Some of you may have seen my post a while back asking for assistance with a King of Fighters XIII Tournament that is coming up locally. Well my copy of KoF XII finally arrived yesterday. I was hoping it would have been here a week earlier, but Canadapost took its sweet ass time. Luckily (as far as my KoF training goes) my wife and son took off for the next 3 days to visit some family. That means I can eat and sleep KoF until they return!

I've only got until the 26th or November to get myself whipped into shape for this thing. The two biggest hurtles are going to be 1)getting familiar with competitive fighting games again, and 2)learning how to use the standard 360 pad for this kind of game.

To get used to KoF I'm going to be spending a butt-load of time playing it (obviously), but I'll also be digging through fighting forums for tips and advice, both for playing the game and for how to approach tournament style play. Because of my locaction and that its not really being advertised well, I'm not expecting to many strong challengers. But being as rusty as I am at versus fighting I'm not going to slack off. I have a lot of room to improve right now.

So right now I've got KoF XII on the 360. I'm going to play it a lot until XIII comes out on the 22nd (which I've pre-ordered now), when I'll swap over to the actual game that is going to be played at the tournament. When I pick up XIII I will literally be spending every second of free time I've got over the days up to the 26th learning the game as much as I possibly can in that time.

I'm also going to break down and purchase a month of Xbox Live so I can get used to fighting strangers, skilled players, and different characters.

This morning I spent some hours in practice mode getting a feel for each and every character. I also took into account which characters are generally known as higher-tier picks for fans of the series. I was able to widdle my possible team down to 4 characters, so I still need to cut one out. I came up with: Kyo, Robert, Joe, Goro.

I'm really leaning towards Kyo and Robert so the big decision is wether to cut Joe or Goro from the roster.

Luckily KoF only uses a 4 button combat system. This makes the 360 pad much more bearable than it would have been for any game using the triggers. The D-pad will now be my biggest learning curve. I love D-pads, but the 360 has one of the worst I've ever used .

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