Virtua Fighter

""I WIN!!""

I blew a lot of money at the arcade on this. I'd always get beat in the third or fourth fight, though. I was never really good at it until I got it for 32X. Then I beat it a couple of times. Still a good fighting game. I'd play it today but my 32X doesn't work anymore. There wasn't all that much to the game. It was a fighting game with, for the time, impressively rendered polygonal fighters. Of course now the game looks very dated. There were a few game types (including a tournament and ranking mode). One cool thing was the option that let you choose the ring size (shrinking the ring to its smallest size for two-hit knock-outs).

Fighters jump eighteen feet into the air and hover around. Boss of the game was some sort of silver, female, blocky robot who used all the styles of fighting in the game. Each fighter had an unique style and out-of-tournament profession. One of the fighting games that did not include special powers (i.e. fire balls, energy blasts, etc.). It seemed to me that every fighter had their share of wrestling moves. Jacky did a northern lights bomb. One of the other guys did a power bomb and a choke slam. Wolf, the actual pro wrestler, didn't seem to have many besides the clothesline, vertical suplex, and big swing. I thought that was weird.

All of the fighters reminded me of the Blockheads from Gumby and Friends. The whole game was made with these crude 3D graphics. Lots of polygons. The backgrounds were sort of cool. There wasn't a whole lot to the graphics, but I liked them anyway. The graphics would get better in later versions, at least. I sort of remember the sound being a few seconds off. I know the impact sounds got a little annoying. Not the final boss, though. Since she was made of metal, it made a cool clanking noise when you hit her. Other than that, the sound was decent.

It doesn't seem like they put much effort into the music. It was okay, but nothing special. I don't think it took much time to put together. This was another one of those games where the music wasn't even that important. Although I think if I listened to it now I'd probably be able to pinpoint the stages that the music came from. The game had pretty good controls. There was only three buttons: punch, kick, block. With those three the game let you tap into a large number of special moves. A lot of the special moves were always too hard for me to do, but that's okay. I could pull off a couple, just not any of the complicated ones. But it did get a little annoying that when you'd jump twenty feet into the air, you could only pull off maybe one aerial move.

When it came out I thought this was a great game. It's not as good now, but it's still pretty cool. I don't know where you could find a copy. Maybe Ebay or something. Though I'm sure most people would rather play Virtua Fighter 4 than 1. I played that one and well...I haven't gotten any better over the years. But this game was very popular when it came out, mostly because of the following the arcade version had. This game was also ported to the Sega Saturn and sometimes I do run into people who actually enjoyed that one. That port is generally seen as really not up to par. Luckily there's this one for anybody who actually bought a 32X.

Sound: 5/10
Graphics: 6/10
Gameplay: 7/10
Replay Value: 8/10

Reviewer's Score: 8/10, Originally Posted: 02/27/03, Updated 06/28/06