I think that KOF 2000 overall has good backgrounds, despite the fairly small number and a couple that are a little too brown for my liking (construction site and the wharf - which also looks slightly "off" in the transition between shallow water and the ground). The couple of bad ones are rather poor, but the good ones are top notch.
My highlights:
* Aquarium stage - love this one, to me it's a downright iconic KOF stage with that manatee in the background.
* Desert/Pyramid stage - love this one too, so simple and clean and the change from the sandstorm in round 1 to a calm blue sky in round 2 is just great.
* Korean shopping street - great stage here too, true "street fighting" and nicely detailed, the mix of neon and the reflective puddles at night looks really sleek and nice to me.
The warehouse one with that giant slow moving fan in the background isn't bad to me either, and aesthetically seems to be a good match for the NESTS saga storyline, where there is a lot of storyline stuff in places with a military bunker vibe (see also: the late stage storyline stuff in KoF'99). Feels sorta like a SvC Chaos stage too - though yeah, that's potentially divisive since I could see people not digging a lot of those backgrounds.
Really thats the great thing about arcade sticks, if you dont like anything its very easy to swap everything over to your preference.
Also, as for sticks... I have a local store with several of the HORI stick in stock (and I own several RAPs for other systems), but I passed on it in favor of the 8bitdo stick that's releasing on August 20:
http://www.8bitdo.com/nes30-arcade-stick/.
The 8bitdo has a nice design and NES pad aesthetic, it's fully moddable for easy swapping in Sanwa sticks/buttons, is a lot cheaper than the HORI ($80 MSRP versus $150 for the HORI) and it's BLUETOOTH to more easily allow for playing the Switch undocked (and not have to bother with a wire when playing on TV). We'll see how latency is, but I can't imagine it's that big of an issue (I normally play with a Switch Pro Controller and that's certainly fine). And it's not as if I'm playing in tournaments when I take an old Neo Geo game for a spin anyway...
I suspect I'll be immediately popping in some Sanwas once I get the stick, but I'll give some impressions when I get mine, which I currently have preordered from Amazon.
BTW, I hear that using a USB to USB-C converter/dongle (not included) does allow you to plug the HORI stick into the Switch in portable mode. Still, feels like an annoyance that I don't personally want to deal with.
