Can I fellate MOTM for a bit in here?
My biggest regret of the SNK bankruptcy is that we never got an arcade version of Match of the Millennium or a similar late era OG SNK SvC game. SvC Chaos eventually came out and was playable, but it in no way captured the "feel" of SvC in the way that MOTM did. And that's kind of the entire arc of the story of SNK's final years vs SNK Playmore's beginning years, those last SNK games like Garou, KOF98-2000, Last Blade 2, Metal Slug 2/X, Sam Sho 4 have a mechanical brilliance and polish that wasn't really recaptured for a long time after the fact (with the possible exception of KOF2002). While a handheld game, mechanically MOTM felt very much like a late 90's SNK versus late 90's Capcom dream match, KOF98 vs SFA2/3 if you will. With dashes of seasoning from other games like Darkstalkers, Samurai Shodown, or the X-Men/Marvel VS games. Similar mechanics, similar game speed, similar UI to A3, similar hitstun, etc. Old SNK also did a better job of making Capcom characters feel like Capcom characters while adapting them, which is a critical failure of Capcom's CvS games as SNK characters often played drastically different or weird in CvS1/2, and SvC Chaos as the Capcom characters there probably most resembled ST versions if anything at all. The CvS games and SvC Chaos also had shorter hitstun than was typical in the 90s, which changes the feel of the games. MOTM also had excellent hit priority, which again is a major issue in all of the other SNK/Capcom games (particularly CvS). You also had a pretty well executed ISM/Groove style system as well as the choice of 1v1, KOF style 3v3, or tag and a solid roster (which is also sizeable in comparison to other NGPC games). All of that combines to make a great package and results in my perhaps unpopular opinion that MOTM was lowkey the best overall fighting game to come out of the SNK/Capcom partnership.
But of course, there's more. In addition to all of that, you also had a substantial amount of secret characters, minigames (and an almost dating simulator like mode to access them), and unlockable supers that combined to give you the kind of replay value you would expect of a high-quality contemporary console game. It's an insanely good package, and the tragedy of it is exactly how few people (even amongst the hardcore fighting game community, although it wouldn't be considered a greatly balanced tournament game) have actually given it the time of day. One can only imagine what an MVS/AES version made in that timeframe would have been like, let alone enhanced home/CD ports of it.
