In the business industry, there is something called a cash cow. A cash cow is a product that consistently sells well to a specific audience in order to fund a new venture to take the brand in exciting new directions. This expression wholly typifies what King of Fighter '98 Ultimate Match is trying to be. It exists only to tide fans over until KoF XII is released, but it is such a tremendous display of fan service, it gambles alienating people unfamiliar with the series.

The graphics and visuals are, quite literally, ten years old. Originally in the arcade and then first ported on the Neo Geo, the visual style is still stuck in the late '90s and that is mainly due to jaggy, pixilated sprites and dated character designs. The only visual lifts King of Fighter '98 Ultimate Match benefits from are the front end Menu system and new backgrounds. Each stage is from the Dreamcast version of KoF '98, so they have polygonal objects behind the fighters to add a pinch of visual flare. To SNK's credit though, they have included over 60 characters in this entry, and each one looks different but yet feels at home in one place.

While the love it or hate it pixels and sprites can easily be overlooked in favor of preserving the series' style, the sound and audio unfortunately did not receive much update and sounds like the Neo Geo sound boards, which isn't a good thing in 2009. Character's voices and stage music often sounds muted or muffled and particularly bass heavy tracks have a metallic sound that stirs up memories of the Sega Genesis era.

The subtitle for this entry is "Ultimate Match." I hope they mean penultimate as well, but this is definitely the most fully featured version of the 10 year old fighter so far. Traditionally, the KoF series is known for 3 on 3 match-ups. King of Fighter '98 Ultimate Match offers a step away from tradition and lets players play with a single character as well as Team play and Practice, Survival, and Arcade modes as well. They even threw in an emulated version of the Neo Geo original.

On top of new modes, King of Fighter '98 Ultimate Match also fundamentally changes each fight. A new style of play appropriately dubbed "Ultimate" allows the hardest of hardcore players to micromanage how a character can dash, block, evade, and even how to use the special meter at the bottom of the screen. With each re-release, every SNK fighter becomes deeper and deeper, regrettably to the point to where some are unapproachable.

There are loads of bonus content on the second disc like wallpapers and trailers and there is plenty of character art on the game disc as well. The starting price of $20 is a no-brainer for any KoF fan. The only comment that needs to be said is that this "Ultimate" version of arguably the best entry in the series should be the last entry on the old generation of hardware. Of course, it won't be since Samurai Showdown Anthology is right around the corner. But until the jump to current hardware happens, the series will always be stuck in reliving and refining the past.

Historically, fighting game fans have always had to endure a gruelingly difficult final boss and the KoF series has been especially painful in that area. While the bosses are still just as unfair and tough as they have ever been, there are some equalizers now. Some of the new characters that are playable are actually boss characters from previous games, so now you have the same overpowered moveset that most bosses have now.

The other interesting thing King of Fighter '98 Ultimate Match does well is while playing Arcade mode, every time you lose a fight, you have the option to choose an added perk. Whether you want to drop the difficulty down a level or if you want to have the computer start at 1/3rd their normal health, it is up to you. I would recommend dropping the difficulty because although it has a scalable difficulty system with options between 1 and 7, the series has always been known for crushingly unfair tactics.

King of Fighter '98 Ultimate Match is a four button fighter just like most of the other fighting games from SNK. The main attack buttons are high punch, low punch, high kick, and low kick and they can be assigned to any setup you'd like. There are other moves that are pulled off by pressing certain combinations of buttons simultaneously, but I would strongly suggest mapping those to the shoulder buttons just to make it more manageable.

One of the main things that stands the KoF series apart from other fighters is the input methods. It is hard to explain without bringing up specific competitors, but in most cases, pulling off a special move only requires a fluid down to right movement. For some characters though, pulling off moves that are crucial to their strategy requires pressing down to back, then back down to forward again in order to connect. It feels like King of Fighter '98 Ultimate Match tries so hard to set itself apart from the likes of Street Fighter that it has lost the easy access that makes its competitors so much more popular.

By the end of it all, you already know if you are going to buy King of Fighter '98 Ultimate Match. Chances are, you already have. There is a lot in the package for a cheap price and it does offer some of the best fighting you will get on the PS2 this year. It couldn't hurt to pick this one up, but I would rather wait a few more months for King of Fighters XII or Samurai Showdown Anthology.