Welcome to DC, Icewater!
Don't just wait...play! 98UM and 2002UM really great games and will help you with your KOF skills for 13, so don't give up on those games, especially since October is a long way from now!
I'm sure they're both great games and I played them both long enough to pick up on the basics like rolls and the different kinds of jumps, but I had a really hard time trying to get into them seriously. I bought 98um to kill some time and get acquainted with the series before 2002um came out, and I got 2002um on day 1 hoping that the netcode would be decent so I could have people to play against. Needless to say it wasn't very good, and even though it was playable more or less it usually had enough input lag for me that I didn't see a point in trying to take it seriously.
Once I found out about ggpo I tried playing 2002 for a while on it using 2002um as a training mode since most stuff on the games carry over between each other, but between pretty much everyone on ggpo being really good and having years of experience and my execution not being up to snuff to learn much beyond really basic combos, I got discouraged from playing it pretty fast.
I started sf3 on ggpo at about the same time and had a much easier time getting into it since there was a stream of new players coming in that I could actually be competitive against and I had an easier time learning the combos and parrying than I did learning stuff in 2002. I might come back and give the older kofs another try at some point but I think I'm good where I'm at for now. Besides October isn't as far off as it seems.
Welcome Icewater! Do you mind me asking, what is it about XIII that attracted you especially compared to SFIV?
I liked sf4 a lot for its accessibility, but it gave up a lot of its competitiveness and depth just so beginners could have an easier time playing the game. The slow gameplay plus the ultras and ridiculously safe dps make the game greatly reward defense compared to offense and make the game quite boring and frustrating to play after a while. Out of the 30 something characters only a few really struck me as cool or interesting and there were more than a few that I hated fighting against (mainly blanka).
The combo system was pretty bland thanks to the damage scaling making short combos the way to go, and even though the ultras were cool at first, you don't really do anything to get them, and people use them almost every round so they lose their coolness factor pretty quick and just become a 5-10 second annoyance.
I feel like kof13 keeps the same kind of accessibility, but it doesn't sacrifice anything for it besides making the execution hurdle easier to jump. The game moves fast and the combos are stylish and very easy to do (compared to the older kofs I played at least), although hd combos seem like they go on for a bit too long and ash's corner combos seem like they go on for a bit more than too long when somebody skilled uses him, but those are minor complaints.
Neomaxes look awesome and usually steal the show for me when someone does one since they have a pretty hefty cost. Rolling, running, and the different kinds of jumps make the gameplay very dynamic and offensive, and instead of having a hard time picking who I was going to use because none of the characters seemed particularly interesting, I had a hard time picking who I was going to use since I could see myself using at least half the cast. I ended up settling on 2 teams to start with but I'll probably learn some more characters down the road.
