« SNK's Battle Coliseum for Xbox Live Arcade Gets HD Upgrade »
FuriousRGD | Sunday, January 24, 2010 at 8:44PM 
SNK Playmore's Battle Coliseum, released previously on Playstation 2, is set to arrive as a downloadable title on Xbox Live Arcade this Spring.
This does not appear to be a down and dirty port for a quick buck. SNK Playmore is upgrading the game's visuals in a very big way for this release. Here is a comparison pic between the old sprite and the upgraded one:
This appears to be more than the application of a filter. The new sprite on the right is crisp and clean without the usual trademarks of filters: blurring and exaggerated lines. I will admit here that I have never played Battle Coliseum and cannot speak to this game's quality, but the way that SNK Playmore has upgraded these sprites makes me wish Capcom would apply such techniques to some of its own classic 2D fighters (image from andriasang).
In addition to vastly improved sprites, the game has an all-new HD character select, character win art, improved backgrounds, and more. Check out a few screens below from Famitsu. If you are interested in more screenshots, visit the original Famitsu article via the source link below for many more screenshots as well as one more sprite comparison.
;)
;)
;)
Source: Famitsu via andriasang
Reader Comments (11)
Imagine CvS, Alpha, or Third Strike with these sprites? droool!
Has anybody played this game? Is it good or hot garbage?
The game is really fun, actually. Very fun tag-team play with a lot of SNK's big stars across KoF, AoF, World Heroes, Metal Slug, Samurai Showdown, etc. The two original characters Yuki and Ai are pretty cool too (and Yuki is beast in the right hands). To best describe the feel of the gameplay, I'd say mix the switch-when-you want tag-team fun of MvC (as opposed to the tag team battles where one character must die to use the next) with some of the strategic not-TOO-fast play SNK brings to the table. A rather hefty amount of hidden unlock characters and the good ol' SNK style I've loved for a while round out to a solid game, IMO.
Needless to say, I'm buying this HD remix as soon as it's available!
i hope this comes out on psn. i might bust a nut. this game is fun as hell!
When I had this for ps2, it really had lasting appeal due to the fact that it was a BUNCH of SNK characters that you can just mess around with and try out different matches in casuals. It really felt stiff though such as the animations and movement compared to a capcom game and it had horrendous loading times. Other than that though, it is a fun game, but just like Garou of Kof XII *shudders* it'll never see competitive play. I might pick this up again though just to play around in arcade mode.
I thought this was also comming out on the ps3?
please be multi platform, this looks like a lot of fun.
Used to play it a lot with my friends back when it came out for PS2.
I hope it comes out on PSN as well...
Best game SNK ever made IMO. I'd play it more if it was in any norcal arcade. Hopefully it gets some recognition with this remake.
That looks pretty awesome. It's a shame that the netcode for this will most likely be horrendous, but at least it'll be fun to play locally.
ngbc is legit, you should give this game a shot if you haven't played it.
though if you don't know how snk games work you may find it a bit confusing at first...
This is most definitely NOT a filter. The reason why filters tend to look weird/bad is because the source material they're given to begin with (a super pixelated sprite) is not so great. This sprite is pretty obviously redone. For example, look at the hand. The original sprite just has a blob of pixels where the fingers are. Could you write a program that would a) even recognize those as fingers, b)take that blob and separate it correctly into fingers, and c) be able to know if they're not just short fingers held straight out or longer fingers that are curled and which direction they're curled? Unfortunately, if it looks too nice, chances are it was reworked. :)