Virtua Fighter Animation

Loved it on the Saturn, but wanted it to be portable?

Well, the minds at Sega have addressed your problem and wisely decided to bang the original Virtua Fighter to the Game Gear to give players a new type of experience.

VF features eight characters from the original, keeping many of their arcade moves and strategies intact during the conversion This release also features a Two-player Option for head-to-head fighting as well as three different play modes that allow you to switch to a Macro Mode with super-sized characters.

And now, from EGM's "...and you thought that you'd seen it all" department comes Virtua Fighters from those masterminds at Sega! Let's cut right to the chase here. Check this game out to appreciate just how far video games have come in the last eight years!

Virtua Fighters will strike you first as an incredible display of technological wizardry. You simply have to see this game in action to fully appreciate what Sega has done here. The animation is so fluid and lifelike that you'll immediately bellow out a reverberating, "COOL!"

Once you finally conquer your amazement at the graphics of Virtua Fighters, you'll find that the game play is equally impressive. You can play as any one of eight computer rendered characters, each with a fighting style all their own.

Also adding dimension to this game is the movement of your viewing perspective along various axes. Your viewpoint swings to and fro, depending on your fighter's location. It's a cool effect!

The playing fields change with every different match, and some of the backgrounds are very beautiful. They definitely give the game an aura of mysticism (ooooh!).

To get a victory, you can do a couple of things. First, you can simply beat the bejesus out of your adversary. Second, you can score a "Ring Out" which is accomplished by knocking your opponent's butt right out of the fighting area. This is a lot harder than it sounds, though!

After you win a bout, you are treated to an instant replay of the KO. The instant replay is neat because you get to see the action in multiple viewpoints, all the while rotating at nauseating speeds around the ring. This is really something of a gimmick, but it looks damn cool anyway!

Virtua Fighters also boasts some of the most advanced hardware ever seen in a video game. Its advanced processors enable it to run faster and display smoother animations than any other virtual-type arcade game in existence. Essentially, this coin-op would have been considered an impossibility just a few years ago!

Take a long gander at Virtua Fighters by Sega and appreciate it for two things. First, it's a way-cool fighting game. Second, and maybe most important, it represents how far the gaming industry has come since the days of Space Invaders, Pac Man, and Tempest. Virtua Fighters gives us a good taste of things to come in the future.