As I recall, Virtua Fighter made a large splash
in the video arcade areas a couple of years
back - it was the first fighting game which utilized 3D polygons
to construct its players
instead of flat bitmaps. Though flat-shaded at the time, the game
was amazingly impressive
graphically. Just for those of you who can't quite remember when
that was, it was around the
time when Mortal Kombat and Street Fighter were competing for the
post of king of the hill in
the console genre, the contest which was more or less tied,
though Street Fighter I believe
received the majority of the votes. Anyway, back to business,
Virtua Fighter, though considered
a breakthrough in graphical terms, was slightly laid back in
gameplay - Street Fighter had more
moves, and overall I believe, was more fun. Very unfortunately I
could not try out Mortal
Kombat: The Arcade because the government banned it here in nice,
green, and safe Singapore.
Obviously it has taken quite a while for the guys at SEGA to
finally port their game to the PC
- the model 1 board (I believe that was the technology behind VF)
of course was far beyond
whatever PCs could reach without special hardware. The reigning
type of PC back then of course
was the 486, which is vastly inferior to the Pentium, which is
the most common now - or is it?
This thing can only run on a Pentium 90, so it's lucky I've got
something in that range. Which
brings me to my point: the technology that was impossible for the
PC then is still slightly out
of reach for some. Shaded bitmaps were later added to the game,
and this is what you'll see in
VF Remix - of course I believe there is an option to just see the
old flat-shaded polygons (but
who would want to?) It runs very smoothly here on my P133; and
the graphics are nearly
indistinguishable from the ordinary arcade. No 3D Blaster
required here by the way! For those
of you who still like this fighting genre, and have the power,
this is probably one of the best
games out there.
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