Developer: SegaPublisher: Sega
Console: Genesis
Release Date: 1996
The second Virtua Fighter tournament sees every original fighter returning, plus two newcomers: the young and agile Lion Rafale and the old drunken master Shun Di. Oh wait, my bad, this is the Genesis port and Lion and Shun Di are inexplicably absent. That’s right, take one of the best parts of the arcade game, the new characters, and completely remove them for the port. Way to go, Sega! Dammit, if the Genesis can’t handle that many characters or moves, then maybe the Genesis is not the best console to port a complex 3D fighting game to.
The game’s graphics are not awful, but by 1996 the Saturn, PlayStation and Nintendo 64 were already out and could deliver true 3D graphics, so this Genesis port ends up looking pretty bad. The game uses 2D graphics for the characters and weird, horribly pixelated parallax backgrounds that resemble buildings and trees. The characters are stiffer than boards and the animation is profoundly lame. There are only a handful of stages and they are recycled with different colors. Super lame. I hope someone can someday tell me why they nixed Lion and Shun Di but could add Dural, the final boss, as a hidden playable character. Even weirder than that, she appears all blocky like she did in the arcade. The game has 2D sprites so why the hell was she drawn blocky? Her stage is an underwater ruin and makes the battle take forever with intentional slowdown. Underwater, slow movements… oh I get it, it’s supposed to be realistic. If it’s realistic why are people fighting a metallic woman under the sea? I’ll just never understand why Sega released this turd.
The controls are also terrible. After playing for over an hour I had performed a total of zero throws on my opponents, but had been thrown more times than I could count. What’s up with that? Jumping is as useless as in the arcade, so at least that’s accurate. The game is somewhat playable, but I rather wrestle with my opponents instead of the controller.
Now for the worst part; the sound. Everyone knows the Genesis’ sound chip was ass when it came to voice samples, but some games managed to pull this off. Sadly, Virtua Fighter 2 has some of the worst if not the worst voice samples ever. Even the NES did a better job. Besides the regular grunts and screams each character has an unintentionally funny winning quote or laugh that will make you either run for the nearest bible out of sheer terror or end up in a hospital’s emergency room from laughing so hard. The worst sounds, by far, are Wolf’s howl and Pai Chan’s laugh. Every single music track is bad enough to cause brain tumors.
The arcade and Saturn versions of Virtua Fighter 2 were awesome, hell, even the PC version was good. The Sega Genesis was a cool console with many memorable games, but this was not one of them. Greed can be a powerful ally, but it can also ruin the fun of a great fighting game by porting it to the wrong system. Spend your Wii points elsewere.
Score:
2 Comments:
The sad thing is, I think sort of looks better than the first two VF games, at least. I remember seeing them in the arcades, and I thought....'that looks awful. It's a bunch of geometric shapes duking it out'. I even drew a cartoon about it, in which one rectangle stabbed another one with a third rectangle (I know there's no...stabbing in the game, but well, I was still making a point). It seems everyone else was impressed with those games, but I never was.
I'm actually not sure I ever heard of...a 2-D rendition. I did not know this game existed. Or if I did, I had long-forgotten it. And it sounds pretty bad.
The first Virtua Fighter did look shitty and was slow as hell, but I was blown away by the animations. Virtua Fighter 2 had a higher polygon count, more characters, much improved background graphics, and speedier battles. It was sweet.
You're lucky you didn't remember the Genesis port of VF2, but now I've ruined it for you. Just try to stay as far away from it as possible.
Post a Comment