Where is the next Killer Instinct game? We've been saying it for years now, and Rare still hasn't come through for us. A lot of people expected it on the original Xbox and even more expected some sort of announcement for Xbox 360 following the Viva Pinata announcement. However, despite the numerous requests Rare gets from its fans, the company still insists that the demand for another fighting game isn't high enough. Although at the same time, the company never denies the fact that a new KI could be coming at some point.

With the advent of Xbox Live Arcade, it's also very possible that one of the previous Killer Instinct titles could make its way to Microsoft's downloadable arcade service. While most would agree that the original Killer Instinct was far superior to the arcade and Nintendo 64 sequel, we would be happy with any kind of Killer Instinct on XBLA. In fact, if the original KI were to grace XBLA, it would remind us a lot of the old XBAND online gaming service that allowed Super Nintendo owners to play online against each other in the original Killer Instinct.

Taking a look back at KI on XBAND, it was one of the first online fighting games, and still remains one of the best. Running on dial-up, the game certainly featured some latency, which caused entirely new gameplay strategies to be found. However, despite the latency issues, the game was still extremely fun to play and timing really wasn't affected. You could still pull off combo breakers on reaction, with high level KI players still being able to execute advanced tactics. Perhaps it was the design of the game, but you have to wonder why KI played fine in lag, while Street Fighter II' Hyper Fighting is simply horrid for the top players online.

Another aspect of XBAND KI that has yet to be matched in modern online fighters was the ranking system. Your overall record of wins and losses did not have a direct effect on your ranking. Instead, every rank in the game had a specific name. Your rank name changed as you moved up in rank from things like Novice in the low ranks to Expert in the higher ranks. Your rank was based on points earned from wins. The higher the rank of your opponent, the more points you would earn for the win, but the lower the rank of the opponent, the more points you would lose if you lost the match. This meant that no matter how many games you played (or how few games you played) the ranking was always based on skill. A new player that was highly skilled simply had to beat some of the top players and they would quickly move up in the rankings. At the same time, a low level player who played 24/7 would hardly move up in the rankings.

If we get a new Killer Instinct, or even an Xbox Live Arcade version of an older KI title, there are a few things that we'd like to see included. If Rare simply copied the XBAND setup for Killer Instinct, we'd be happy, but we've also got a few specific requests.

2D vs. 3D

Killer Instinct has always been a 2D fighting game. If either of the original KI titles comes to XBLA, the 2D fighting would obviously be preserved. But what would happen with a new KI? Rare could go with a 2D fighting game, but considering the company is already hesitant to release a new fighter, going old school with 2D gameplay may be out of the question. So it's safe to assume any new KI title will be a 3D fighter, but that doesn't mean the classic gameplay needs to be completely revamped.

If you take a look at some of the modern 3D fighters, the basic gameplay still operates on a 2D plane. In fact, in many cases, the only difference between some of these 3D fighters and classic 2D fighters is the ability to sidestep into the foreground or background. A sidestep in KI probably wouldn't be too hard to implement, and it's not out of the question to see some stages remain true to the 2D roots of the franchise. Take the original KI, with Chief Thunder's bridge stage. Clearly there's no room to sidestep here, so the gameplay would be restricted to a 2D playing field. However, looking at the rooftop stage in the same game, you have a lot of room to move around so sidestepping would come into play here. The bottom line is that it should be relatively easy to update the series with 3D gameplay, while still retaining its 2D roots.

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