Look, we thought we'd made ourselves perfectly clear the last time we reviewed a King Of Fighters game - King Of Fighters 2002, to be precise. It's not that we have a problem with 2D fighters (in fact, many's the long night we spent struggling with Chun Li's powerful thighs in an extended bout of Street Fighter abuse), but there's a time and place for these things, and making us pay for it on Xbox in this day and age isn't that acceptable.

So before we start pounding into King Of Fighters 2003 with our size 16 boots, laying into the proverbial goolies of yet another game that looks like it's come about three console generations too late, here are the facts that matter: it's a one-on- one beat 'em up, featuring over 30 different characters and more special moves than John Travolta's all-star disco-dancing team. It's got full Live play, a couple of bonus survival modes and the kind of indecipherable storyline that only Japanese developers on 100 per cent proof sake can come up with.

And, providing you enjoy this type of game and you still have the manual dexterity required to get the most out of the brain-searingly complex combination moves, it's pretty good at what it does. King Of Fighters 2002 might be considered the purest fighter of the series, but we actually prefer the way 2003 lets you constantly switch mid-bout between your team's three fighters. It adds variety and somehow makes it more accessible.

But let's face it, is this really what you want to be playing on Xbox, especially when we've got games like the delicious-looking Black running on the same hardware? Again, this isn't an attack on the reputation of SNK or its venerable fighting games, but this really should have been released as part of a retrospective compilation pack. Releasing it like this, as a standalone game, seems as sensible to us as a cheese-wire thong.

Let's put it another way: the King Of Fighters series is twelve years old now. Twelve years! And in that time, bar the odd flurry of new characters and general tweaks to the fighting mechanics themselves, the technology behind the game has come about as far the clockwork tin-opener. The name might say 2003, but this is pure old-school gaming, 1994 style. For a technical fight fan it's great, but for the other 99 per cent of society - those brought up on a diet of super-realistic third-person action-adventures - it's 20 hard-earned quids for an antiquated gaming curio. Twenty hard-earned quid, needless to say, that could just as easily be shelled out on the not-antiquated-at-all Ninja Gaiden Black or Fable:

1. It does what it's supposed to perfectly. A truly arcade-perfect conversion of a (once) massively popular beat-'em-up.
2. An amazing amount of depth for the truly committed fight fan. Thirty-plus characters and thousands of moves and combos.

1. Twenty quid's a big ask for an old arcade game these days. After some great Capcom and Taito compilations, why not an SNK one?
2. Unless you've grown up with fighting games and can do fireball moves in your sleep, you'll never pick up the archaic joypad moves.
3. A slight graphical improvement on King Of Fighters 02, but it's hardly a looker. Not with pixels the size of breeze blocks everywhere.

Deep and definitely more accessible than the last one, but as Indiana Jones said, "This game belongs in a museum."