No Game New Year: Kingdom Hearts

Kingdom Hearts

Ah, Kindom Hearts. It is a beautiful, beautiful game that took the epicentre of imagination and made it into something truly special. It never quite achieved the mainstream success of the triple-A titles of the time, nor did it manage to compete with the leading games that came after. However, after twelve years it retains a relatively small but immensely loyal fan base. And rightly so.

I played through the game up until more or less the end back in 2003, and had a few false starts later on, but I’ve never beaten it. And with No Game New Year still in full swing, and my sister’s PS2 still plugged in, I felt compelled to give it one more shot.

Anybody who knows about Kingdom Hearts knows the score: It is an amalgamation of the Disney and Squaresoft intellectual property in a somewhat linear but very enjoyable role playing game. That, to me, sealed the deal while I was still reading magazines running the preview versions of the game in Japanese – I’m a big Disney fan, and I loved the Final Fantasy games. What was not to love about this?

As with all games that take more than a day to finish, I’ll probably be some time with this one, so I’m going to give you the highlights here:

 

There was a certain amount of innocence to Squaresoft before it became Square Enix. Final Fantasy VII was a huge success, had some incredibly memorable characters and had a great storyline. Final Fantasy VIII was a good game but fell short of the mark in terms of character, and Final Fantasy X was very good indeed.[1] So taking some of the characters from their games and putting them into Kingdom Hearts was a fantastic idea. With a completely new hero, Sora, you actually got to interact with some of the characters who appeared in the aforementioned Final Fantasy games – Cloud, Tidus and Squall (Leon) were all very good as player characters but talking to them from an outsider’s point of view is a special experience even to this very day. It’s an odd thing to pick up on but I loved it.

Similarly, teaming up with Goofy and Donald Duck, characters I have been watching on TV and film my ENTIRE LIFE, was magic. They both have video games of their own but having their characters interact with yours – Sora – was an incredible experience that made me somehow feel that they were talking to you – with their quirks and personalities intact. Takes me right back to ‘pretend’ games you played as a kid, which I won’t go in to but don’t tell me you didn’t do the same at some point.

Of course, kicking their asses was fun too...

I equally enjoyed teaming up with the Disney characters you find on the various worlds you visit, though I have done less of it this time due to team balancing (I’ll tell you later.) At the time of writing I’ve only got to Tarzan in this playthrough, but later on you get to team up with Aladdin, Ariel from the Little Mermaid, and The Beast to name but a few. Plus the characters you can get through Summons (Simba, Bambi, the Genie) are a pleasure to have alongside you.

I set the difficulty on this one to Expert. As far as I know, it only affects the combat, and I found myself breezing through most of the combat on Normal difficulty. I wanted a challenge, so I set it to expert. However, I found a different challenge in one of the few negative aspects of this game: The controls.

Sadly, both the controls and the interface don’t work quite as well as they should. Maybe I’ve been spoiled by the character action games I’ve been playing on the Xbox360, but it took me a while to get my head around the idea that you can’t change the direction of your attack during a combo. Usually you can do this in games by pointing the analogue stick in the direction you want to go, but it doesn’t work like that in Kingdom Hearts. Some of the moves take a surprisingly long time to do, and more than once I’ve been injured or killed simply because I’ve been interrupted during the first attack of the combo. Similarly the jumping is a little off, in that once you land, there is a delay of about a third of a second before you can move again. I imagine I will appreciate it a lot more during some of the platforming sections I know are coming up, but I’ve been caught out by it a few times in combat.

Well I'm very pleased to hear it...

The other major is that as far as I can see, there is no quick way to access your items. You have to ‘equip’ items to each character in order for them to be able to use it in combat, which is fine, because otherwise Goofy and Donald would use all your potions in five minutes. But once you get in to combat, you have to use the directional buttons – which takes your thumb off the left analogue stick and stops you moving – and cycle down two menus to do something as simple as using a potion. I’ve lost count of the amount of times I’ve died because I was faffing about trying to use my potions, and while I’m getting a little more used to it now, it’s still a design flaw in my opinion.

But as I said in my coverage of Fallout: Brotherhood of Steel, which was from about the same time, this game was developed before a lot of these things were standardised. There wasn’t a precedent for a ‘good’ system, so the developers just did whatever came to their heads, though I still find it hard to believe that anyone thought a menu in a real-time combat system was a good idea. My sister actually told me that it gets a lot better in Kingdom Hearts 2, which I haven’t played yet due to wanting to complete the first game, er, first.

To end on a high point, I would like to shake the hand of the genius who came up with the soundtrack. I don’t know who it is, I have looked in the manual to the game but the composer of the music either isn’t mentioned or is given a different title. I was almost in tears with nostalgia when I heard the background music to Traverse Town. I find it incredible that a loop of 16 bars of music and a melody from what I think is a clarinet can simultaneously make you feel welcome, comfortable and lonely, and it never, NEVER gets old.

I probably will shed a tear or two when I get to Agrabah – Aladdin’s stage – and the Genie makes his appearance. As I write this, Robin Williams, who voice-acted the Genie in the film Aladdin, died earlier in the week. I found myself as moved by the terrible circumstances of his death as I am by the huge legacy of work he leaves behind, and will be reminded of it only too well when his character appears in the game.[2]

I’ll most likely be away next week but hopefully I’ll have a little more to say about it when I come back. See you all then!

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[1] Can’t pass judgement on FFIX because I never played it.

[2] Yes, I know the voice actor for The Genie in Kingdom Hearts was Dan Castellaneta, but it will still nonetheless remind me of Robin. What a loss.

No Game New Year: Ecco Jr

Ecco Jr.

Three completed games in the space of a week? I should play old games more often…

I’m not sure I ever intended to play this, even when I bought the Sega Megadrive Collection disk years ago for my PS2, as I would have wanted to play the first two games (Ecco the Dolphin, and Ecco: The Tides of Time) first. But as this is one of the three games that did not appear on the Xbox 360 version of this compilation, I thought I’d better give it a go.

It’s strange; I have a kind of ‘love/hate’ relationship with Ecco. As a concept, having the hero as a dolphin swimming around in the sea for the entire game is a brilliant idea and not a risk you would see many triple-A publishers taking these days! I was drawn in by the idea of puzzle-solving and finding secrets; almost like you were treasure-hunting under the sea. What’s not to like?

On the other hand, the games were very hard. I owned the Tides of Time way back when I owned a Megadrive, and got stuck on the 10^th level. I had a list of codes that would take me to all the levels but I had no idea what to do on each one. And this was a time before I could look at a wiki to find out!  Then there was the sullen mood of the game, assisted by the beautiful but almost ambient soundtrack, plus the fact that I don’t like fish very much and there found some of the enemies very unpleasant and borderline frightening, meant that for me, Ecco was not always an entirely enjoyable experience.

Ecco Jr. though…

 

This game was geared towards younger players, and it shows. For a start, you can’t die. At all. There’s no health bar or oxygen bar that was a staple of the previous games. You can’t drown, and the worst thing enemies can do to you is block your path for a moment. You spend the game doing what are essentially ‘fetch quests,’ as you swim around the levels trying to reunite a lost seahorse with its mother, herding fish into a cave and finding a seal’s ball. No, really. The end game is that Ecco and his friends (a young Orca and a baby dolphin, all playable but as far as I could see the only difference was the sound they make when they use the Sonar,) want to meet Big Blue, the whale from the previous game, and if they do all the puzzles the crystal glyphs will show them the way.

What's that? Objective markers so you actually
know what you're supposed to be doing?

It’s a kind of paradox that they took a lot, but at the same time not very much, out of the game play. For example, Ecco can’t attack in this game, but with no enemies there’s no real reason to do so. You can’t flip in the air but this was only ever aesthetic anyway. One mechanic they actually added to it, which I thought was absolutely brilliant, was that if you were facing the right way and used your sonar, the sonar would bounce back to you from the direction you were supposed to be going in order to meet your objective. The previous Ecco games would have been a lot easier if they’d put that in from the start! If you remember that Ecco is, at its heart, a puzzle game, you realised that the developers for Ecco Jr.[1] put their focus almost entirely on this – and therefore did not take much away from the game at all.

 

Did I enjoy it? Well… there’s not a lot of challenge that’s actually built into the game, and I’m not in to speed running so the game didn’t have a lot going for me. I’m glad I played it through to the end but I see no real need ever to do so again. I won’t spoil the ending but I suspect it would be the same no matter which character you played, so unless the levels are randomly generated (I didn’t check. It would be unusual but not unknown,) there’s not a lot of replay value here. It took me about an hour to get through the game and that was quite enough.

But again, this game was geared for younger players, and I find myself wondering if I would have enjoyed it more if I was 4-5 years old. And the answer is: I probably would, as there’s plenty of positive things about the game that would appeal to younger children! 

It’s worth mentioning that Ecco Jr, while not very challenging, was a competently-made game. There are no bugs or glitches that I can see. The levels are not very big and look more or less the same all the way through, but you’re never swimming around looking confused for more than a few minutes. There’s no fail state, nor are there any enemies to induce it. And the game feels a lot more ‘happy-go-lucky’ than the previous games could ever manage with their plots about vortex aliens and dark futures.

Contrast that with the previous games, where it was very hard to work out what you had to do, it was possible to drown, and some of the enemies were horrifying (I’m thinking mainly of Medusa from the second game) and you realise the game would potentially put off a lot of the younger market. The choice to make the previous games hard was entirely deliberate, but I’m glad an easier version of the game exists. I remember playing games not unlike this on my old Acorn Archimedes computer I had years and years ago, when I was of the age you might expect to enjoy a game such as Ecco Jr. And I had a lot of fun with them at the time, playing through them and later showing my younger brother how to play them as well. It was nice to see a Megadrive game going the same way.

To conclude, while I doubt I’d be impressed if I’d dropped £30 on this game, (not likely since as far as I can see it was only ever released in Australia before virtual consoles and this compilation) it exists for the right reasons. I probably won’t play it again, but I’m happy that I had the opportunity to do so.

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[1] Appaloosa Interactive, if you want to know.

No Game New Year: WWE Smackdown vs Raw 2007 with a bit of Streets of Rage...

WWE Smackdown vs Raw 2007 (PS2)

I wasn’t going to bother with this game originally. This series of games is in its 16^th year (crikey, that makes me feel old…) and I owned all of the games at some point up to 2009.[1] As the new iterations of the game are almost always better game play-wise than the previous ones, I’d not usually touch the older games after I’d got the new ones, and I put SvR 2007 and 2008 on the list of games that I was going to get rid of at the end of the year, 2009 having already gone a couple of years ago.

Then when I made my list of PS2 games I hadn’t completed, I remembered that I never finished the Season Mode for either game. And given my almost obsessive-compulsive need to play games in order, even though it doesn’t actually make much difference in the long run, I thought I’d play through SvR 2007’s Season mode.

 

I created my own wrestler for this. This is something I don’t do very often. You’ve been able to create your own wrestler in every iteration of the Smackdown games since the first, and while I enjoyed it hugely in the first game, I found that by the time the second one came out, I hadn’t actually played as many of the wrestlers. I thought I had missed out on a lot and didn’t bother with it after that. I think I used the mode once in every game but I’d usually play through the Season mode as one of the wrestlers.

Creating a wrester in the later games is a long and not always enjoyable process so I decided this time to have a bit of fun with it and create a video game character. I chose Abadede from Streets of Rage 2,[2] and basically created a freakishly tall, muscle-bound god with purple underpants, boots and wristguards that were as near as I could get to a metallic colour (black.) Sadly I couldn’t get the right haircut. Apparently 80s bouffant never occurred to the designers of SvR 2007; who knew? I made sure he was from Mexico, gave him what I thought was a Mexican voice but actually sounds more like a cool black guy, and gave him clean tactics. The latter option might seem strange but for his boss battle in SoR2 he never uses a weapon, and it’s a straight 1v1 fight, giving me the idea that Abadede at least had enough pride in his own ability to fight properly. For his move set, I gave him a very powerful uppercut, and made sure he had a lot of opportunities to do clotheslines as these are his main attacks in SoR2, with a fairly standard Power Bomb as his finisher. Sadly I’ve got no way of screen-grabbing anything off my PS2, and trying to take a photo of it always turned out rubbish, so I can’t show you. But I mention it because of the contribution it made to my enjoyment of the game!

 

I took Abadede into the Season Mode. It works on an experience points system, where you play a match and if you win you get 2000 XP, if you lose you get 300. You then get to spend these points in your various attributes. Because of the build I was going for with Abadede, I put as much as I could into Strength, Stamina and Durability, with Charisma as a secondary consideration. But this brought to light a design flaw in the game that brought the momentum of the game to a juddering halt: There is no way to apply experience points from inside the Season Mode. Instead, you have to save your game, exit the Season Mode, load up the Create Mode, apply your points, exit Create Mode and load the Season Mode up again just to apply some experience points.

This is made all the worse by the fact that the PS2 game took a while to load each screen. I would imagine the position would have been somewhat different with the Xbox 360 version, but with no hard drive, the PS2 had to rely entirely on reading the disc. It was a long and not very enjoyable process to do this at the end of almost every match, and knowing that it could have been better with just a single tweak of the game’s design was nothing short of insulting. Thank goodness that I spent most of the time I spent waiting watching videos on Youtube. I do seem to be doing that rather a lot with PS2 games!

The actual wrestling is not bad but it takes some getting used to. For a start there is a ‘Stamina’ system whereby if you use too many big moves too quickly, your wrestler will run out of energy and will need time to recover. Strikes are easy enough, but basic throws are done from the Right analogue stick. You have to hold down R1 for a grapple, from which you can do a number of different moves, again with the Right stick. Some moves target certain areas of the body, and the body damage can impede your wrestler’s ability to use that part of the body but significant damage can be reversed by recovering your stamina. Aspects like Stamina, Body Damage and Momentum were handled better in later games, but once you get used to it, it works. Thankfully, as Abadede is quite clearly a heavyweight, I never had that horrible problem where you can’t lift a wrestler much heavier than you. I guess it makes the game more ‘realistic,’ a term tragically mis-applied given the sport that this game represents, but it slows the game down to a crawl when it happens and is never welcome!

Kind of sad seeing Chris Benoit in the game,
given what was months away from occurring...

The season mode follows a number of pre-set storylines that last for 6-7 matches and culminate with a final match to resolve the situation, usually at a pay-per view. Which stories you get largely depends on whether you choose to be on Raw or Smackdown at the start of the game. I chose Smackdown for no reason other than I like Tazz’s commentary.[3] There’s little you can do that effects the progress of the story; it’s usually the same matches whether you win or lose, but it is what it is – a background giving context to your matches. And it’s got all the camp, hammy, convoluted plots you would expect from a WWE storyline, with your wrestlers being as dense as a wrecking ball in most cases. It’s good fun; wresting always is! After a several storylines have passed you get traded to the other show, I suspect because of the production with regard to writing and voice acting not having enough material to carry one show on its own for a year.

I had a decent amount of fun playing through the various storylines, and actually felt quite good about their resolution when it all went my way. I didn’t feel too badly about it when it didn’t, though, as the game would be very boring if I won all the time! It’s Wrestling – it doesn’t always go your way. It is for this reason that I set the difficulty to Hard; I would not have enjoyed the game much at all if there’d been no challenge. My only complaint really would be the first storyline, The Deadman and the Wolverine, which pits you against The Undertaker and Chris Benoit – two men who few would consider pushovers, and since Abadede had no experience at that point, it was hard to make any headway at all. Other than that, there are no incompetent or out-of-context difficulty spikes that I saw.

My season actually ended when, having won the World Title at Wrestlemaina and defended it against Triple H in the following story, I actually lost it to The Big Show of all people at the end of the final story. I don’t know whether the game would have carried on had I managed to win that particular storyline, but to be honest I was about 2 more upgrades away from completely maxing out Abadede’s stats at this point and there wasn’t much mileage left in it. It was a fitting end to an altogether rather enjoyable game, and I’m glad I had the opportunity to play it through.

The game also features a general manager mode, where you compete against the other show for ratings. Now, I had a go with this in the previous version of the game, 2006. While it wasn’t terrible, it was a bit of rigmarole, so I think I’m going to tackle that when I play through 2008 – just so that I’ve only got to do it once, with the best version of it.

I probably won’t play 2007 again, and will sell it when I get enough stuff to do make a decent sale. But I did enjoy playing it through, and while I would like to do something a little different for my next game (the last 2 have been fighting games!) I will probably come back to 2008 before the end of No Game New Year.

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[1] 2009 was the Nintendo DS version. I didn’t own a machine capable of playing the ‘main’ version at the time!

[2] I know Abadede appears in both of the first 2 games but the version of his sprite in Streets of Rage 2 was a little more detailed and easier to copy. Besides, I’d been playing the game, which is kind of what inspired me to do it so…

[3] While I’ll probably play through SvR 2008 at some point, Tazz doesn’t appear in that version of the game.

No Game New Year: Dead Island

Dead Island

Ah, Zombie Games. Of all the gaming tropes that refuse to die, Zombies – quite fittingly – are the most belligerent. Ever since 1995, when the first Resident Evil came out and Zombies became scary again, we’ve had a steadily-increasing horde of Zombie games rising up to consume its own genre – and infect other genres, that previously had nothing to so with the undead, as Zombie add-on packs are released for Call of Duty and Red Dead Redemption. Zombie games get yearly releases, new intellectual properties are published that are basically just Zombies, and recently we’ve been seeing the ways to kill them become more and more inventive – just to keep the so-called Horror genre interesting.

You’ll guess from that rather cynical opening that I’m not a huge fan of Zombie Games. I love the first Resident Evil game, and the fourth but I’d hardly class that as a Zombie game. I played Nightmare Creatures for a little while but didn’t get very far. The only other Zombie games I play are the ones where Zombies appear as part of a line up of enemies, in Role Playing Games for example. So how did I come to play this one?

You guessed it: Downloaded it off Xbox Live as part of the Games with Gold package. I wanted to play something I could get through reasonably quickly, and tearing through a horde of Zombies seemed like the ideal game to play. Turns out I, er, wasn’t quite right about that…

Customisation of weapons is always fun...

The game is essentially a first person action RPG that apparently has an emphasis on melee combat. I’ve not heard good things about it from Youtube videos I’ve seen where it’s been commented on, (To be fair, Zero Punctuation is hardly the best place to look for positivity,) but as I don’t play many Zombie games and certainly none of the previous-gen ones, I didn’t have any pre-conceived ideas of what the game would be like. What I got was a peculiar mish-mash of different games rolled in to one. “Hey, it’s Borderlands with Melee Weapons,” I found myself saying at one point. “Hey, it’s Elder Scrolls in a Contemporary Setting,” I thought at another. “Hey, it’s Far Cry with Zombies,” I thought finally, the Skyrim with Guns analogy already having been used by the aforementioned Far Cry. And while Dead Island isn’t really as good as any of the game it references, it’s OK for a while, bashing zombies with Baseball bats, cutting their limbs off with knives and the like. You might even come across a gun or two if you’re lucky. But there are issues in the game that, in retrospect, impede enjoyment of the game quite a lot.

The first thing about the game is this: It is not scary. I know Zombie games are not necessarily scary any more anyway, but here’s the thing: They should be. The first Resident Evil game worked so well because of the combination of fixed camera angles, limited ammo and ambiguous health system. More or less the same goes for the first two Silent Hill games. This did a fine job of building a huge amount of tension as you struggled to solve the puzzles in the game in order to move on to the next bit, all the time pushing your luck with your ammo and your health while you could barely see what was going on. Combine that with the occasional jump scare and the possibility that you could de-rail any chance you had of beating the game through sheer carelessness, and you had a genuinely frightening game. There’s none of that here. The open environment means that with a very small exception, you see the monsters long before they have a chance to react to your presence. The puzzles largely consist of fetch quests, and weapons are easily obtained and maintained. There’s no survival here. There’s just getting from one bit of the game to the next and killing Zombies if they happen to get in your way.

The ‘Quests’ are a good idea, but something of a missed mark in my opinion. For a start they are almost always ‘Fetch’ quests (bring Item A to Location B, then return to Quest Giver C and receive reward D, plus some XP.) Thematically they’re all correct – finding supplies, tools and prized possessions – but its all carrot and no stick. For example, in the first section of the game, the quests you have to do in order to progress the game further is attempt to get supplies from various parts of the island. All the others are side quests – someone asks you to look for a necklace, another asks you to find family member, a third asks for engine parts for a car. The only reason it matters what order you do all this in is the reward you get at the end, which could take the form of money, weapons or supplies. It never seems to occur to the game that, while you’re faffing about looking for a necklace, the missing family member is presumably fighting for their lives against Zombies, and will probably die if you don’t get to them soon. And while you’re doing all these side quests, how are the survivors coping with the supplies you’ve chosen not to look for? Do they revolt? Do some of them go scavenging themselves? Do they snarl at you whenever you’re around for not doing enough to help? No – they just stand around waiting for you to do it. There could have been an excellent ‘decision’ mechanic in there where you have to decide what is important and what isn’t, and come to terms with the fact that you can’t help everyone which would have fit the theme perfectly, but it just doesn’t happen. The other missions I’ve done so far are either ‘kill’ missions, where you have to kill a certain set of enemies – which you’ve been doing all game anyway, so that’s nothing new – or escort missions, and no one likes them no matter what game it’s in. There’s not a lot of variety in a game this long to be honest.

Next criticism – the game is quite stoically bleak. Everybody around you is as miserable as sin and whether you achieve their quests or not, it does little to lighten the mood. Now, I understand that there’s not a lot of room for sunshine and rainbows in a Zombie game, but there really isn’t much personality in any of the NPCs that I’ve met so far. They’re there for the more functional purpose of giving quests, and while there are some exceptions, most people just… talk.

The contrast between what people expected having seen the game trailer and what people eventually got has been well-documented. Having seen a video of a father and a husband (both the same person) fighting ferociously to defend his family, and eventually having to throw his recently-zombiefied daughter out of the window to a huge drop below, what we were expecting was an emotionally charged desperate battle for survival. The problem with this approach is that it only really works with a relatively small cast of characters so that we have time to build up relationships with them and actually care if they get hurt – and even then, they have to be correctly scripted and performed. This doesn’t happen much at all in the game I’ve played up until now, as none of the characters are particularly memorable.

***SPOILER ALERT*** on the one occasion I’ve come across where the NPCs actually contribute some emotional gravity to the story, it is so poorly paced you barely notice. A mechanic has been bitten, he knows he does not have much time left before he becomes a Zombie and promises to upgrade your vehicle before that happens. You have to fight off a Zombie horde while he does this, and when the mission is over, you are rewarded with a cut-scene where he asks you to take his daughter with you. What follows is a teary goodbye between father and daughter, which would have been a darn sight more effective if you hadn’t been introduced to both characters LESS THAN FIVE MINUTES AGO. The ‘scene’ is shot well – but because we have no pre-existing emotional attachment to the characters, we find ourselves caring about them a lot less than we should. This severely blunts the emotional impact we are supposed to have over this. ***SPOILER OVER***

That having been said, I’ve been playing through the game and I have been enjoying it. There have been no standout moments, but also no appalling incompetence on the part of the devs. It is a playable game, make no mistake about that, and I have been having fun with it. I especially like the idea of doing limb damage to enemies in order to prevent them from running or attacking, and crafting weapons is always a satisfying experience – if you have enough room for them in your inventory! Driving over Zombies is always fun, and even though there’s not a massive variety of enemies, you do at least have to come up with new strategies for when a new one is introduced. And the Looter gangs are good as well, as they lend a certain amount of moral ambiguity to the survivors. Finally, some of the sound assets for the Zombies are excellent. One of them genuinely sounds like they’re in pain when you’re staving their brains in with the handle of a hammer.

 I’ve stopped playing it for a little while but I expect I will come back to it eventually and get through the rest of the game. I’m about a third of the way through at the moment, but I decided to move on as I always come back from a weekend away from games wanting to play something else.

That turned out to be Virtua Fighter 2 from the previous blog…

No Game New Year: Virtua Fighter 2 (Mega Drive Version)

OK, here’s another long, convoluted story about my life to explain this one away:

As part of a mid to long term future that has so far taken me up to two and a half years, I’m hoping to move out of my parent’s house quite soon. The reason it’s taking so long is another story. But the point is that when I do eventually move out, the Playstation 2 won’t be coming with me. Why? Because it’s not mine; it belongs to my sister. Some – but not all – of the games we’ve got for it are mine, but as the console itself is not mine to take, I won’t be taking it. This being the case, I thought I’d better play through some of my PS2 games.

 

Sega Megadrive Collection

For clarity, this is not the same game as I own on the Xbox 360. Most of the games are the same, but the Xbox 360 version has more games including the best game in the world, Streets of Rage II, so I was always going to buy this once I had a 360! I’m not going to waste my time playing through all the games that appear on both discs though, instead focussing my attention on the three games the PS2 has that the 360 version does not: Ecco Jr, Sword of Vermillion and Virtua Fighter 2.

 

Virtua Fighter 2

I would imagine that anybody who grew up in the 90s would remember this game. Virtua Fighter was the first time I can remember seeing 3D graphics in a fighting game, and for the time it looked beautiful. Virtua Fighter 2 only improved on it, with better graphics, more characters and a whole lot of pound coins dropped on it in an arcade somewhere in South Wales. That last bit was my contribution.

See? Rubbish.

Let’s get this out of the way right now: This is not a good port. The Sega Megadrive (Genesis to you Americans out there) just did not have the processing power of the arcade machines. The Sega Saturn version presumably looked a little better but the Megadrive version did not have the graphical fidelity, the sound clarity or the fluid controls. The sprites probably would have looked better on Streets of Rage. The sound and the voice acting in particular are choppy and horrible. And the game controls are clunky and unresponsive. For a Megadrive title, this was as good as it was ever going to get,[1] but compared to the ‘real’ version, this is not very good at all.

So, has the game got anything going for it at all?

Actually yes… ignoring the awful port for a second, I think Virtua Fighter left behind an impressive legacy. It was the first arcade game to use fully-3D graphics;[2] Sony’s Tekken was not far behind but VF got there first, and set the standard for what was to come in what at that point was the next generation. It was also the first game that I am aware of to include a character that could mimic others. A lot of fighting games have done it since then, but VF’s Dural was the first character I can think of that could start the round as any character, lending an air of mystery and a significant challenge to the final boss of the game.

But what I really liked about Virtua Fighter was that it was probably the most technical of the fighting games at that point – and for quite a long time afterwards as well.[3] All the characters had a certain move-set, but you could either block or counter most of the moves and you wouldn’t take any damage in doing so. Contrast this with other popular fighting games of the time; Street Fighter II and whatever iteration of Mortal Kombat we were up to at that point, which all had ‘stun’ mechanics, where you could do a move or combo that would hold your opponent still for several seconds. This meant that once your opponent started to build up some momentum, it was actually quite hard to win. Not so with Virtua Fighter. As long as you block and counter in the right places it is NEVER too late to pull the fight back. Of course, the fact that in most cases this was very, very hard made the challenge of actually doing it right all the more satisfying when you did.

I chose Jacky for my playthrough, as his style (Jeet Kune Do) is quick, efficient and gets the job done. Of course, the lack of an instruction manual meant I had to work out a lot of the moves for myself, and most of the time I managed to pull off his more damaging moves was a lot more by luck than judgement. I managed to get through about half of the fighters quite easily, but Sarah, Jeffrey, Wolf and of course Akira were rock hard and I needed a few tries to beat them! I managed to get to the end of the game and fight Dural but not beat her, because it is IMPOSSIBLE. You only get one chance to do it; if you lose the fight it’s Game Over and you have to start all over again.

Well, perhaps not impossible… but the fact is I don’t care enough about the Virtua Fighter canon to do it. There was never much of a story in the game and this port was no exception. If I hadn’t played the game in the 90s and been watching the characters fighting the demos pretty much since then, I might have checked this game out and thought “Well, who are these people? What are they fighting for exactly? Why should I care?” This version of VF2 does little to answer those questions, and since the fights always appear in exactly the same order, there’s little variety beyond learning all the character’s move sets. It probably would be more fun in multiplayer, but what isn’t? So, having got to the end credits with one of the characters, I think it’s safe for me to say I’ve got everything I’m going to get out of this one, and put it to bed.

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[1] The game was released towards the end of the Megadrive’s lifespan.

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtua_Fighter_(video_game) accessed 4/8/2014

[3] I actually had both versions of Virtua Fighter 4 for the PS2 at some point as well.