The Game
The King of Fighters '96 (KOF '96) is a fighting game released by SNK for the Neo Geo arcade and home consoles in 1996. It is the third game in The King of Fighters series, following The King of Fighters '95. Like its predecessor, the game was ported to the Neo-Geo CD, as well as the PlayStation and Sega Saturn.
The game made a few changes to gameplay such as new techniques, various changes of some teams, with a few of them introducing new characters. The plot follows a new King of Fighters tournament created by Chizuru Kagura, the heir of Yata Clan who wants to find and recruit Kyo Kusanagi, who defeated the previous host, Rugal Bernstein, to ask him and his bitter rival, Iori Yagami, to help her in the sealing of the Orochi demon. The new boss is one of the servants from Orochi, Goenitz, who appears after Chizuru is defeated.
Objetives
- Plays Hardest Difficult Level
- Abuses programming errors
- 2 player matches for variety/entertainment purpose
- Entertaiment
- glitches, infinite combos and 100%, resets & many crazy stuff
An advice before anything
If you are trying to sync this run at emulator you may come across desync issues while playbacking because it's FBA...I made this run years ago and even fixing the desyncs during the process it still desyncs when I finished it, first of all download the savestate I uploaded
here (FBA saves are .fs archives so rename the .lua extension to .fs and put the save at your FBA standard saves folder) then before playbacking the .fbm set audio to> 44100Hz for no sound issues, now proceed playbacking the .fbm making sure to be running at ready-only, the run start desyncing after frame 11084 so the first savestate slot is set for this specific frame, just load it and then the entire run will sync properly.
Behind the whole run creation
If a word should describe the reason behind picking KOF '96 probably would be: Challenge.
Tha was a big challenge for me that time, I made this run years ago after so much working on both researching and asking for feedback from KOF community friends, the reason why it was a big challenge is because we are talking about The King of Fighters, a franchise stuffed with unique interactions, speed and glitches amoung the entire series were the community keep discovering new combo and glitch stuff every year, having that in mind it's one of the hardest fighting games to work on even knowing everything behind trick, combos & glitch stuff. I made a route based on doing multiple 2 players matches at start while CPU fights should end the run seemed the way to go.
With that being said let's understand how crazy a KOF game can be even a old hat one like '96.
Glitches & Bugs
Like KOF '95 Team Assist was still going around at '96 (press ABC simultaneously while in dizzy state) if you perform a team assist nearly while doing any desperation move who envolves doing multiple hits on opponent your character will keep non stop hitting when the assist already kicked the second player, lot of effects start to happen if you do a desperate move during the hit collision and funny stuff like Choi Chouzetsu Tatsumaki stuck into his own move, Joe can generate a second copy of itself while performing some of his desperates, there are lot of different effects that can be made.
A common trick/glitch for KOF games, it's even at SNK vs. Capcom game, basically you can lock the screen at any side of the stage with some characters allowing us to make some nonsense combos happens, in this run Athena was the choosen since she is the best for the setup: do a psycho teleport while having both characters almost at the corner limit and if you suceed the screen will slow-down a bit while you are walking forward making possible to do some big combos (see Multiple Hit bellow).
Can be done with any character, all you need for the setup is doing a desperation move while doing any normal move (like Robert crouching multiple low kicks in a row).
- Daimon Jirai Shin fake Throw
This is where the game start being out of control, can be done with all the characters vs Daimon, doing a Jirai Shin and then grabbing him with C or D at the right time and doing the same thing again will result in so many broken stuff that nobody knows where it will ends on, reseting machine, air stuck & floating and TUGS can be performed by abusing this glitch, you can see in this run what happened between the fight against Kyo and Athena.
- Running Backward/Moonwalking
Easy to do: just start running>F, F and then press Up + Back to start running backward, keep holding forward to keep running.
- Yori Interrupted Shiki Ya Otome
This one require Shoki Yami Barai being canceled for the setup, after hitting Yori when Yami Barai gets active you need to jump back and do Shiki Ya Otome desperation at the right time to make both projectile and DM colides, if you did the right input Iori will freeze in the last animation, if you try to switch sides Iori will do the last animation for Ya Otome.
- Chang Crazy Throwing Ball
Do a Tekkyu Dai Kaiten at corner making sure to block with player two, at some point try to avoid off Dai Kaiten with roll technique (A+B) and then with Chang do his Dai Hakai Nage grab before Dai Kaiten animation ends, he will throw the opponent while the ball will still remains switching sides while Chang executes his move.
Very classic one, for those who doesn't know Kim has a glitch where hitting the opposite side of any character will results into opponent get stucked, at '96 the way to do it is doing his desperation move at corner, all you need to do is having the other character at opposite side + direction.
Only works against characters like Ralph and Clark, Benimaru has an weird infinite in this game where he can keep spaming crouch low kicks against Clark after grabing him his Coleda, should be impossible for any character be able to keep hiting your opponent after a grab but Benimaru does not care about logic of how '96 works.
A small weird stuff, if you keep pressing down while charging his gauge the sound effect start being out of sync for no reason.
That's it, lot of other cool effects can be done as well by abusing off team assist and Daimon throws I just tried to shows up what fits better for me and for the viewers while having variety instead of doing a run focused only on these two glitches, from now on the rest of the run are against CPU where lot of combos was done.
Thanks to:
- 2-D (2D50, check out his youtube channel) for helping me all these years with KOF stuff about tricks, glitches and mechanics behind lot of combos, this run wouldn't be the same without his feedback.
- TempestWay for the encode, the savestates and also for the feedback gaven during the whole run process to encourage me.
- For all the combomakers from KOF community with all their video content showing off new ideas for combos and glitch stuff.
- For everyone who took some minutes to watch this run regardless if my run was entertained enough or not, tried my best and get satisfied with it.
This is all for today, thanks :)
feos: Claiming for judging.
feos: Great work! I don't even need too much forum feedback to tell that this run is really well done on all fronts: research, execution, and the final look. Accepting to Alt.
And to sync this run, I needed these 2 savestates provided by the author (load in read-only mode):
