494: Number of days since KOFXIII was released in the arcades….
A little over a year ago, the King of Fighters XIII was released in the arcades all across Japan in a very select few around the world a few days later. Many were skeptical how KOFXIII would turn out after the not-so-well received KOFXII. Fast forward a couple of hours and it was instantly hailed a classic at least with us SoCal players and considering several of us have been playing since Kof’94, it speaks volume of the greatness that is XIII. With a couple of days left before the release, I want to take a stroll down memory lane.
The SoCal group wants to take the time here to thank everyone for supporting: our videos from Arcade Infinity, our attempt on a ratio tournament (and all the haters), our less exciting YouTube uploads to my channel with my tripod camera, our Direct Feed recordings from AI (Thanks Scott!), the first SoCalRegionals ’10 where we had this silly webcam to stream the finals because of technical difficulties, NorCalRegionals ’10 (thanks Vinh and Giby for hosting that!), the Dark Periods (thanks for shooting our hopes down of no console release date in sight), #17 for visiting us and adding so much hype, RevaLAtions, The Atlus console release announcement, STA Ranbats for having us, Evo ’11, iPlaywinner for streaming STA and pushing XIII so hard, the delay (thanks for the tease), the official SNKP change logs, the Isaiah vs SoCal event, The Level|Up X Atlus event. We’re probably missing some significant milestones in this arduous “waiting period” but we also want to thank all the millions of videos a-cho and KCE pumped out and all the efforts from ON and RSG with their excellent stream events and of course everyone here at the Dream Cancel family.
In 494 days, some popular fighting game titles might have receive several revisions already. We are the most hardcore of all fighting game fans to have waited this long and the wait is almost over; we are KOF fans.