Tencent does it again and somehow made another deal with SNK, this time to put 98UMFE on PC in China as a Free-to-Play title.
The game features a similar coin system to Tekken Revolution, except much worse. You start off with 5 free coins and that’s it. Winning does not get you more coins, but beating your opponent will allow you to either play them again if they put in another coin or allow you to play arcade mode for free. It is possible to buy coins, but I’m not sure how easy that is for US citizens who would want to. The price is 2.50 RMB to 1 in game coin, which is very roughly 50 cents a coin. On top of that, coins recharge once per day instead of 1 coin every 30 minutes.
The game itself is a straight port of the arcade version, which means (besides being seemingly arcade perfect) there is no training mode. The game’s rooms feature a main lobby where players can chat with one another and also features what seems to be drop-in-drop-out opponents, but sadly does not currently offer a spectator option. The netcode feels like a sort of GGPO knockoff rollback based online. The few matches I’ve been able to play so far were kinda jittery (as to be expected in a connection as far away as China), but my inputs did not suffer all that much if at all. The game is apparently still in beta and doesn’t seem to be “officially” listed anywhere available for download, but it’s not difficult to get the game by any means. Whether this means in the future the coin system will change I do not know, but the possibility is there.
EDIT:
Spectator is in the game, actually. Just didn’t know how to do it.
