and the names were changed to protect the innocent…  I mean, to avoid the pressure of releasing a new one every single year.  This gave them the needed time to perform what many of us now call a ’series reboot’.

KoFXII has enjoyed a pretty public development for the last year, and has visually come a long way since the early location tests.  In recent interviews, the producer of the game has stated that they are putting on the finishing touches, and will be ready for an arcade release (in Japan) some time in April.  The shocking news that the console version will be only 3 months behind the arcade release is only made more shocking by the fact that this release includes the United States.  I’m sure Obama has something to do with making this happen so quickly.

To add to the good news for all you new and old fight fans, the home version of KoFXII is looking pretty feature heavy.  You can already view screenshots from the Xbox 360 version of the game, and there are a smattering of shots from the PS3 version floating around as well.  Game Informer is also reporting that the home version will have additional playable characters, though they fail to hint at who or how many.  On top of that, the game will feature online versus play, including the option to watch online matches or record and post your own battles for the world to see.  A group of people will also be able to gather and create a room for team battle!  And, for the old school KoF fanboy in you, both Japanese and English language dialogue options will be available.

I simply can’t think of a reason not to go preorder right now.  Even if you’ve never been a fan of the KoF series before, I think we all owe it to SNK to give this one a try.  They have been too dedicated to 2d fighting for too long for us not to stand up and take notice.  The rest of the world did a long time ago.

Super Battle Opera (Tougeki) 09 will take place at Suido-bashi, Tokyo, Japan from Aug 14 – 16th. The US has been granted the following qualifying spots:

1 spot for Street Fighter 4 [2on2]
2 spots for Tatsunoko vs. Capcom [1on1]
1 spot for Street Fighter 3 3rd Strike [3on3]
1 spot for Guilty Gear XX Accent Core [3on3]
1 spot for BlazBlue [1on1]

The qualification events for the above games will take place tentatively as follows:
SF4 and SF3 3S quals will take place at Denjin Arcade near Los Angeles, California on June 6th weekend. The winners of this event will receive about half of the plane ticket costs paid for by the arcade.

The quals for BlazBlue, Guilty Gear, and 1 TvC will take place at Arcade UFO in Austin, Texas on June 27th weekend. The winners from this event will receive full plane ticket costs covered by the arcade. Click here for details.

The qual location for the other TvC spot is still pending.

Thanks to the owners of Denjin and UFO, Richard “Shogo” Andrade and Ryan “fubarduck” Harvey for graciously assisting with plane fare for the winners. They are putting in thousands of dollars of their own money for the community. Please show support in any way you can.

To start off, I’m initiating a SBO fundraiser similar to last year. Please click here for details. Note that there will be a drawing for donators to win 2008 EVO DVDs along with 1 hour of playtime with SF greats such as Alex Valle, Ed Ma, Gootecks, Mike Ross, and Justin Wong!