November 10th, 2014 by Benj Edwards
Even polygons get mad sometimes
[ From GamePro – August 1997, rear cover]
Discussion Topic of the Week: If you’re old enough to remember it in the arcade, what did you think of Virtua Fighter the first time you saw it?
Tags: 1997, advertisement, Fighters MegaMix, fighting game, Fighting Vipers, GamePro, Retro Scan, Saturn, Sega, Virtua Fighter
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Even polygons get mad sometimes
November 12th, 2014 at 2:11 pm
I thought it looked blocky and ugly 😛
The 3D graphics didn’t impress me. I was still a diehard Street Fighter II partisan.
November 12th, 2014 at 4:38 pm
To me it always seemed like just another Street Fighter, Mortal Kombat clone, the arcades were filled with them.
November 12th, 2014 at 4:40 pm
Being released in late 1993, Virtua Fighter was the first time I saw fluidly-animated 3D polygonal graphics (running at a smooth frame rate) in a video game. It completely blew me away when I first saw it in an arcade, probably in spring of 1994. It smelled suspiciously like the future… and that turned out to be correct.
November 13th, 2014 at 1:04 am
I had a combination of Eagles409’s & Dan Helton’s reactions — it just seemed like yet another of the umpteen fighting games, except with ugly polygons. It baffled the heck out of me that anyone thought that was preferable to shaded “2D” graphics…
For anyone curious, this page has nice large screenshots:
http://gamesdbase.com/game/arcade/virtua-fighter.aspx
November 13th, 2014 at 1:09 am
First time I saw Virtua Fighter in the arcade? Blown away by the graphics, not so much impressed by the gameplay.
Then again, I couldn’t stop drooling over Time Traveler (Sega’s holographic video game a few years prior). The 90s were such a grand time for graphical advances.
November 13th, 2014 at 4:41 pm
I didn’t get it. I thought the gameplay was “floaty”, and I didn’t care for the blocky characters. I didn’t truly start appreciating 3D graphics until they had matured a bit, around the PS2 era (though I thought some 3D games for N64 were fun, but the graphics had obvious limitations).
November 13th, 2014 at 6:20 pm
I enjoyed playing Sega’s Virtua Fighter arcade game, though I still preferred the older 2D fighting games like Street Fighter, Mortal Kombat and Streets Of Rage.
November 13th, 2014 at 10:40 pm
The flat-shaded polygons didn’t bother me. I was amazed by the fluidity of the animation. 60 fps, with real perspective – not just some giant sprites being slid all over the screen. It was also one of the first games I remember that had an instant replay feature. When playing it, I discovered that the controls were very intuitive as well. I was able to infer the presence of combos that weren’t listed on the small printed instructions on the cabinet. To me, Street Fighter combos are as linear as typing in login passwords. And Mortal Kombat and Tekken have never been much more than button mashers. Virtua Fighter is the joint, and I’ve enjoyed experiencing each iteration of it. Here’s hoping for a VF6 announcement in 2015.
November 13th, 2014 at 11:12 pm
I was astonished by how fluid the movements were. Being already a programmer for some time (and having witnessed how slowly computers usually generated 3D imagery, I found it out of this world that we had all that rendered on the fly.
November 14th, 2014 at 1:42 am
One word: Tekken! 😉
November 17th, 2014 at 3:25 pm
I had mixed feelings when I saw it. I wasn’t impressed by the blocky, flat-colored characters or the minimal backgrounds but I thought the gameplay and fluid motion was excellent. Except for the jumping, that always felt like the characters were suddenly on the moon and took me out of an otherwise excellent game.
November 17th, 2014 at 3:32 pm
Yeah, the jumping in Virtua Fighter was weird. And I wasn’t a huge fan of the actual fighting gameplay — MKII and SFII seemed much easier to control. But the graphics blew me away.
November 18th, 2014 at 5:35 pm
I gave Virtua Fighter a fair shot, and got pretty decent at it in my local arcade. I still have the 2nd one on Saturn, and will have a place in my memory of 90’s gaming just for Virtua Fighter. I loved the entire Virtua line of games really. I was always a SEGA supporter all the way up to the Dreamcast’s demise.