13-Aug-2001 Virtua Fighter gets re-released again, but this time round it doesn't need a 3D graphics accelerator. Peter Davison gets grappling with his gamepad to see this version has anything new to offer.
You may remember that a few issues ago we reviewed Virtua Fighter Remix, which came bundled with the Diamond Edge 3d accelerator card. It gained an extremely respectable score of 89%, but its appeal was somewhat limited by the fact that it needed a 3d accelerator board to work. As a proper standard for 3d cards has yet to be established, very few people are buying them - because they don't know which one to get. This is the reason only a small number of people will have experienced the pc version of Virtua Fighter.
Until now, that is, with the release Virtua Fighter for 'ordinary' pcs which don't sport Ł250 3d boards. That's the good news; the bad news is that you need a real turbo-nutter ninja bastard piece of kit to get this running - Sega say that a p90 with 8mb is the absolute minimum required to get anything out of the beast, and recommend a p133 with 16mb for optimum performance. (But who wouldn't, eh? - Ed.)
The game looks bloody amazing. The characters are extremely detailed and the backgrounds look great in hi-res svga graphics. However, all this comes at a price - and one that many pc users have come to dread - Jerkovision. I tested Virtua Fighter PC on a p90 with 8mb (Sega's minimum spec, as I mentioned earlier) and although it was playable, it had one of the worst frame rates I've ever seen - it ran jerkily even after I'd turned all the pretty texture maps off and selected the chunky low-res option.
Sega have tried to get round this by providing 'Fast' and 'Smooth' modes. 'Fast' lets the game run at the same speed on any machine, whatever its spec, whereas 'Smooth' gets it running at an acceptable frame rate - although speed is sacrificed as a result. You can't win if you've got anything other than an extremely fast Pentium.
So, onto how the thing plays. There are four different ways to play, including the standard arcade and team battle modes. However, they're all basically the same: one character has to beat the crap out of the other in a given time limit.
Despite the poor frame rate the game's quite playable, but it has to be said that there's nothing particularly new about it. 3d beat 'em ups have been cropping up all over the place recently - we've seen multiple incarnations of Virtua Fighter and Toshinden, and the incredibly popular FX Fighter. To stand out in the crowd a game needs to offer something new and special, and sadly Virtua Fighter is lacking on both counts - we've all seen the 3d beat-the-crap-out-of-each-other action many times before.
So, to sum up, you won't find any-thing especially innovative or unique about Virtua Fighter PC. Sure, it looks amazing and it's a near-as-dammit perfect conversion of the arcade and Saturn original (and it has new texture maps to boot), but the frame rate is dreadful unless you've got a bloody fast pc. In its favour though, if you don't already have a game of this genre, at only thirty quid it's worth taking a look at this one. Z
// Overview
Verdict
Slow frame rate, but pretty close to the arcade version.
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