it seems the Vita release of KOF 97 doesn't have Training mode. Why oh why would they neglect to include that??
The same reason Samurai Shodown III by Hamster Corp doesn’t have one, I suspect: because they ignored the console settings.
It’s a little known fact that most SNK fighting games actually have two settings, “Arcade Mode” and “Console Mode”, the only way to know these settings exist, however, is by going in to the game’s internal options either through Test Mode, or via the game’s menu options (if they are present). Usually you can determine if a game has a Training option, particularly in SNK-style arcade emulators like Kawaks.
But sometimes those modes are cut out of the game, either due to memory limitations, or because the developer wishes to retain the “Arcade experience” that the original game’s code had.
It’s also worth noting that most SNK Arcade games that HAD a Training mode were also prone to many glitches, much like the glitches you tend to find in Guilty Gear Training Modes (mostly because of dipswitches and the idea that Infinite Health or Infinite Meter goes against the natural flow of the game’s functions).
In fact, it’s worth noting that the original Guilty Gear’s Training Mode didn’t bother to have an Infinite Health setting, instead, you could only practice combos until the character was K.O.’d, and the screen would simply reset.
Nowadays, you’ll also see settings that save on memory by making it so that a character’s health and meter settings are shared between the player and the training dummy (like BlazBlue has), so as to prevent errors in the game’s code.
Accent Core and Slash are actually pretty famous for their glitch history, if you look in to it. Particularly the versions of the games that allowed Gold Characters to have intros.
Gold Slayer vs Gold Order Sol and Gold A.B.A. vs Gold Order Sol were particularly funny intro glitches, as I recall.
There are, of course, still glitches to be found even in XrdRev2 and Central Fiction, but it’s not as prominent an issue anymore, even with training settings that can potentially make a character over-powered via the dipswitches they are given.
Anyway, from a coder’s standpoint, Training Mode is actually something akin to a Debug mode, full of all sorts of dipswitches and settings that change different states and generate different simulations in the game.
Because older Arcade-style games didn’t function very well within Training Mode, sometimes those modes were completely excluded, is the main reason.
