Game #1079: The King of Fighters XIV - Ultimate Edition

  Two words, one name: Rock Howard.    

 It was only last month when I finally played KoF XIV, but I had purchased that game years ago and never got around to playing it.... only to find out The King of Fighters XIV: Ultimate Edition was releasing this year! Well, it's what you'd expect, same game but with all the DLC on the disc... which is pretty cool if, like me, Rock Howard is your favorite fighting game character ever. Ever.

 So, what's on the disc? 8 new characters, for a total of 58, and hear me out, these are fantastic picks. For starters, three of my all time favorite fighting game characters ever: Rock Howard, Blue Mary and Vanessa. Then there's Whip, which I really like, as well as Yamazaki, a fan favorite, a new fighter that was very interesting, Oswald, who is as suave as he was in IX and... Heidern, who I guess must have at least one fan. 10 characters get DLC costumes and... frankly, I couldn't care less. I guess some people might care about highschool Kyo and Iori, but... nah, I like it when my characters move forward.

 There's some new stuff which I think was added through patches, namely, a few new stages and now each character has a total of 6 color palettes, not bad! The graphics were slightly improved too, but nothing earth-shattering.

 Your save-file doesn't carry over from the original game, but the bosses are unlocked from the start, so you'll only lose your gallery items.

 I'm not gonna lie, the new added content is enough to make me bump up the score by 0.5. Not only in lieu of getting to play as my favorite fighting game character again, but I really do think the added characters are great additions to the roster. Plus, this disc includes all the patches that added more colors, stages and even better graphics to the game, making it a worthy replacement for the original release.

 8.5