:: orochinagi

Many arcade games now have cards or keys or something to add incentive to play.

Tekken 5: Dark Resurrection uses cards, which displays your win/loss ratio, rank, and allows you to customize your character's appearance. This doesn't actually affect gameplay.

Initial D also has cards and you can tune your car and stuff with it. This affects gameplay.

I've heard that the new DDR will also make use of memory cards, and a game called Wangan also uses cards. Would you like SNK to make use of incentives like this to boost their popularity?

I wouldn't mind either way, as long as it doesn't affect the gameplay. It seems a bit cheap how you can "buy" your wins in ID, while in T5DR it's just for personalisation, a bit of fun. For KOF specifically, they could add classic costumes (eg. for Athena), maybe edit the colors of the flames for certain characters, or select your own BGM while fighting.

NeoWave had a card system when it was released.

It was popular in Japan, but all it really did was open access to the 6 secret characters (after you had scored enough points...which took way too long) and an array of awful alternate colour schemes.

I don't really think card systems are well-suietd to 2D fighters, since there's not a whole lot of meaningful customisation they could do. In 3D fighters you can select alternate pieces of clothing, but doing that for 2D fighters would mean having to draw entire alternate sprite sets, which is not something I think SNKP is disposed towards doing.

New clothes for the characters wouldn't really take much, it could be copy and paste on the exception of a new hat/jacket, or even the lack of them for some of the more popular characters (shirtless kyo )

What I'm afraid of is people becoming obsessed about earning said bonuses... Arcade courtesy is already pretty bad right now with pros challenging noobs, but with the point system people will almost seek out said noobs, in efforts to collect win points.

An achievement system is more viable, but it'll probably just move towards jackassery anyway

I wouldn't care either way but I'd like to see how it work with the new KOF. For SF4 you can only use cards in Japan cause the score is tied to their phone network but for Tekken (and maybe ID?) you can use your card worldwide which is better. If it's not like the Tekken system I'd hit it but if it's like the SF4 set up then it'd just be a moot point :|