After a brief video intro, you're dumped into a selection screen where you can choose which of the King of Fighters games you wish to play. Or you can opt for a challenge mode, which gives you specific requirements, such as winning a fight with all of the lifebars and other on-screen elements disabled, or a set up where enemies only take damage if your super gauge is completely full. Completing these challenges unlocks artwork and music for you to check out in a gallery. Not to get too far off-track here, but does anyone actually look at unlockable concept art anymore? Zooming in on shoddy scans of promotional posters has never been my idea of a good time, even for games that have plenty of high-quality concept art to consider.
If you're already familiar with these SNK classics, then you know what you're in for. While never achieving the level of popularity of Capcom's Street Fighter games, the KOF series offers up some wonderful 2D fighting with tons of characters, especially in KOF '98, which brings together over 30 different characters without relying on a lot of duplicates or clones. The fights take place in a team battle format, with each side choosing three fighters, then the order in which they'll appear. It's an interesting format because it forces players to learn at least three characters, rather than just relying on one to succeed. The games can get a bit more technical than most other 2D fighters, with multiple ways to use your stocked up super attacks and, occasionally, more-difficult controller motions than the standard "double fireball" sort of stuff that's the norm in today's fighters.
The games in the collection are emulated from the original Neo Geo versions, and they run in arcade mode. The emulation isn't perfect, and it's slightly different between versions. The PSP and PS2 versions of the game stop to load a lot more frequently than the Wii version. The PSP has pretty long load times when jumping into a game, too. For some strange reason, the PSP and PS2 versions have the buttons backwards in their default control settings (which can be easily fixed).
So no version is perfect, but the faster loading makes the Wii version the best choice, provided you've got the right controllers on-hand. Also, it's nice to get a collection of good, classic 2D fighters on the Wii, which doesn't have a ton of games like this. That said, it's still sort of hard to recommend the collection, especially if you already own KOF '98 in another format. The $30 price point on Wii and PSP is a bit much, and PS2 owners would probably be better off waiting for the updated version of KOF '98, called Ultimate Match, which Ignition is scheduled to release later this year.